Penni - Owner Lowcountry Wellness Center

Penni: Welcome Penny, thank you so much for being here. I'm super excited to share with our audience today the owner of Lowcountry Wellness Center, Penny. She's here to share her autoimmune story and her practice story as well. So without further ado, let's just jump right in. Penny, how are you? Thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you. I'm great. I'm great. Thanks for having me. Super excited. don't you start by telling us your autoimmune story first so we can all ⁓ a better idea of who you are and how you came to where you are. Yeah. So I was a lifelong sickie. And I know so many people can appreciate that, right? I was 10 years old when I was told that I had IBS. At 12, they said it was treatment resistant IBS and that I would just have to live with it for the rest of my life. And so ⁓ you're a digestive person, you go through life knowing the path to every place you need to go, right? ⁓ know the good bathroom path and you know the bad bathroom path, right? So I just lived my entire adult life that way. and ⁓ never gave it any consideration, right? IBS. And as I got, you know, a little bit further up in my years, it was, you know, I don't feel good. Like, I know my gut stuff isn't great because of my IBS, but I just don't feel good. Like, I was having migraines, I was having weight gain, I was having all kinds of things. And I went into this vicious migraine cycle that lasted about seven years, and we tried and failed everything, and the neurologist said, hey, listen, I just think it's tied to your IBS. I think... Mm-hmm. I don't have a good answer for you. think you're just going to have migraines like this for the rest of your life that we can't treat. And you're just going to have to figure out how to live with them. And I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't love that for me, but I didn't have any other choice, you know? And, and then it just so happened one day, I, I was in clinic seeing patients and I collapsed and came to with my husband hovering over me. My staff had called him ⁓ and ⁓ said, two options. You can get up with me and go to the hospital on your own. or you can lay on the floor and I'm gonna call 911. And I said, well, I'm not dying and I'm not going to the hospital in an ambulance. So get me up and we'll go. so got to the hospital and of course they rushed me back. know, when you have a alphabet soup after your name, things happen a little bit quicker for you. And ⁓ came back to me and said, yep, you've got a GI bleed. And I said, ⁓ I could have told you that. It looked like a massacre every time I went to the bathroom. And... ⁓ And so I was just losing so much blood and they said, well, we got you an emergency appointment tomorrow morning with GI. And I said, beautiful, great, thanks. Gave me the meds for GI bleed for the, know, to get me through to the next morning. And I go and see GI in the next morning and he says, I think they misdiagnosed you. A, I don't think you have a GI bleed. B, you definitely do not have IBS. I think you have ulcerative colitis. And I was like, that makes way more sense. Yeah. ⁓ my gosh, right? Ding, ding, ding. All the lights started to go off. And he said, but more importantly, can we talk about the large adrenal tumor you have? And that one floored me. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, ⁓ they didn't tell you. sir, they most certainly did not tell me. And he said, yeah, I'm more concerned about that than I am about anything in your digester tract. I can fix that. And it was like, beautiful. And he said, well, because you are who you are, normally I would never get involved in this, but. I'm going go ahead and let's get some orders going. Let's get an MRI and do some other things for the adrenal." And I was like, great, love that. Yeah, let's dive in. He said, please go see your PCP, bring her up to speed. Perfect. Made an appointment. So all of that was, so that was Tuesday morning. I saw my PCP the next day, Wednesday. ⁓ This was March, ironically, March 7th of 2018, eight years ago. We're right there. And I saw her and she walked into the room and I was so weak I couldn't drive. So my mom drove me. Yeah. Wow. Wow. ⁓ And she walked into the room crying holding her tablet and she said, which hospice agency do you want? ⁓ my God. And I said, what? And she said, well, you clearly have adrenal cell carcinoma, adrenal cancer. And I said, how do we know that? What are you talking about? She said, well, I looked at the scan, I saw how big it is and I saw how much diet took up. And I said, okay, but inflammation will cause die uptake. I was having like, you know, I'm trying to ration while my mother's hysterical next to me that her only daughter is dying. I said, listen, I... Yeah. I'm sure. I think you and I are on different pages of where my body is and I got to get out of here. And I turned to my mom, said, come on, let's go. I can't be here. And you know, she followed me out she was like, no, no, no, let me talk to you. me talk. I said, no, we're done. We're done. can't talk to you. You know, you've just doomsdayed me and I don't need people like that on my side. Right. I needed you to come in and say, go ahead. Right. ⁓ Well, and that's, and I know that, you know, it was a provider to provider thing, right? You know, Well, and how to give someone news. mean, that is the most... But it doesn't matter, you're human. But still, and that's what I said to her. said, you only treated me as if I was your peer and not as if I was a person, right? At the first and foremost, I'm a person. I'm a patient. I'm seeing you as a patient, not as my colleague. And I went home and dove into research ⁓ and said, gonna make some diet changes, right? You see as a big diagnosis, I need to make some drastic diet changes. Yeah. right. So implemented diet changes right away while we waited for my colonoscopy and my EGD to get scheduled. And in an MRI, ⁓ needed me to get some other inflammatory things done before we could jump into all of that. So that bought me about a three week window of, I don't really know what's going on with my adrenal tumor. I don't really know what's going on with my digestion. The bleeding had stopped. So that was a saving grace. And the end of March came and we got the scans ⁓ and we the... ⁓ Polinoscopy EGD done. I'll never forget when I went in for the follow-up, the first thing he said when he walked in the room, my mom brought me and he said, boy, was I wrong. And he said, thankfully, you don't you see, you don't have any type of lower digestive disease. What you do have though is the worst celiac disease I've ever seen in a body. He said, your celiac created so much inflammation that it caused your intestines to bleed. And then this light bulb went off in my mind and I said, I have complained for over a decade to my providers about this one focal spot of pain in my upper abdomen that felt like a hot electric poker searing into my abdomen. And the answer was always, well, let's try BS. so he said, point to where? And I showed him and he said, that's exactly where the hole in your intestines is. Unbelievable. And so that was the colonoscopy predated the MRI, think by a few days. ⁓ got the MRI back and it was like two different people. There was no comparison to the scanning done in the ER. And the only thing I can think of and, you know, went and met with Endocrine and spoke with multiple radiologists is in those three weeks, I had drastically changed my diet. I'd gotten on some good anti-inflammatory things. I started, you know, drinking a lot of aloe and bromelain to help with, you know, tissue repair and changed. That was the only difference. And that drastic inflammation change in those three weeks was like we scanned two completely different bodies. It was crazy. I believe it for sure. Yeah, so that started my path and you know, I... What were you, what were you, I know you were a practitioner before, but what were you specializing in before all of this? Yeah. So yeah, my background. So my original training is primary care, but then I went into orthopedic surgery. That was where I had spent most of my career was orthopedic surgery. And in 2017, I opened Lowcountry Wellness Center. Actually, I opened Charleston Physical Medicine, which was a more holistic ortho practice. And in 2018, when I got sick, I said, listen, if I can't get the care that I want with my alphabet soup, then nobody else is getting the care that they want. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so I closed down Charleston Physical Medicine and I reopened as what it is now, Low Country Wellness Center, and I've never looked back. It's incredible and I'm so grateful to have this conversation with you because my autoimmune stuff started... I mean, I'd say I started to see things happening in high school, really, and I did go to a holistic doctor and he specialized in like muscle and it was all like food and energy based and all of this and so ⁓ he me off of gluten, sugar, dairy, all of that ⁓ and did that for... Mm-hmm. I don't know, while I was home in high school and my mother and father could help me doing all of this. And then I went to college and I played basketball in college on a scholarship and I just like, gluten free is not a thing in 1997 when I went to college. It certainly was not. So I ended up not continuing that diet, but it was always in the back of my head. Like, this is, I shouldn't be doing this, I shouldn't be doing this. And then after a long, Mm-mm. No. many, many years later, I did end up with an autoimmune disease. And I often think, had I been able to, I know, but it's in my head, like, had I been able to... You can't. You can't. Yeah, get it out of your head. Because you never know, right? We have over 100 autoimmune diseases. We have names for about 50 % of that. And so whether it's the one that you know about or it's the ones that you didn't know about, you likely wouldn't have changed the trajectory. Yeah. So I often think too sometimes, does it matter the name? I know it does for, like, you're treating it, well, maybe we should take a step back here. For some people who don't know ⁓ functional medicine is, want to give us a quick little roundabout of, I mean, I think a lot of people have heard it, but don't typically know, Okay. ⁓ No. Nope. Not really. Yep. So, yeah, I'm gonna tell you, I can't stand the term functional medicine. I refuse to acknowledge it, I don't use it, I correct everybody. Because when you talk about functional medicine, you're saying that anything besides that is dysfunctional and that's crap, that's not accurate, okay? So I like either foundational or root cause, right? Let's drill it down to the why this went wrong in the first place, right? So that's that. So the difference between, That makes sense to me, Okay. traditional allopathic medicine, I call those the box people, right? Because they can only see what they can fit inside of a clinical guideline box. They forget that the boxes are made of human beings. And so in the root cause world where I live, we drill it down to the why. But why did that happen? Why did you get an autoimmune disease? Where did that come from? Was it, know, childhood things? Was it diet? Was it environmental exposures? Why? Because your body didn't just go haywire. Mm-hmm. spontaneously, right? There were precipitating things that led us to that. And in the allopathic world, they just look at, ⁓ you've got a headache, here's a pill for that. But in the root cause world where I live, we go, but why do you have a headache? When did it start? What else was going on in your body at the time? Well, maybe we need to track that back to even further, right? And figure out why did that go wrong? And so that's really the main difference, right? In a very rudimentary nutshell, that's the main difference. No. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ And to follow up on that a little bit, and this is, know the answer to this is gonna be all over the place, but is there often a big, like, is there often a cause that you see, like, it was this, it was that, or it was this, or it was a combination of them all? Like, what would you say ⁓ a primary cause? ⁓ Yeah. So when teach, because I teach practitioners how to treat the medically complex, we talk about a system I created to kind of identify that. ⁓ it's the treatment triangle, right? And in the treatment triangle, there are three legs to it, right? There's the pathogen leg. That's the stealth infections, Lyme disease, EBV, CMV, the goes on and on, COVID, all the things like that. Then there is the toxicity and that's environmental toxins, mold toxicity, know, that type of stuff, parasites and things. And then there's the trauma ⁓ of it. Yeah, and so that's where we've got to get into the, what we call the big T traumas and the little T traumas, right? Because your body stores ⁓ single thing that has happened since you were in utero. Mm-hmm. That's where I'm going with that. Yes. And so it might not be something that happened in the last five years of your life that made your body get ill. Crap, it could be something that happened when you were three months old and you have no cognitive knowledge of it whatsoever. So yeah, so generally it falls into one of those buckets if that makes sense, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can see in my own case all three ticking boxes. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely trauma. There's definitely, I mean, who doesn't have trauma, there's definitely environmental things. I can remember as a kid, I broke a thermometer and I was playing with a mercury, like not knowing that. ⁓ I vividly remember, my mother's a nurse and she freaked out when she saw me doing that. ⁓ Yeah, and that's the norm. Yeah. Yeah. Call the Asnet team. And that was probably like 1987, so what did you do? You just cleaned it up and went on your day and I often think like, I wonder if that had anything to do with But I don't think it was one specific thing for me. I think it was for sure, yeah. It is, yeah. It's accumulation of things, yeah. It stacks, and that's what I tell everybody. It's not one thing, it's the stacking of them. And what really sets the difference between how our bodies respond now, because you could get two people with the same illness and you're get completely different responses because it goes back to what was your childhood like? What was that treatment triangle complexity when you were five years old, when you were two years old, when you were 12 years old? Because that set the tone for what your adult body can handle. Mm-hmm. So. I can imagine people, like I get a little emotional thinking of that. must, the emotions that come out of people when you have this type of treatment must be pretty intense. This is a calling. Well, is. And the traditional practitioner isn't going to get into that treatment side, that triangle of the trauma piece of it. But because for me, like you, trauma was a huge piece of it. ⁓ chased that one deep. ⁓ so I actually became a certified trauma hypnotherapist because for me, that was the best relief that I'd ever had. I felt the best after I unloaded ⁓ much childhood trauma and I did it without having to relive it. ⁓ No. Mm-hmm. ⁓ And I thought, why would anybody ever want to go through that trauma twice in their life? Why would we not all want to do it under hypnosis when I can come out of a session and be like, yeah, that happened and it's Monday, you know? So, yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I need to say because my mother listens to this, I had a wonderful childhood. sister passed away when I was seven, so that was where that comes around. I had an childhood, but we did have some ⁓ things happened. ⁓ So, ⁓ Mom, love you. ⁓ ⁓ yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You Yeah, so I can see where all of that comes into play. you, what ⁓ treatment look like in your office then? You start with labs and, ⁓ do you start where you let the patient take you? Okay. ⁓ Yeah, well, we start with a complex history. Yeah, we start with a complex history, right? And we start talking about that treatment triangle right away because at any given time, right, the leading leg of it is changing. And so, you know, when you talk to me today, you might be stuck in fight, flight or freeze. And I go, all right, well, nervous system is leading. So I got to get you out of that trauma side of it, right? I can't do anything physically until I can get you out of fight, flight, freeze. Or, you know, I see you another time and the pathogen arm is what's leading. And I'm like, OK, well, Yeah. We gotta go and we gotta look at, know, what pathogens do we need to tackle or whatever. And so it's very fluid. You know, I always tell patients we could get a hundred sickies in a room and I'm gonna have a hundred different treatments and a hundred different reasons to do it. And so, you know, when you get into the medically complex where I live, is, it's an N equals one, right? Every treatment plan is unique to that patient. And it's never ending. feel like what I've come to learn after 16 years of this is that there was a long time I just was fighting so hard to put this into remission, ⁓ heal myself. to kind of have the perfect outcome. And I was living my life in a way where it was like I was afraid to do things, I was afraid to put the wrong thing into my body, onto my body, I was afraid to have too much stress, and I was like, this is no way to live. I've come to the realization that with this disease. I might go into remission, I might have a miraculous healing someday, I hope I do, but it's not my end goal. My end goal is to just learn how to live with this so that I don't have to have this if I don't, you know, ⁓ I'm an athlete maybe, it was like, it's a fluid thing. ⁓ peaks and valleys. Well, it's a fluid thing. Yeah, and I tell patients, flares are gonna happen, right? You're human, flares are gonna happen. The goal is to get your internal terrain so strong that the flares come and go quick and they don't knock you out, right? That we build up your resources so heavily that you can get the common cold and have it be a four or five day thing, right? You can get the flu. and only have it knock you out for a few days instead of a few months or a few weeks, right? That's the goal. You know, it's to increase that background, you know, kind of quality of life stuff, right? When when you're somebody who's been chronically ill for a long time, you get that. ⁓ man, cold's going around like I better live in my bubble because I don't have weeks to be down. Right. And, you know, I can tell you as somebody who you didn't even tell you that. Mm-hmm. All right. to be down, yeah, yeah. found out that the cause of all of my stuff ended up being Lyme disease ⁓ of the infections that come with it. so when I treated that and cleared that my body, can, let me knock on lots of wood right now because I don't know the last time I actually was sick. I mean, it's been years, years. And I... Yeah. So interesting about... I'm sorry, go ahead. I don't want to interrupt. I was just gonna say, I'm, I'm exposed to six to, you know, viral people all the time, every day. Yeah. Sickness is all the time. So it's literally your job. So I am interested in Lyme because I grew up in the Northeast. I moved to Charleston seven years ago. say ⁓ I know it's still in there. I can bury it, but it comes out every now and then. ⁓ Yeah, exactly. part my fear back then, ⁓ I two babies. Yeah. I heard that. Little Massachusetts twang in there. And I was scared to death. We lived in two acres and there was deer running everywhere. And I was scared to death to let them outside because I thought I knew so many people. It's an epidemic up there really, Lyme disease. Well, that is my question. Because I don't hear about it as much here. But my functional, my holistic doctor up there used to say to me, just don't think you're going to get away from it just because you're going to Charleston. an epidemic across the whole world just so you know. Every state in the country is epidemic. Yeah. Yeah, no, it is here. I actually have a very large Lyme practice. That's mainly what I do these days. Lyme paired with the medically complex. And ⁓ yeah. So can you touch a little bit on the testing you do as opposed to the testing you would do at an alipathy or at your PCP for Lyme? don't want hear that that test is different. And I know for a fact that, yeah, yeah. It's very different. Yeah, it's very different. So the root cause world, you know, we actually get down to, you know, into the pathogens. And so I'm little different. And I tell everybody, you know, in. I don't need to have the name for all the bugs that you have. The treatment is the treatment. ⁓ And, know, if you've got the money, then great. We'll test if you're that brain that needs to have data points in order to justify why we're doing what we're doing. Beautiful. I will test you. Mm-hmm. But if you're that brain that just says, I want to feel better and I don't care what name it is, then let's just jump into treatment. Now, when you talk about testing, the traditional test is the Western blot. You can get that at any lab, right? Lab core quest, The problem with the Western blot is that when the Western blot was created, it was created as a surveillance test, not as a diagnostic test. It was also created when America was facing a massive Lyme vaccine. And so the two strains that the vaccine would have given everybody as positive bands the Western blot were removed from the American Western blot because the theory was that we would vaccinate 100 % of the population in the early seventies and that every single person would be positive for bands, know, 34 and 39. And so in America, bands 34 and 39 are taken out of every Western blot test that we have. which happens to be the most indicative two bands of Lyme disease, is why, you if somebody has a positive Western blot in America, you have to have five active bands in order to qualify as a positive. Now, the misconception is that the bullseye gave you Lyme. The bullseye meant that your existing Lyme is reacting to a new bite. Right. The other misconception, as you said, is I was worried about my kids getting exposed to deers, you know, in the deer tick. Lyme is spread, as are these other stealth infections, from every vector that bites. Mosquitoes, gnats, noceum, horseshoe flies up north, right? Anything that has the potential to bite you and bite somebody else is spreading all of this stuff. Right. then as moms, we pass it gestationally. Right. We have, we call that horizontal transmission. And so as a mom, I unfortunately birthed Yeah. three Lyme-positive daughters who went on to birth Lyme-positive grandbabies. And that's really when my grandson was born and spent some time in the NICU with what I knew was neonatal Lyme. And MUNC Sean Jenkins laughed at me and they said, that's not real. Even though I went with a stack of literature that proved this is what neonatal Lyme looks like. I said to my daughter, you know what, let's get him out of here and then Gigi will fix him on the other side. Let's just, get him stable enough to leave the hospital. They're not gonna buy in. Mm-hmm. They're too boxed, right? They're too boxed into their hole. I think, you know, the big thing that we're going to see coming, thank goodness for the Lyme Roundtable that happened back in December and, was it November? I forget, but ⁓ it's first ever HHS, Department of Health and Human Services, that had the first ⁓ roundtable on Lyme disease from a government level. And that night, a new disease website got added to the HHS website. the roundtable came out and said, we're, you there'll be no more gaslighting of these chronically ill patients. No more stops today. more acknowledgement of these alternative tests, right? Because we know that the Western blot is a wrong test. It was never meant to be a diagnostic test. It was meant to be a screening and a surveillance test. and so, know, immediately Kennedy said, we're going to Thank God. put some resources to that. Do you know, and this is where it gets crazy, you can see I'm so passionate about Lyme, right? That, know, HIV research, let's just talk about that, gets hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for citizen. Lyme research gets on average $15 ⁓ person of research. Lyme disease affects more people than any other illness that's ever hit our planet. No, I am too. How does that make sense? It doesn't make sense. I mean don't get me started on what they spend their money on up there. That's crazy. ⁓ about let's talk a little bit about why some people's autoimmune diagnosis are in fact actually like Yeah. Some people will often say to me, have you ever been tested for Lyme? Because maybe you don't have rheumatoid arthritis and maybe you really do have Lyme. So they mimic each other some way and that makes it difficult. Yeah. They do, yeah. So if you look at the, ⁓ well, if you look at the latest research, there's been some very overwhelming evidence that supports that MS is Lyme, lupus is Lyme, Parkinson's is looking like it's gonna be Lyme, RA was actually how the Lyme got found, so to speak, up in Lyme, Connecticut, was a group of children around that island all started presenting what looked like juvenile RA. when in fact when you look at imaging and you look at x-rays, Lyme arthritis is a very different appearance. And so they called it juvenile RA for these kids when in fact it actually was Lyme arthritis. that's how we finally got the name for what is Lyme disease. And unfortunately, Lyme disease is one bug and tend to throw this whole cascade of illnesses into the name of one bug. So that's the other thing that those of us that are Lyme providers have been reached out by the CDC to help us come up with a better name for it. And so we're kind of leaning towards something that's going to be like vector-borne syndrome or something like that that more appropriately justifies it. But what you'll start hearing, especially since the roundtable, is there's going to start to be some reclassification. So when we talk about lupus, for example, we talk about Lyme lupus. We talk about MS. We talk about Lyme MS. Let's acknowledge what it really is. It's Lyme RA. That's when I've got a patient who came to me in palliative care because nobody could figure out what's wrong with her. For 10 years, she'd been sick. She was in her 50s. And she said, they told me I have what's called seronegative RA, meaning it never tested positive on image or on blood work, but on imaging, she had RA. And I said, I'm going to call crap on that one. I said, what you have is Lyme disease and nobody knew what it was. And so they threw you into this pigeonhole disease and put her on the biologics for RA, which made her feel horrible. I said, let's humor me. Let's just do a quick little Lyme screening test and sure enough, know, her numbers came back off the chart and I was like, and you do not have RA, you have Lyme disease. It's a different beast, you know? Yeah, interesting. What do you think, ⁓ said your practice is ⁓ dealing with Lyme disease at this point. ⁓ think there's a, okay, yeah. ⁓ do you think that, not to put a number on it, but 60 % of people who have ⁓ autoimmune are classified the wrong way? ⁓ just, ⁓ point. ⁓ my personal practices. Hehehe. Yes, yeah, I think the number is much higher than that. Yeah. Yeah, my point in that question is really, because people don't know where to turn. They get these diagnoses. You're saying what I hear all the time from people is that nobody's treating me as a whole. They're treating me by this disease. It's not that I have this problem and this problem, but one is endocrine and one is joint, so no one talks to each other, and they don't know where to turn. And Yeah. Yeah. What would you, if you, someone came to you newly diagnosed, obviously you would recommend they go to you. Is there a resource? They'd go to you first. But is there books, ⁓ resources, anything that we can direct people to? ⁓ gosh, there's an abundance of information out there. ⁓ Project Lime is probably a good, yeah, exactly. And that's what I warn patients. I said, hey, listen, know, actually where I tell people to start when they're considering this journey, I have them start with a documentary. I said, it's gonna open your eyes, it's gonna piss you off, it's probably gonna make you cry. And I want you to start with that. It's called the Quiet Epidemic. And I tell everybody, please buy it from their website and don't buy it from any of the streaming services because then the money goes to Lime Research. Yeah, which is overwhelming. Yeah. Okay. If buy it from the streaming services, that money doesn't go back to the Lyme research. So please just go to the quietepidemic.com, download the $5 movie there and watch it. the Quiet Epidemic is going to be that kind of first eye opener into the gas lighting that Lyme patients go through. But it's gonna shed this light that the typical Lyme patient, I call them my Lymeys, take nine years to get to me or to get to a diagnosis, nine years of illness before Okay. They finally find somebody like me who goes, ⁓ wait a minute, here's the big picture. 100 % you have Lyme disease, right? And that's what I call it, Lyme and, because Lyme never comes alone. But really, Bergdorferi, which is the bug of Lyme disease, never seen alone. He always comes with friends. And so I've always called it Lyme and, just ⁓ it's better representation. But when we look at the diagnostic criteria to diagnose somebody with Lyme disease, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. People are under the misconception that I have to prove it with a test and it's what we call a clinical diagnosis. You have to meet a certain number of symptoms of clinical criteria. Well, lo and behold, any autoimmune disease is one of the criteria. Criteria, okay. So you could treat me for Lyme without, I'm not one of these people, maybe I was 16 years ago, but I'm not that person anymore that I need to know, check in all the boxes, because what I've come to learn is putting a name on it makes you no different than you were yesterday. It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't matter. But people think diagnosis, medication, treatment, healed. So you tell me. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Let's just make you feel better. Why does it matter what it's called? Yeah, I wish it worked that way. I wish it worked. New people who are newly joining, yes, people who are newly into this autoimmune world, who are trying to get answers, who have no experience, don't know anyone who's been through it, they really genuinely think they're gonna go to the rheumatologist, they're gonna get a diagnosis, they're gonna get a medication, and they're gonna be better. it's really hard for them to come to the realization that that is almost never, probably never the case. That it's, ⁓ And that's because our American healthcare system has programmed everybody to think that, right? So when we step away from that main street allopathic system and we get into the root cause world over here on my side of the street where we go, hey, listen, I don't have to answer to Blue Cross. I don't have to answer to Medicare. I don't have to answer to Medicaid. I get to treat you the way that you need to be treated. You want to duke it out with, you know, Blue Cross, that's on you, but I'm not going to do that. I just want to make you feel better. And, you know, Yes. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. when I don't have to answer to the insurance companies, that frees me up so much. And I know, you know, I see it all the time in the Facebook groups. I hate that, you know, they don't take insurance. And I'm like, you realize that we wouldn't be able to care for you the way that you want us to care for you if I was bound by their rules. only reason we're able to do the things that we're able to do and get people into remission and, you know, get people feeling better is because we get to walk outside of that allopathic box. ⁓ Take care ⁓ That is very true because and I tell people when they're first I get a lot of people this is what birth this Podcast is a lot of people are referred to me or you know, my friend has something like that or whatever and then they just want to talk they just they just need to feel like they're not alone and I Tell them from the get-go what I'm taking your you're 16 years away from trying them for the insurance company is very Regimented on what I don't I'm not even really sure why we have doctors once we have the diagnosis Because like go to get your labs done and the insurance company tells you what you're gonna take and when you're gonna take it and when it and when you fail it and What you take the next one it has nothing to do That's a really sad situation So I a hundred percent understand and can confirm what you're saying is true that insurance companies muddy the waters Yes, yes Exactly. Yep. Yeah. They're practicing medicine. We're seeing insurance companies practicing medicine. And I write back to insurance companies all the time when they send me the little letter that says, hey, you didn't put your patient on this. And I said, when you have a license to practice medicine and you are their PCP, you may give me your opinion. Period and done. Yeah. think what holds a lot of people back from talking to people like you is the financial part of it because it is reach for a lot of people. ⁓ I talking to my cousin, her... Her situation is double fold. Her kid is dealing with a lot and she has an autoimmune thing too and they have the means to turn over every single leaf imaginable and she's very blessed and lucky to do that but I know there's a lot of people out there that don't. Do you have any recommendations for those people? I mean I always think it's worth the initial visit anyways because you don't, you're judging and you don't know. There could be a million plans out there but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And there's a lot of ways to go about it, right? One of the reasons that it's more expensive when we get into this root cause world is our expenses are so much higher, right? When I was a regular primary care person, I paid maybe $1,000 a year in liability insurance. But because now I live in a root cause world, I pay 30 plus thousand dollars a year in insurance. the only thing that changed is I don't Mm-hmm. I live outside of the box now. That was the only thing that changed. So patients don't understand that there's a lot more liability on the provider when we step out of the allopathic mainstream world, right? And so we have to cover that, right? I'd love to give my care away free every day. It doesn't work, right? Then I can't give it, you know? And so there are lots of us that do, you know, low cost consults we'll do what we call like a chart review. Mm-hmm. Well, no, no. I'm not going to treat you as a patient, but if you want to send me all your stuff, I'll send you back some info on things, you know, some, some things that, you know, kind of jumped out at me that I think are worth exploring, ⁓ you know. And so there's, there's a lot of options out there. It's just a matter of, you've got to start somewhere. Mm-hmm, I've learned not to talk to my rheumatologist about things I do outside because not that they are Fire me as a patient or anything. They just don't care If they ⁓ they don't believe you ⁓ yeah. Yeah Well, and they don't understand nor do they have the time to learn it. You know, I sent a patient recently who insisted on going to rheumatology because they had told her she had lupus and I said, you don't have lupus. So I sent the referral at her request. said, you know, I don't like this. I'm going to do it because you feel like you want it. And I sent all this information, including journal studies on the Lyme-lupus connection. And what I got back was, well, we're going to start around this med, this med and that med. She doesn't want to do any of that because you've put into her head that, you know, this is what the problem is. And I said, I didn't put anything into her head. I literally gave her the literature, the clinical evidence that supported what I'm saying. You're just pissed off that it's refuting what you're telling her, which is go on all of these big drugs that are going to cause a hundred other issues. When all she wanted to know was, why do I get out of a flare when I'm in one? That's why she went there. How do I get out of a lupus flare when I'm in one? And he said, I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Go back to Dr. Penny, that sort of thing, I don't know. Beautiful. ⁓ Do you ever or do you do you see a value in doing both Western or allopathic, you know, like ⁓ Well, I tell everybody the true integrative world where I live is where we get to blend East and West, right? When I'm in a trauma, absolutely take me to that level one trauma center and you do the life-saving things that I need you to do. But when I'm dealing with a complex multi-system autoimmune disease, I'm not gonna go the allopathic route. You can't help me. I fired my endocrinologist way back in that day, right, in 2019, because I went to him and I had done a lot of research and I'd done a lot of testing on my adrenal tumor Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He rolled up in my face on his stool and literally yelled at me and said, you make me feel like a moron. And I put my hand up and I said, no, you make you feel like a moron because you can only see guidelines and I'm a human being and you don't know what to do with us. I don't fit into any of your boxes. And for those of you that are listening to this, I'll share quick side note on why I had to fire him. My case presentation from an endocrine perspective was so challenging. Yeah. that I was the case presentation at the 2018 National Endocrine Society Conference. He came back to me from this conference with all of the powerhouses in the endocrine world and said, nobody could figure it out, we're all stumped. And that's when I went, okay, y'all can't help me. That's, yep, you can't help me. You wanted to give me a medicine for a disease you don't think I have, but then you flipped and said, but you don't not have it either, so we don't know if you have it, but it has a 50 % risk of death. Yeah. Do you hear the things that you're saying out loud? Does that make sense? And so ⁓ fired him that day and I said, I'm sorry, you can't help me. And said, well, you need follow-up. And I said, not from you. I'll manage it on my own ⁓ and you never lay eyes on me again. And that was that. That was, you know, that was the day that I said, this is it. If I don't take charge of this now, they're going to kill me. ⁓ I've to get a handle on all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, me ask you this. For about five years, I did ⁓ treatments only. And two of that I shouldn't have. Or I should have found something else. Like what I was doing worked for about three years. And now I have a lot of damage from the joints and stuff that like. ⁓ And the that really flipped the switch me and I was never really able to get back, but doing what I was doing was stress. And I hear all the time from mothers and women in general that all of their problems started with stress. I mean... Sure. Yeah. That was the catalyst. Like, of these symptoms were happening and then I was having, my child was sick with cancer, my mother was dying, I lost my job, you know, whatever it is. And was never really able to get fully back to it. So it's probably because I never really addressed ⁓ the cause of it. Although I feel like I turned over so many rocks trying to get there. Lime testing. 16 years ago was not much on the radar when I was doing all of that. So maybe that's something I need to explore a little bit. But can you talk a little bit about stress and what that does? ⁓ I lose you? ⁓ Yeah, that's, you know, it goes back to, you know, when we're stuck in that autonomic nervous system, right? When we're stuck in that fight, flight or freeze, that deteriorates the body at such a faster rate. And so, you know, one of the first things we talk about, you know, when I sit with patients is, what do you do for stress management? What do you do for sleep every night? Truly the number one thing. I can throw all of the herbals and supplements and healthcare. How's your sleep? The number one most important thing you can do for your body is have quality botanicals and We can use food as medicine, but if you're not sleeping, nothing else I do matters. And so we talk about, you know, what does self-care look like for you? How do you prioritize that? do some simple things, you know, I love telling my teenagers like humming. People take for granted humming. It is a powerful way to help calm the body stress responses down. said, every time, especially to my girls, every time your thighs hit that toilet seat, your mouth better be humming. do you have like tools of people to deal with stress ⁓ or autoimmune? It's like maybe two or three big ticket items here. Yeah, I think there's some really simple things that we can do to help manage our body stress response. number one most important thing is sleep. If you're not getting quality sleep with good adequate dream recall, can't prioritize that any higher. That is ⁓ the number one thing. Second thing is controlling the autonomic system. And so there's some great free things that we could be doing. You know, we don't have to go and buy all the gadgets. Everybody has the ability to hum. Humming for two to three minutes a day can pull the body out of fight, flight, or freeze. EFT or tapping, the emotional freedom technique, is another really great and free resource that we can all do. Again, helps kind of pull the body out of that panic mode that we get in, that scarcity, ⁓ my gosh mode. So those are really simple ones. Breath work, you cannot minimize breath work. There's so many different breathing techniques to... ⁓ You know, some are to calm the nervous system and some are ⁓ to activate this. ⁓ Another easy one is just rebounding, right? I love rebounding. research shows that just a couple of bounces a day on a mini trampoline doesn't have to be anything, you know, super, super expensive. It is enough to open up your body's lymphatic channels. So yeah, let's do some really simple things so that your body can calm down. So the first thing, prioritize sleep. I care. How aggressive you need to be. I don't care if you're the bad person because you're like, hey everybody, I got to tap out, it's eight o'clock, I got to be asleep by nine, right? Like you have one life to live and if you're not sleeping well, you're not going to have a long life to live. It's that simple. So sleep is the priority. And then, you know, I follow that sleep thing up, like I said, right away with how many mornings do you wake up with dream recall? Because if it's not the majority, then you're not getting quality sleep. Dream recall is important. It tells me how deep. your body got into restoration mode. then I tell all of my kiddos and my teenagers, which happens to be one of my favorite populations, if your thighs hit the toilet seat, for the girls especially, then you're humming. That way I know you're humming at least two minutes a day, right? You don't have to go and do all the tapping where people might look at you. Hum doesn't have to be loud, but ⁓ time you're sitting on the toilet, you're humming. ⁓ gonna see changes quick. And what is the thing to deal with humming? us why that's so important. Yeah, yeah, so humming has been shown to help the body pull out of autonomic dysfunction. And, it's that autonomic dysfunction that we get stuck in that creates all that reactive oxidative stress to the body that then goes and targets our organs and our tissues and our joints and the brain. And so we've got to break the cycle, right, of creating ⁓ reactive stress. so humming is a simple way to do it. Tapping is a simple way to do it, you know. Sleep is the preferred way to do it. Sleep is, as a perimenopausal 47 year old woman, I've always been priory to sleep because I've had to. I'm just, with this disease, I can't, I have to sleep. If I have to go to bed at 7.30, it's good night guys, get yourself to bed, I'm done. But lately, it's been, I don't have any trouble falling asleep, it's the staying there that's the problem, yeah. But yeah, I... Yep, I'm out. maintaining. Yeah. And that tells me that your hormones need to be fixed, right? You know, that's a simple one. So yeah. I know. Yeah. I thought, Well, it doesn't feel simple. None of it, you know, and that's part of my problem is that I'm so sick and like, I'm so sick of my health. I'm so sick of it. Yeah, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, right? I'm sick and tired of it being like a thing every single day. I know this is like doctor's appointments and insurance companies and know, blood works and this and that and this and now I get to go find a whole nother group of people to help me. That's where it's just, it becomes a lot. ⁓ since I've been in Charleston, I have not had any more holistic treatments. ⁓ I really found anyone. I know that there's some out there, but Here we are. I know, there's a reason for everything in this world. So, I'm super excited. I was looking at your website earlier. You want to tell us where people can find you if they're in the Charleston area? Yep. So Lowcountry Wellness Center, we are located in West Ashley, right on Sam Rittenberg. You can find us online at lowcountry-wellness.com. And if you wanted to schedule a first appointment, how far out are you booking? This is questions people always ask. I think my staff told me this morning we're only a couple weeks out. Okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. And you're in West Ashley, awesome. All right. message you'd like to share with someone who's newly diagnosed with anything or struggling to get there to the diagnosis that we, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, find your people, right? Find your people. Find a support system. You know, I used to offer a autoimmune support group open to the community. I ran it in my office and I think the most I ever had was two people show up. And I was like, I know there's more than three of us that have autoimmune in Charleston. you know, so find your community. You're not alone and you're not crazy. You're not crazy. I promise you, you're not crazy. It's you're not just sick in your head. They're just missing what's on paper. Mm-hmm. ⁓ and so, you know, hum, tap, whatever sleep, right. But find your people. I agree. Finding your people is, and don't find your people online because they're very negative group of people involved in all of these autoimmune disease groups. And they can't help it. They're there because they're desperate. They're in a flare. They're wherever they are. But those are not the people you need right now. The people you need right now are neighbors and friends who quietly suffer too that are there for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah. Yes. They're desperate. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, exactly. And that can connect you, right? You can say, oh, hey, know, Susie, you know, my friend Kim is going through the same thing. Let me connect you and Kim, right? And then you get to talk to Kim and maybe Kim says, oh my gosh, here's what's worked for me, or here's who has been able to help me or, you know, whatever that looks like. And now you start to build that system. Mm-hmm. Right. And don't put yourself last, moms. You have to put yourself first. No, you're, this is like the airplane. tell all of my patients, right? What is the first thing that, you know, that safety talk on the airplane says, put your oxygen mask on first. And this is no different because if you're not taking care of you, you can't take care of anybody else. And now you become a patient. You become the one that everybody needs to take care of. And we're moms. We're not good with that. You know, I'm tell you that firsthand in the last, you know, six weeks and not being able to take care of myself. I'm like, first. You can't. No, we're not. But you can't... It's terrible. You can't pour for an empty cup, as they say. So we need to prioritize ourselves and don't know. Finding community is always helpful and I hope this helps bring people closer together. I'd love to chat with you again. This has been amazing. ⁓ Exactly correct. Yeah, so Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time