“Why High Performers Are Still Burned Out — And What They’re Missing”

Plantar Fasciitis and the Path to Acupuncture

Well, fast forward, I had plantar fasciitis in both my feet. It was awful. And my chiropractor at the time said two options. You can go get, uh, some have someone put a needle in your foot, bottom of your.

In the form of like basically a steroid, or you can try this acupuncture stuff. I was like, well, do anything. Cause that big Neil sounds worse than those small needles.

and I went and did that and changed my life, got some results. That led down a pathway where eventually a few years later, I was making a massive career change.

I had people, was in management in my career. People come in in office saying, can't believe you're following your dreams. Welcome to My MD Unscripted, where healthcare gets personal and the script gets tossed.

Dr. Clint Carter, ER doctor turned direct primary care freedom fighter on a mission to challenge how our healthcare system treats patients in America.

In every episode, my expert guests and I dive into real conversations about what's broken and how we can fix it by making healthcare about people, not just managing disease.

It's time to rethink what healthcare should be and make it better together. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome back to My MD Unscripted Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Clint Carter, and I am honored today to be joined by Dr Erica Schultz. And don't let the name fool you, she is indeed practicing Eastern medicine.

Introducing Dr. Erica Schultz and Her Healing Philosophy

So Erica is a doctor of acupuncture in Chinese medicine, functional nutrition expert and the founder of resiliency method, a system designed to help patients heal at the root level.

So blending ancient medical wisdom with modern clinical insight, she specializes in restoring the body's ability to adapt, recover and perform at its highest level, known for her ability to identify patterns that others miss, Dr.

Erica creates deeply personalized healing strategies that move beyond protocols into true transformation. So that's a mouthful and we're going to get into it, but Dr Schultz, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Dr. Clint. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. So what I'm going to do is I have a question, and then I want you to introduce yourself properly.

Why do some of the most disciplined, high-performing people still struggle with fatigue, hormones, burnout, feel like junk? even though you're trying to do everything right.

So somewhere in this, introduce yourself properly and let's kind of dig into what you do and this is gonna be fun. Yeah, well, the short answer before I get into who I am is really, it's just not all about diet and exercise.

And that's unfortunately a message that we hear over and over again. You and I have talked previously and a lot of times that is just really challenging to just simply say to an overwhelmed body and an overwhelming person, You must have the perfect diet and you must go out and expend more energy than you have in this single moment.

So it becomes this never-ending sort of thing that nobody can ever get to. And it's challenging because the truth is if your mitochondria is in the tank, and your hours in the office are too abundant.

And this is true of most high-performing professionals and people, is that time is one of the biggest challenges to actually creating a system or a strategy for their body to do well.

Quite simply put, I just really, truly believe we're not, sadly, we are in more of a deplorable state than maybe we want to acknowledge when it comes to our health.

I don't mean that to sound really sad or woeful, but there really is a lot of things that we're dealing with on a system level in terms of toxicities, self-stealth pathogens, things at a foundational level that are oftentimes not getting picked up on standard testing and are causing problems for our health.

As a doctor of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, I'm really fundamentally trained in what I call a systematic viewpoint on the body. From a medical, traditional medical standpoint, we're trained that the bodies operates in these succinct departments or compartments and you have a system that's aligned, set up that way, you go to this doctor for your gastrointestinal needs, you go to this doctor for your kidneys.

And as a Chinese medicine trained Eastern, ancient medicine-trained doctor with a lowercase D, I have a knowledge and a view on the body in terms of how it's all connected.

Sometimes people think that if you're looking at ancient medicine or Chinese medicine, and unfortunately, it comes also in the way that we talk about it as a profession.

It's almost like you have to create this and agree to or subscribe to this whole new view of the meridians, channels, qi, all these strange words that quite frankly are just challenging in the sense because they were translated poorly when this medicine was coming to the Western world.

From Corporate America to Chinese Medicine

But two, it's really Chinese medicine is really the study of how everything is connected. to everything else and they were really good. The ancient Chinese were good at anatomical dissection.

They were meticulous about documenting every blood vessel, every fascia plane, and every artery and showing those inner relationships between each of the organs, organ systems, and that's what's known as quote unquote the channels, the meridians, that the pathways or whatever.

It's really just this systematic view of body and how everything is connected to everything else and then consequently, you know, an acupuncture point actually rolls up to a a electric and scientifically proven area of the body where there's a increased amount of electrical activity happening.

And so you're working in that system and stimulating that electricity and simulating that neural network that's been mapped out at a very physical level.

But the resiliency method itself is my registered trademark process of how to go about unwinding the really to a root foundational level and helping to facilitate an actual healing response inside the body.

And doing that in a layered approach and over time actually creates a new level of foundational health and ultimately more adaptability and resiliency.

Well, okay. I mean, that'll make sense. Those of my listeners will have a better framework than many because of all the functional providers we've had on over the last year or two.

But how in the world did Erica Schultz end up doing Chinese medicine? I suspect there's a story here that- Always, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I grew up in the daughter of a chiropractor and my twin sister, my brother, they all went to chriopractic school.

And I was like, well, guess I mean, should probably go, but I didn't want to. It wasn't something that really interested me that much. So I went on and had a career in corporate America with training and performance management and training design.

We did leadership sales trainings and customer service trainings. Those award-winning developer of training curriculum. But I always had this little scratch on my back that just continued to sort of need to be itch, which was that I knew I was a healer in some way.

I just didn't know exactly what it looked like because I didn t think that was chiropractor. Well, fast forward, I had plantar fasciitis in both my feet.

It was awful. And my chiropractor at the time said, two options. You can go get some, have someone put a needle in your foot, bottom of your feet, you know, in the form of like basically a steroid, or you can try this acupuncture stuff.

And I was like, I'll do anything because that big needle sounds worse than those small needles. I went and did that and changed my life, got some results that led down a pathway where Eventually, a few years later, I was making a massive career change.

I had people, in management. In my career, people come in my office saying, ''I can't believe you're following your dreams.'' I'm like, yes, i am. And I never looked back, honestly.

Fast forward though, while I in grad school, my health tanked. It was like one year in. How am I going to do this three years? I got introduced to foundational nutrition.

And I became a client and then ultimately I started learning that while I was pursuing my doctorate in Chinese medicine acupuncture. So I went from not thinking I'm going to get through grad school just full time to starting a practice and starting to see patients without even having graduated with my medical degree yet.

as a nutritionist and applying that initial technique. I did that for about 10 years. That today, our first phase of our process, we have a three-phase process when it comes to approaching health.

Building the Resiliency Method

The first-Phase probably has the most influence from that original technique that I was practicing very studiously for many years, We saw everyday miracles, just even applying the first Phase with people, which was really rewarding.

Kind of like you though, I got into a model where it was very, you know, high numbers of patients every week. At one point I was, as a natural medicine doctor, seeing a hundred visits in a week, which is almost unheard of, but that has its limitation too.

So I really had to confront if this was really the full model that I wanted to continue on for the next 10 years. But at the same time, once again, my health was plateauing and I starting to actually rescind I had grown up with a grand mal seizure disorder and had varying success improved or help with working things through this process.

But I have reached a plateau and I started to go backwards and started have more seizures and and also started also develop another autoimmune condition in the systemic sclerosis patterns and it was like we're missing something.

And that's the pursuit, honestly, to probably save my own life, quite frankly, you know, help me unveil what was some of the things that we were missing.

And I started to figure things out for myself on the next level. Then, of course, because I had such a busy practice, I start to figured that out from my patients.

And so now, fast forward, we've got a complete three-faced process now. Getting to a level in the body that I'm not sure other clinicians are really getting to, and it's something that i talk about a lot, which is working the I call it, quote unquote, earn the right to go deeper and deeper, and that's what my body needed.

And it's my true belief that that is probably what most bodies need, because what we're seeing is changes in terms of cognitive health. We're talking about finding patterns that maybe someone's even aging into, like dementia, Alzheimer's, starting to identify how we can head those things off by doing deeper levels of detoxification in the body, specifically in things that are encapsulated in the body.

So think tumor, cysts, nodules, you know, like that kind of thing. And creating an environment where the, body finally says, Oh, it's safe to open this up.

It's, safe, to let this go. process that kind of gets us to that point. It comes with, you know, like I said, a sequence to it. There's a right order that has to occur in order to do this properly and safely.

But it's working beautifully. We're seeing incredible results with people that are applying this. And so it comes from You know, I would say I was probably the doctor that could really deal with the people that nobody else wanted to deal, with really complicated cases.

To now where we're seeing, well, if you apply all three phases of this process, you're really talking about the key to longevity as well. So we are just working with more high performers too that really want to invest and they know the importance of their brain functioning well for the rest of life.

And they are taking charge and wanting to, as a high performer, they want a strategy, you know, and it's working really well in that context. Yeah, I think the, yeah, what's beautiful about that is you have a sort of a step one, step two, three, four.

You've got, first do this. reach a level before you can try to jump to the next one and sort of heal the body slow and steady. The world kind of likes a quick fix.

They just want to feel better. they don't want be better and so that's fun that you've got a system But ultimately you've titled the resiliency method, right?

Yeah. More resilience. Yeah, and the good news story on that too is, is we do get results quickly at a symptom level. You know, one week on our program that's targeted at dealing with the root cause, using implementation to do that.

Within one week, we've had incredible turnarounds. I just had a client recently that couldn't get on an airplane, and I'm thinking to myself, are you going on Saturday?

And I'm like, okay, when we got one week to settle that vagus nerve down, boy, we did. And actually, that's a scenario I've come across a few times in my practice, especially with high performers.

Eventually, things that make a high performer a higher performer oftentimes are nervous systems that have an opportunity for improvement. One of the reasons they're high-performers is they are often upregulated.

on the ready so they can process information quickly. They can do multiple things. I'm this profile so I can talk about it really well. With an increased capacity, I would say.

But they're also the ones that tend to have the most neurological challenges going on too. This podcast is not about me, but I got my neurological challenge as well and it does come with a sympathetic dominance, if you will, just ability to go to the next thing, the thing.

But, you know, God created us with the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. You know? A yin and a yang, it's like balance. The parisympethetic, that doesn't pay the bills, man.

It doesn' get things done.

High Performers, Nervous System Stress, and Root Causes

My kids might getting into Princeton with me being in a parasympathetic state kind of, you know, and I joke with, so I make my living almost on taking 40 something year old females that have been just obsessed with the health and wellness or the wellbeing and goal directedness of other people in their lives, mostly their kids and maybe their husband.

And like, you know, mama could use some attention. Mama's feels like she's going to break because she might break. And I know getting into that, that sort of high performer neurologic, world that you're talking about is right down.

I think most of our listeners are going appreciate that either in them or someone close to them. What do you do with those folks that come in? They're just pushing so hard.

Like you said, they're high performers. Hopefully they've got a long-term outlook, but they also feel like jump right now. Where do they start? Well, we just start with applying our sequence, really our algorithm, and it just sort of reveals what that person needs ultimately, you know.

And truth be told, a lot of people in our society took the COVID vaccine, for example, so that's an area where, well, if they did do that, oftentimes we need to start there.

Usually the last thing that kind of stressed out the body is the first thing the that body will want to deal with, With that, if that is the case, sometimes it's just a grab bag.

It's like, you know, some people need to come in and they want to clear a little bit heavy metal, a mercury offer system. Sometimes they come and their overburden with fungus.

You know? Sometimes, they start and got a nervous system that's dealing with a parasite. right out of the gates you know something like that and we'll actually be able to analyze for what is it that that body wants to start with our ultimate goal is to just try to Start recovering mitochondrial function immediately getting some energy and getting them into more of a regulated state so a high performer can still be successful and that they're even more successful when at night when they go to lay down that they actually go into parasympathetic well.

And so half the battle is just making the vagus nerve, you know, satiated enough to where they will be able to find that rest state so they can heal. And then another thing we pay particular attention to that I'd say almost is pretty common for a lot of our patients around the gates is we support the thymus gland, you know, such an underplayed aspect of the human body and so important for long term and short term immune system function.

So a lot of those patterns, and again, it's a pattern. It's pattern for somebody. And we just address the thing that is the most prevalent for them. That's why we quote-unquote look like we get miraculous results because it lines up to some kind of symptom picture that they're dealing with.

Yeah, between the nervous system, metabolic, all over the place, hormones, it all has to work together. For your audience, if there's a lot of middle-aged females listening to this podcast, one thing that's unique, you can help meet that immediate need sometimes with hormone replacement therapy.

What we can do is work with the body in a way to help support the recovery of the endocrine glands, to support recovery the kidneys because the deficiency of hormones is very much accelerated by insufficient kidney function.

That's where all of your precursors to hormones come from. So if we can bring up the status of the kidneys, well, now they're starting to do better hormonally.

And then another key factor is making sure liver is happy. A liver that's too toxic, that isn't performing well. If the body's too toxic, I should say, the liver won't perform as well.

And then that's a big deal because the livers in charge of regulating all those hormones. So if your liver's not performing well, then you're going to struggle with hormone balancing.

You're gonna have mood shifts, you gonna to have painful, difficult periods or irregularities, things like that, mood changes. All those things are par for the course.

We're looking at, again, what's stressing these things out, you know, in the gamut of all the things that can stress out a human body. And then we're taking nutritional supplementation to deal with that stress rather than somebody comes in and says, hey, I think I have a thyroid problem.

Well, here's a thyroid supplement for you. You know, it's like, no, the question really is, is well, what's got the thyroid stressed out? And let's look at some expansive panels to really ensure that this truly is brain fog from thyroid issue versus brainfog from maybe a cortex, you know or brain situation that's happening.

Yeah. I mean the, issue under the issue, under issue as well. Right. Like I treat hormones and thyroid all the time and you Part of the question is, well, why do I have to treat hormones and thyroid all the time?

We live longer than I think we were created to have certain hormones, at least at the levels. No, I disagree. We don't have a longevity problem. we have quality of longevity.

Well, we definitely have lifespan. You don' have health span. Right. Right? So, we got plenty longevity. We just, he's got to make the body think that it's supposed to still be alive, you know.

Well, I mean, biblical times, too, there was a lot. People lived longer, you know? And, we sort of contextualize the change of, for example, perimenopause, menopaus.

We contextualized that as being pathological, and it's not pathologically. By design, your hormones are supposed to drop. The thing that shouldn't be happening is that when they drop and you go into that stage of life that you have symptoms.

Hormones, Thyroid, and Functional Testing

That is the mark of the imbalance in the organ, the tissue, and the gland of brain, nervous system that is surfacing and saying, hey, there's a shift happening here and now you're symptomatic.

We just take for granted, we just created a culture around that, that it's supposed to be problematic. quite frankly, the same with PMS and periods and that that's somehow just what's so for the female.

And really, it's just a symptom of some kind of underlying imbalance in the body excess or deficiency, as we would call it from Chinese medicine. Right on.

Well, you know, there's, yeah, I mean, There was a period in biblical times when people lived hundreds and hundreds of years, and then it kind died down to, You know you're not going to live more than 100, 120. You know, I think a lot of it as we got more and more sedentary as well.

I mean, there was dangers then, you know you get eaten by a bear I guess. You always had, people died in childbirth and like your average. There's a lotta that dying young of things.

It's come a long way in our sanitation procedures and those kinds of stuff. Right, but we also sit a while, and we don't, Yeah, there was a lot that they did that would be life giving that we don't do day in and day out, even to the point of just having to walk more and being less comfortable, God forbid.

So how do you best bridge sort of that ancient medicine, modern medicine? I mean, I guess that's kind of built into your method. Yeah, I mean the process, the patterns, very much informed philosophically by Eastern medicine, it's informed that way, but we also really modernized it with the integration of some of the functional medicine testing that we can do.

Mostly from a standpoint of dotting our I's, crossing our T's. I think it's really important and valuable for patients to be able to see their health in a data presentation kind of thing.

Because what we're talking about too is you can't You can't really be motivated to do something for which you don't see that in your future. Everybody's in a little bit of denial, even if they look around at their parents or maybe even look at your grandparents.

Basically, use that as information if you want to buy a test to see how your neurological health is doing. As you know, there's some really incredible tests we can look these days.

But look around and look at your ancestors. And if you're looking at a parent that's showing signs of dementia and memory loss in their 70s, well, you can bet because you are the next generation down, You're probably going to show that in your 50s or 60s.

You know, sadly. That's kind of what we're seeing. I'm sure your patient population and some of that you've seen firsthand too that the younger people are having more health challenges than ever too, right?

I mean, everything, cancer's at a younger age, dementia's a a young age. Heart disease at younger, I think everything's coming. And, you know, a lot of it, everyone wants to blame, wants everyone to pick their thing that's the cause of dementia.

So much of is just a lack of health. You know, just you treat your arteries and nerves and gut and everything poorly for long enough, it's gonna fall apart.

And we've gotten so many comforts that in the long run are probably not worth the cost. I think a lot of what you do, the functional medicine avenues and so that is to point out put on the screen in front of the patient, like you were saying, Hey, look at all this red on your test.

Look how angry your gut is. sympathetic driven you are and out of balance. For those of you that are watching, I got a different setup this time. It's just me, a window, and Doc Holliday behind me.

But normally I've got this big screen behind and the part of the point of that is normally the patient and I are both looking at the screen with their labs on it real big.

And we can just scroll through it. And there's stuff that we talk about that I would like to skip, but it's red. Patients don't like the red things. It'll be okay.

But what I really want to talk to you about is this thing. People don' t want t confront it, right? Sometimes you offer them the lab tests and they don t wanna buy it because they're afraid of what it s going to show them too.

Right on. Because that would require a decision. The decision is to change or stay the same. Otherwise, you just get to coast. But what is it saying? Nobody changes until the pain of change is less than the paint of staying the saying.

Well, I mean, that's true. If you know that that is true and you the the is coming, right? You can change before. You could write a decision to prevent.

Um, okay, let's wrap this thing out with some common mistakes that, that your patients often do wrong.

Common Mistakes and Going Deeper in Healing

I mean, we're, you know, in the world of people who come to you aren't the, are probably not the same people that you are with that are happy going to their regular insurance doc with 20, right?

These people are trying a lot of these folks, a ton of your are either fed up with that system and they're looking for something new and or have already started trying some things.

So where are your folks, despite their best efforts, kind of getting it wrong that might not be helpful? Sure. Yeah. Well, I love functional medicine from a standpoint and like medical doctors that are practicing like you are.

Dr. Klint, because you kind of help take that, that person that has been kind like infatuated with the medical system, or maybe they grew up in an environment that was the only acceptable way to look.

And then you have this incredible ability to kind help, when I say, walk them across the bridge. Which is, hey, this might not be the answer to everything.

Come over here and look how much more you can know about your body, a different way of looking at it, approaching it. And so I love that standpoint. Those are not necessarily my clients.

My clients are the people that are kind of just in a brass tacks, quite frankly, commonsensical and know that, hey, I do need to be on a different trajectory.

I know, that that's not working. And I can see that clear as day. They may even have been on the path already dealing with some of these things I mentioned earlier.

Maybe they've done a heavy metal protocol, maybe they have done gut reset protocol. But they are kind of like, well, I did that for like three weeks and it helped a little bit.

But now here I am back to where I started. It's really those people that really get that they need to go deeper with their health, but they might be stuck and they were like me.

They were plateaued. And I will say I was working with some of the most foundational and probably proficient practitioners and I still got stuck. And that's when I just recognized that we just needed a different process.

It wasn't the ill intention of the practitioner. Never really is. Everybody's doing the best with what they can when they know. And so it really was that, we needed to go further and ask some more questions.

So my client's really the person that like, hey, I don't want to just take hormone replacement. I know that my body is smart and I was made perfect in design and that I can heal.

And if you believe that at a foundational level, and that's your truth, well, I'm here to tell you you can. It's just that oftentimes we just need to coordinate it in such a way that it actually produces a result for you.

And sometimes it needs to be customized a little bit more than what you've approached. So don't give up. There is still a pathway, even if you haven't barked on more of a quote unquote natural alternative functional medicine route, but maybe have plateaued a bit in your process.

I bet you do see a bunch of people that tried something that worked for a while. Yeah, we see a lot of doctors, quite frankly, because they're always on the forefront of understanding what is out there and what's available.

So we end up working with a lots of the healers too. I love my doctor patients because I get to skip the explanation and get right to like, Look at that number.

Because doctors, we take terrible care of ourselves as a rule and then all of a sudden we start to feel bad or our dad has a heart attack or whatever.

Something wakes us up.

Closing Thoughts and Where to Find Dr. Schultz

I'm glad you're taking care because we need to take care each other. Well, Dr. Erica, thank you so much. It's so cool what you're doing. I understand you are in the Colorado area, but you see people all over?

We do. Yep. We can be found at www. ParamountWell.com. Um, I have a podcast as well, which you'll be on as, as you know. And, um, so you can look for that information.

we can provide it for you in show notes there as. Yeah. We'll put all your contact stuff in the show notes and people that want to reach out and take that next deeper dive, maybe just do it in a right order, figure out how to customize it to heal their body so that they can feel the way they're supposed to feel both now and later.

And that's kind of what we're all trying to do, right? Love it. Yeah, let's get a result. Well, thank you so much for coming on. That was fun. I look forward to talking to you soon.

Thank you. Thanks for joining me today on MyND Unscripted. I hope today's conversation opened your mind and inspired you to imagine a better path for your health and therefore life.

If you found value in this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone passionate about transforming healthcare. Real change starts with real conversation, so let's keep on going.

Until next time, stay well, Stay curious, And never stop pushing for better.