Finding the Right Functional Medicine Practitioner

Jenny Swisher 0:05
Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist hormone health expert and girl mom. I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best and this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!

This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com. That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

Welcome friends to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Today we are talking all about how to find the right functional medicine doctor for you. This is something that if you’ve listened to Episode 1 of this podcast with My Story, you know that I have quite a story when it comes to working with various doctors as it pertained to my migraines 16 years ago, I started experiencing chronic migraine. And really went through the gamut of working with multiple types of doctors over the course of I don’t know, 5 – 6 years, I worked with different neurologists, spinal specialists, actual migraine specialists, headache doctors, I worked with general practitioners, OBGYN’s, you name it, I tried it. And I kept running into the same issue where I was being given prescriptions to treat my symptoms, but I was not being looked at as a whole person. And I was not being tested in ways of looking for root cause. I kept feeling like I was putting all my eggs in one basket, I kept finding myself in doctors offices, waiting for a doctor to know what was wrong with me waiting to you know, for a doctor to be the one that diagnosed me with the right thing and to feel like I finally had answers. And I just kept finding myself in different doctors offices with no answers. I finally got fed up with it. I mean, I’m a very type A personality, and I really value return on investment. And so I really didn’t like spending time meeting with doctors that looked at me like some sort of unique case I always you guys might remember the the show from several years ago called House, I used to love that show. It was all about the doctor who would kind of figure out what was wrong with somebody like maybe they had mold growing in their house, or maybe they had some sort of parasite or something like there was always something that only this doctor could figure out, right. And so I kept finding myself in this position of waiting for my doctor house like waiting for the person who was going to figure me out. Because I was in pain. I was living in a state of chronic pain. And anyone who has dealt with that, in any capacity knows that it is no way to live. It was affecting my emotional well being it was affecting my relationships. And of course, I was gaining weight. I was just continuing to get unhealthier simply because I wasn’t making progress in finding answers. And so I’ll never forget the day that I was on a walk with my dear friend Jen. She’s also been interviewed on the podcast. She’s also my yoga instructor and my sense of calm. Anytime I’m feeling really high anxiety, she always tends to know just what to say. And I was walking with her through the woods, we were hiking, and I had my little painkiller in my pocket that I was taking to just get through the days with the migraine. And I said to her, Jen, I’m at a breaking point. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep going to different doctors, I can’t keep living like this, I’m miserable. And she looked at me and said, I want you to try one more route. And I was like, I can’t like please don’t send me out of state. Don’t send me to some, you know, witch doctor, like, I don’t know, I’ve done I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all. I’m not willing to try something new at this point. And she said, No, you haven’t tried everything. I think you should look into someone who has a very functional approach. And that was the first time that I ever heard that phrase. I didn’t know what functional medicine meant. I didn’t know what she was even talking about. But at that point, I was so desperate for answers and for relief, ultimately, that I was like, Okay, who is it? What is it tell me what to do. And so she told me about this doctor that she had started seeing that was here local to us in the Midwest. And this particular doctor was a MD a family physician who specialized in functional medicine. So she likes to look at treating the root cause of what’s happening in a person doesn’t mean that she’s opposed to modern medicine or to pharmaceuticals in cases of need, but she tries to get to the root cause and to supplement patients accordingly as a first route of attack. So I thought, Okay, what’s it gonna hurt?

I’ll I’ll go. So I set up an appointment with her. And in the very first appointment, she sent me in for some lab work. Initially, it was just some blood work. And when that blood work came back, I thought to myself, I’ve had all this done before I’ve had brain MRIs at that point I had had four neck surgeries. I had had Botox for migraine. I had done everything and I thought, What is she going to find that no one else has found, right? Well, it turns out she did testing that was different than anyone had done so far. And we sat down in her office at my second appointment, where she said to me, I think I think I might know what’s going on. I think there is a pretty large hormone imbalance happening. We had a conversation about my years on birth control, she started teaching me about my menstrual cycle, she started teaching me about what could potentially be causing these headaches, what she thought my trigger might be as related to hormones. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt like someone was finally getting to the root of what was happening for me. And she wasn’t just go, you know, trying to prescribe something for me to get through the pain or she wasn’t trying to just treat the symptoms, she was really digging deeper. And so I will never forget, she told me in that second appointment. She wanted me to go cold turkey off of all of my pharmaceuticals. At that point, I was taking anti seizure medications that were supposed to be preventing migraine, even though they weren’t working. I was taking like a really high dose blood pressure medication to also help offset the migraine pain. I mean, you name it, girl, I tried it. And she said, I want you to go off of all of that effective immediately. And we’re going to put you on some BioIdentical Hormone Replacement Therapy comes in the form of a cream that is derived from yam root, you’re just going to rub it on your wrist every night before you go to bed. And you’re going to take these vitamins. And I thought to myself, like Okay, now we’ve entered the next level of crazy, like, there’s no way that I’m going to come off of these medications and go on to this Frou Frou stuff or so I thought and see results and see, you know a difference. But sure enough, I stuck with it. And thankfully my friend Jen, who was also on a similar regimen at the time, she said Hang with it. She said keep doing it, don’t give it up, stay consistent with it for three to four months, and see if it works. So thankfully, I had her in my corner for support and accountability. And I continued the cream, I continued to the Nutritionals I continued the supplements. And I did stop those pharmaceuticals under the direction of my doctor. And within three menstrual cycles, I started to feel so much better. I went from having 28 to 30 days a month of migraine literally all the time, like I would wake up in the middle of the night with a headache, I would wake up in the morning with a headache like it was non stop by using these holistic methods. And as bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, I started to go down to about two to three total days a month of migraine pain. They were always around my menstrual cycle. And so I started to realize like, oh, my gosh, maybe this really was hormonal from the start. But my OBGYN didn’t do the right testing. The general practitioner didn’t know what to look for. And the neurologist ruled out brain injury and brain health as being a culprit. And so I just never got the right direction. I never had anybody look at my hormone systems, and I never had anybody look at me as a whole person. So it made sense to me, because I remember thinking at that time, like why are they only looking at my brain? Or why are they only looking at certain markers? You know, everything in my body is obviously connected. So why are we not looking at what connects the body which is your endocrine system and your hormones. So it started to the pieces just started to fall into place, I started to feel better. And I really became an advocate for this concept of root cause medicine. Over the course of time, of course, the last 16 years has been a journey for me and thankfully, my functional medicine doctor has been the most amazing game changing person in my life when it comes to my health. I don’t know where I would be if I had stayed on the path that I was on 16 years ago and it makes me emotional because I think there are a lot of people in my position or at least the position I was in, you know 16 years ago where you feel like you’re constantly in waiting rooms looking for answers looking for your doctor house looking for someone to understand what’s going on with you. And the reality of it is that a lot of modern medicine you know, doctors are trained in symptomatic care they’re treated in how to give you medications to alleviate your symptoms. As opposed to getting to the bottom of what’s happening for you, and functional medicine, I think is it’s on the rise. I don’t have the statistics in front of me. But I do know that it is incredibly on the rise in the last five to 10 years. And it makes sense because people are no longer willing to settle for a drug to treat their problem. And they’re, they’re more open to going about this journey of self discovery and understanding what their body is doing and how it’s designed to feel. So if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, she’s speaking to me, I’m sick of looking for answers in all the wrong places and getting no no direction, it’s time for you to consider working with a functional medicine doctor. So the first thing that I want to do today on the podcast is just talk about the difference between functional medicine and integrative medicine, because that’s a common question that I get, and also teach you how to go about finding the right type of practitioner for you.

Functional Medicine focuses on creating individualized therapies that are tailored to treat underlying causes of illness. So again, it comes back to this idea of root cause medicine. Whereas integrative medicine seeks to understand the individual as a whole, and applies many forms of therapy to improve your overall wellness. So I like to think of it as sort of like, you know, proactive care, as opposed to reactive care, which is a lot of what we see with prescribed drugs. So I’m a huge fan of both approaches. A lot of times doctors who are functional medicine, doctors are also considered integrative medicine doctors, otherwise, sometimes you’ll find where they differentiate themselves depending on what they’re into. So those are questions that you can ask when it comes time for you to interview a doctor. But when it comes to finding the right one for you, that’s a whole journey in itself. So I usually like to tell people, if you’re not receiving any word of mouth referrals from friends who are seeing functional medicine doctors, which is always where I like to start, you know, word of mouth is powerful, because you can trust, right, your friends who are having good results with their functional medicine doctors. But if you don’t have that, or if you’re in a sort of a rural area where you’re not sure where to find someone like this, you can go to ifm.org. That’s I, f is in Frank M as in mary.org, Institute of functional medicine. And you can search by zip code to see where there might be licensed functional medicine doctors in your area. Now, I will tell you, I’ll give you a little disclaimer that just because someone pops up in that search field, as a functional medicine doctor does not necessarily mean that that’s going to be the right doctor for you. So sometimes this journey of finding the right functional medicine doctor, is a journey in itself. And so I know what you’re probably thinking, and that is, well, how much is this going to cost me? And what does this look like from a visit perspective? Well, I will tell you that every doctor is different. There are some doctors who are kind of a mix between, you know, traditional MD, mixed with some functional approaches. Those are great. That’s what I’m working with. Currently, that’s my primary care option. And it’s been great to have sort of both worlds collide. Sometimes doctors are covered on insurance, sometimes they are not. So definitely wanting to make sure that you when you reach out to these places, and these doctors that you’re asking what the upfront costs are, what the cost of testing would be, what the per appointment cost would be. All of that information is good information to have up front. But I find that a lot of women are deterred, because they think it’s going to be a struggle, or they think it’s going to be expensive to work with a functional medicine doctor. And I am here to tell you that by getting to the root cause of what’s going on for you, you are saving money for yourself in the long run. So could you potentially spend $150 or so on an appointment with a functional medicine doctor? Sure, you could also spend quite a bit in testing. But what’s better right to go with a doctor who is covered on your insurance but doesn’t give you answers. And then you’re spending a lot of money on pharmaceuticals and you’re feeling bad all the time. Or deciding that it’s worth it to have proactive care and to have somebody look at the root cause and to pay for the testing and to get answers so that you can get back to living your quality of life. So don’t let the cost deter you. I work with two different practitioners. One, like I said, my primary is kind of a mix between modern medicine and functional wellness. And then I also have a dedicated functional medicine doctor that’s sort of my second opinion person that I work with for my bio identical hormone therapy. And they’re considered to be a functional and integrative practice. So all eight doctors that are in the practice all work together. And it’s really been great because I think it’s very affordable. They have their own testing lab. And between my first two appointments and my testing, I spent well under $500, which I felt like was really well worth it for the quality of care that I received. So it just depends you’ll have to ask those questions when you are investigating doctors and when you’re making your phone calls. But I still think that it is so worth it in the long run to to work with a functional medicine practitioner.

So, but let’s talk a little bit more in detail about once you do start to get to that point where you’re ready for your appointment. How do you know that that the functional medicine doctor that you’re about to meet with is the right one for you, and that they have knowledge as it pertains to hormone imbalance and hormone testing. So the first thing that I would say is, if you’re working with a doctor of any kind, who tells you that blood work is accurate, or that blood work is enough to rule out any major causes, you’re most likely working with the wrong practitioner. So I’ve said this before. And it’s worth saying, again, that bloodwork is a really inaccurate way of looking at your sex hormones. It’s great for a baseline for like your thyroid, it’s great for a baseline for even just like your your blood sugar, obviously, like looking at your fasting blood sugar and your insulin. But when it comes to your sex hormones, when it comes to this progesterone, estrogen, testosterone and the ratios between those, when it comes to even your cortisol, we want to make sure that we’re looking at both urine and saliva testing, to get the most accurate look at what your hormones are doing. Think about it. If you go in and have a blood draw, you’re really only getting a glimpse of what your body is doing on that particular day at that particular time. If we’re able to do something like a 28 day cycle map, which is something that I advocate for which a lot of functional doctors get behind, we can actually pee or urinate on a little strip of paper, you know, every so often for 28 days, mail those in. And what you get back is a graph that shows you this is what your hormone levels were doing over the course of your entire cycle. So this is where it was deficient. This is where it was too high. This is what’s happening, we get we get a better picture and a more accurate look at your hormones that way. So I guess what I’m getting at is when you meet with that practitioner, if you have someone that’s telling you and you’ve maybe this is even your OBGYN, or your GP currently you ask them for this testing, and they say, Okay, we’ll just call in a basic metabolic panel, we’ll add your sex hormones on there to test. Let’s say you have that done and they say, oh, everything looks normal, everything’s good. I would really push back on that. And I would say, Okay, well, can you tell me like are my ratios? Okay? Can you tell me, you know, should I do more in depth testing when it comes to my urine or saliva. If you’re having a doctor that says, Oh, you’re fine, you’re just aging or you’re entering perimenopause, or everything’s fine, everything’s normal. If you feel off Sister, you have to stand up for yourself and advocate for yourself. So if that doctor is, is a brick wall for you, you’ve got to find someone new, even if it’s just for a second opinion. And functional medicine is the way to go. Functional doctors for the most part, not all of them, but most of them are on board with looking at accurate hormone testing through the urine and saliva. So that is by far, number one. The second thing to be paying attention to is whether or not your doctor is giving you guidance on when in your cycle to do that testing. So if I’ve had this happen before, where I will be sitting in my OB’s office, and I’ll mention that I want to get my bloodwork done. And she’ll say to me, okay, well, there’s a lab right down the hall, you can just pop in there on your way out, and I’ll put the order in for you to have your bloodwork drawn. And it was a red flag for me when that happened, because I thought, well, she doesn’t even know like, what day of my cycle I’m on is this even going to be an accurate day of my cycle to test these numbers. And that all matters. So for example, when you’re testing your progesterone, you want to make sure that you’re testing it about a week to 10 days before your bleed. So if you just finished bleeding, and you just finished your period, and you’re going in and your doctor says let’s check your levels, there’s a problem there because your body isn’t even producing progesterone in that part of your cycle. So having a doctor who understands the proper timing, not just the proper testing, but the proper timing of that testing, is also going to be important. So once again, you know, I think that there’s a place for all kinds of medicine in this world. You know, and I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. But I think that we have to go about finding people who not necessarily specialize but who have knowledge on root cause medicine who have knowledge on getting you the right testing, comprehensive testing, not just a basic metabolic panel, to really dig deeper and to see if there’s something happening with one of the legs of your four legged hormone chair. By the way, that’s another episode of the podcast like I can link to in the show notes. If you’ve not listened to it, it’ll help you connect the dots between what we’re talking about here on the show. So if you have any questions for me as it pertains to this, I’m always happy to answer I think that this is a topic that I’m extremely passionate about because I have seen the difference that it has made for me. I spent 1000s of dollars seeing neurologists and headache specialists and headache going to headache clinics and doing all the things trying to figure out what was going on for me seeking my doctor house. And I never could find them until I finally realized that I am my own best doctor. I know when my body feels off. And it’s up to me to find the right person that will stand alongside me and say, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and we’re going to figure out what’s going on.

So I hear you if you are a woman out there who’s struggling, if you feel like you’re going into your doctor’s appointments, and you feel like you don’t understand what’s going on with yourself, and you want to just learn more about how your body is designed to feel you want to learn more about what questions to ask, you want to learn more about what testing to request, what supplements to be looking at, like all of those types of things are things that I teach in my SYNC Digital Course, I work with dozens of clients on this very topic, and it is helping so many women and I know it can most certainly help you too. So finding a functional medicine doctor, finding someone who is in your corner who will help you get to the underlying cause of what’s making you feel off is totally worth the journey. And sometimes girl it can be a journey, but it is so so so worth it. I’m so glad that you spent time listening with me today. I can’t wait to talk to you guys again soon. I hope this has helped you in some capacity. If it has, please share it out to your social media. Tag me if you’d like leave a great review on Apple or any place that you’re listening to the podcast. I still appreciate it and we’ll talk soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them you can live your life with all the energy needs to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friend to those you love. Until next time!