From Patient to Pioneer 3/10- The Missing Piece: Functional Medicine

The Humbling Moment: Two years into practice, you threw my own back out due to poor ergonomics and lack of exercise. Doctors have to practice what they preach.

The Nutritional Gap: 25% to 40% of my patients were getting better with physical treatments, but those with nutritional deficiencies were hitting a wall.

Studying Functional Medicine: Over 200-hour Functional Medicine University program and graduating in 2019. It taught me to use food as medicine to push different pathways in the body.

The Ultimate Goal: My clinic motto: "I love you, but I don't need to see you in my clinic every day". My passion is finding the root cause and fixing it so patients can live a healthy lifestyle and move on.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Nicole here, and this is the learning corner. Alright, we're on episode three. The missing piece. Can anybody talk about what that is? Alright, we'll get into that. Anyways, I knew about muscles, bones, and the brain. I could get people out of pain, but some patients were still struggling, including myself. The missing piece, what they were putting in their bodies. Today we're talking about functional medicine. That's right, that is the missing piece. Functional medicine. And my absolute favorite favorite clinic model. We'll get to that. Okay. When we jump into all these podcasts and we're talking about things, I hope you know that some of them are impromptu and some of them are read. Like I plan it, I pull out what I want to say, I write it down. Sometimes I copy paste, sometimes I use Google AI to go over my stuff because I'm like, hey, my writing style, everybody is like, what are you talking about? So there is everything from my heart and my mind put on paper. And I do put thought into these podcasts, and I really, really am enjoying this one specifically because it is about my struggles, my patient journey for me myself. I I had a lot of issues and massage, it helped. Chiropractic, it helped. Neurology, another help. Um, but I was still missing the metabolic component. For me, it was a big one, and that's the functional medicine piece we're gonna talk about today. So after two years in practice, I threw my back out. It was poor ergonomics, it was lack of exercise. This commonly happens, and it happened to me. But remember, that's why doctors have to practice what they preach. I practice what I preach. So I went into my chiropractor and I got adjusted three times a week for I think it was six weeks because it was not a discarniation, it was just a protrusion, if anybody cares. Um, but it was um mid-back, and it really took my breath away, and I had no clue what was happening. It was horrible. So I understand when a back gets thrown out, um, some of the pain that comes along with the ones in the mid-back. Um, my low back, I've had low back instability because I have lax ligaments, so I've also had to address those areas. Um, but that was very humbling for me. Like, I'm a chiropractor, I shouldn't throw my back out. What's happening here? Right? That those are the things that do happen to us, and what are we what are we gonna do about it as clinicians? What are we gonna do about it as practitioners, as patients, as you know, moms, dads? Like, how are we gonna encourage healing to really happen? So healing can happen physically, where you get adjusted, you know, maybe massage therapy, maybe a little stem, maybe a little, you know, red therapy, whatever modality that can happen for acute trauma or acute care, right? You get in there and you really help inflammation, you help the healing power of the body. But that leads us to the nutritional gap. Um, 25 to 40 percent of my patients that I was seeing in the physical realm with the physical treatments were, you know, maybe not getting as good as they could. They weren't fully healing, they weren't um experiencing the miraculous uh power of chiropractic, which is amazing. But I'm starting to see a lot of patients at that point early on in my practice where um chiropractic in itself, massage in itself, chiropractic neurology, you know, I could get people so far, and then I'm like, what's missing? What is the struggle? We have chronic inflammation, we have all these things happening that wow, they're a wild car. What is this? And that's what brought me to my externship. Um, kind of like, okay, so functional neurology, I was introduced in the middle of my program at chiropractic school, and I went through you do internships and externships as a chiropractor, and you get to kind of pick and choose where you go. And now I'm not probably the traditional chiropractor um who wanted to do high-volume chiropractic adjusting. I wanted to utilize the full scope of my practice and be a general practitioner. So I chose um a straight chiropractic um or a sports chiropractic internship, and then I chose a straight chiropractic um internship where you know they heavily weighted on um injections and well, I suppose I wouldn't be a straight chiropractic. Okay, more of a mix, more of a medical model, because I didn't know a lot about injections. I wanted to know, like, okay, if this patient comes in and they want an injection, what does that look like? How is that looking? Why would that happen? You know, if they want prednisone, if they want, you know, more of a drugs and surgery route, this chiropractor really taught me the ins and outs of why that's important to have as an as an offering to patients, why patients choose it, the outcomes of those. So it was heavy on um referrals and it was heavy on imaging. So I got really, really good at um reading images and working with the radiologist that way, which is very cool. But my last um portion was an externship. Um, my first choice was with the neurologist, but that didn't work out, um, which is fine because it led me into the other piece that we're talking about today, which is functional medicine. But my externship is where I got the experience. Um, I actually worked with a functional medicine practitioner who also had training. I forget what the degree is, but they also have the um cancer certificate, whatever it is, where you go and you train for cancer patients specific. And so I got exposed a lot to treating, I shouldn't say treating, it's not treating cancer patients, but it's it's supporting them nutritionally while working on like chemotherapy and other drugs that they might be utilizing to help combat their cancer and working with other MDs. So that really gave me insight to a whole new scope. And I really chose these intern and externships based upon the lack of knowledge that I have, and that's how I work. As a patient, I want to have all my questions answered. And if you don't have the answer, I want you to give me it to a person that has the answer or the insight or the knowledge or the experience. And so I want to be that as well for you as your practitioner. I want to know, okay, well, I have experience in sports care practice, and that's the bulk of my experience for hands-on care. And then I have the experience of sending you out for um injections or working with your MD for a less holistic way of treatment. So those are the things where I want my practitioner to be that way because you don't know what you don't know, and there's a lot of things I don't know. So, anyways, back to the nutritional deficiencies. Once I learned the neurology and once I started using that in practice, I was like, okay, this is great, but there's still something missing. What is it? I don't even know. But that's what brought me to functional medicine. Okay, well, now I have this extern ship. Wow, there's a whole can of worms that I just opened that wow, okay, I'm gonna learn this. What does the body do on a cellular level? This is amazing. Okay, the nerves they work like this, and the bones and the muscles, they work like this, and the physiology of it works like this because anatomy and physiology were like one of my top five favorite classes, and so the physiology part to me was amazing, and I dove in. I mean, you know, how did the brain speak to the organs and how did that signal with hormones and neurotransmitters? And it was that's my favorite part is just learning all that stuff. But functional medicine, I then stepped out of um school and graduated and started my practice, and I started doing my functional medicine training um at the University of Functional Medicine. I graduated in 2019. It really taught me how to use foods as medicine to push different pathways in the body. So we can use food is best, right? So you can withhold food, you can add food, and then supplements would be the second best, and then prescription medication, in my opinion. That's kind of how the body appreciates it. But I got to learn all of the of the systems at a higher level and how they work together and what deficiencies are. And so this all really began giving me such a good, hearty foundation, and then building and building and building on it. It has been, I think learning is is one of my favorite things to do, whether it's learning about the body or learning about a person or learning about my patients. What makes you tick? What do you need to survive and live a quality of life? Like, how does that look? But my ultimate goal is basically this. This is my motto. I love you. I don't need to see you in my clinic every day. I want you to find the root cause, and I want to help you do that. I want to be the reason because you know, every person has a little pride. I want to be the person that really finds that reason, the root, the the reason to why your symptoms are there, why you're overweight, why your hormones are off, why you have migraines, why, why, why. I want to be that person. I love that. That's the puzzles, right? That's the puzzle pieces getting put together. I want to learn who you are and what that piece that is missing, what that is for you. And I love you, but I don't want you to rely on me as a clinician when you don't need to, as you learn to do what you need to do, right? So I teach healthy lifestyle, healthy choices, what's good for you might not be good for somebody else. So these are the things that I really focus on that I say, all right, guys. I I think a lot of people are gonna be giggling at this, but I'm trying to work myself out of a job. Meaning, if I can help fixing people over and over and over and over and over, and getting them out of the office and they come back, you know, here's the cycle. We all have stages in life, but the general things like, man, um, why does my pain hurt? Or why does my foot hurt? What caused my foot to hurt? Is it something I need to be seen for, or is it something that's gonna get better? Those are the clinical insights I want to teach you when you should come in, why you should come in, and to have that critical thinking component. That's what I teach. You as a person might choose to say, hey, every six weeks, I want to get a massage, and every four weeks I want an adjustment. Whatever that looks like for you, that is great. I would love to see you on those increments. But what I'm getting at is, I hope that you can learn what diet you need. Meaning, when we look at diet, I'm not saying what diet, like you need to restrict this and restrict this. It's more what style of eating do you need for your genetics? What style of lifestyle, right? Do you need to make sure to prioritize prioritize your sleep? Is that genetically necessary for you? Do we need to look at, is it you're not disciplining yourself? How are we going to get you to discipline yourself? Whatever those things are, my job is to investigate and to find out how to reason with you, to instill it into your lifestyle, into your everyday disciplines, I guess you could call it, and stick with it. If I can find your why, then I can teach you why, then you don't have to come back all the time because you go, oh yeah, that's right. Nicole said, if this happened, then this would happen, then I'd be okay. But if this happened, then this happened, then I need to call. Okay. Ur ding ding ding. Okay, yep, I'm not gonna call right now because this will go away, right? So these are the things. If I can understand who you are, what makes you tick, and your why, that's what gives me the confidence to say, I love you, but I don't need to see you clinically every day. I get patients healthy and you go on your way, right? So I do memberships, and we'll get into that. And when we do annual memberships, typically it's going to be somebody who really has something in their health history they want to look at and they need to investigate, and they need a health coach to stand by them to help them understand their why, get through a few things. Maybe some difficult things are coming up, and and it's a big health change for you, or you know, you're dealing with cancer, or you're dealing with Alzheimer's disease, or something that's in the chronic nature, and you really need help. What I do is take that into account. We work together, and I slowly get you to understand where your deficits are, where your needs are, and how to kind of put those together so that you can start having, I don't want to say compassion for yourself, but start having that confidence in taking care of yourself and that confidence of my body is working well, I'm just having a bad day. And so those are the things where okay, I want to teach you to fish. I don't want to have to go fishing for you. Will I fish for you? Yes, I will fish for you and I will do a dang good job at it. But eventually you're gonna go, hmm, I'm really sick of Dr. Nicole fishing for me. So I'm gonna learn to fish for myself and I'm gonna take her advice. And she is the best person to do this because she knows the most about the body and she's seen all of these things happen and she's helped other people just like me. So I want to give you those answers. I want to educate you, I want to make sure that you have everything you need to get better. So next time on our podcast here, we're gonna dive into exactly how we get sick, and it might just challenge everything you ever knew about disease. Signing off for today, I'm Dr. Nicole. This is the learning corner. Bye bye now.