207-SYNCPodcast_AlyssaBroadwater

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today I’m sharing with you a small excerpt from one of the videos that I recorded alongside Alyssa Broadwater for my upcoming functional fertility course. This course is launching on January 15th of 2024. So here in just a few weeks, and I wanted to give you just a little glimpse into how awesome this course really is.

[00:01:19] Jenny Swisher: Alyssa and I filmed hours upon hours of content for you. Some of it we filmed together, some of it separately, all on the topic of lifestyle factors for fertility. Now, this course will address men and women. It’ll be looking at proper testing for both men and women. It’ll be looking at a functional versus modern medicine approach to fertility.

[00:01:37] Jenny Swisher: It is everything that I wish I had had in my twenties when my husband and I were on our own emotional infertility journey. So if you know of anybody looking to conceive. Or if it’s in your future or you have a family member or friend that you think this could pertain to I would love For you to share this out with them Let them know to get on the email list for the functional fertility course so that they can hear all about it when it’s ready to launch But again, this is the information that I feel so many women and couples need when they’re looking to conceive and start a family So what I wanted to do is just take a small clip out of one of the videos that we did together On this particular video, we actually covered the differences between a functional fertility journey versus how modern medicine treats infertility.

[00:02:18] Jenny Swisher: So I hope you’ll take a listen. Again, share this out with all of your friends and family and without further ado, let’s dive in.

[00:02:25] Okay, my friends, this is perhaps my most favorite topic to talk about. I talk about it every day until I’m blue in the face. And that is, what are the differences between a functional medicine approach versus a traditional medicine approach? And I find myself talking about this often to women because I think a lot of us, you know, we, we count on our OBGYNs and our primary care practitioners to, to really understand how to help us.

[00:02:47] And they do help us. And I definitely don’t want to, you know, spread any shame toward modern medicine. I definitely think there’s a place for it. Um, but at the same time, in my experience, I’ve experienced where a lot of things kind of get covered up, right, like, oh, well, everything’s normal. It’s just part of aging or we’ll send you on to the specialist or XYZ, right, as opposed to someone really wanting to dig deeper into root cause.

[00:03:10] Root cause approach is essentially a functional medicine approach. And so what we want to do is we want to say, why is the check engine light flashing, right? Like, why are things not working the way they should? And we want to open the hood and we want to get underneath the hood and we want to see what’s happening.

[00:03:25] In my experience, traditional medicine tends to want to just try to maybe top off the gas tank or clean the windshield wipers or kind of give you a, a, um, a remedy for the symptom itself, as opposed to really figuring out the true problem. My story is that I saw every possible specialist for migraine.

[00:03:44] I saw every possible specialist for infertility. And it wasn’t until I started embracing the functional approach and doing the root cause testing and things like that that I really started to get answers. So let’s just kick this off, generally speaking, Alyssa, with just describing to our listeners here, um, what is the difference that you see, the biggest differences between a functional wellness approach when it comes to fertility, as opposed to maybe a more modern medicine approach.

[00:04:12] What’s exactly like you just described. So the functional medicine is looking at the root cause. The conventional medicine is typically more of like a bandaid solution and maybe it doesn’t do things proactively. Um, so especially for fertility preconception, if we can do things proactively, that is where the magic is.

[00:04:30] Um, I mean, I had this experience with my. OBGYN, like I kind of knew that what the answer would be, but I still said, you know, okay, my husband and I are thinking about starting a family soon. What should we do kind of thing? And I got the typical answer, which is, well, you know, once you’re ready, come off birth control and start, if you’re lucky, your, your OBGYN is going to say, start taking a prenatal.

[00:04:55] And then that’s basically it. What’s missing in that conversation is. The, the, the proactiveness and the looking at the root cause. So, um, my approach, for example, before someone even starts trying to conceive it’s, can we take at least three months to really maximize health of both partners, and that’s going to do a couple of things.

[00:05:21] One, um, it’s going to lessen the burden of the fertility journey. You know, if you are putting in. This work before you even start trying to conceive, it’s going to make conceiving easier. It’s going to decrease your risk of miscarriage, and it’s going to put all of these practices into place that you’re going to want to continue on during pregnancy anyway.

[00:05:45] A good fertility diet is a good pregnancy diet is a good postpartum diet. Yes, there are some differences that are important there, but the general concept is true. Um, So when we can think about really that concept of like preparing our bodies, it just lets everything else go so much better, you know, we, we do a whole module on stress.

[00:06:07] And this is a big piece of it. You know, if you are able to work proactively and say, okay, I’m going to give our bodies three months of just really good air and then start trying instead of a week. Yeah. Not paying attention to it a whole lot, just start trying when you, when you want to, and then you get a few months in and say, gosh, this isn’t happening for us.

[00:06:32] Um, you know, I thought getting pregnant was going to be easier. And then you kind of have to go to the drawing board and said, we’re being proactive about it of there’s only benefits to preparing ahead of time. Um, so I think that’s especially for fertility. That’s the. Probably the biggest difference is we’re the functional medicine approach is one looking at root cause if and when there is issues and two taking that more proactive approach that preventative approach.

[00:07:00] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned in sharing my story, right, that every neurologist I saw wanted to do every possible brain scan, right? Oh, your brain MRI is normal. Your, your CT is normal or your, you know, basic lab panel is normal. And you get to this point where you’re like, well, I don’t feel normal.

[00:07:17] Like. Something’s not right, right? For me, it was an actual pain signal. When it comes to fertility, there’s, there’s not always pain, right? Like physical pain. Can be, but I mean, and a lot of times it’s, it’s unexplained and you’re trying to figure out like, well, what is, what is really going on? Is this my issue?

[00:07:32] Is this his issue? Is this both of our issues? Is this, you know, what’s, what’s going on? And so, um, I look back now and to share a little bit more story in detail, uh, for me, when my husband and I, when we first started out, I remember bringing this to my OBGYN’s attention first. So we got married at a really young age, right out of college, we were high school sweethearts.

[00:07:52] And I remember asking my OBGYN when I came off of the birth control pill, I told her that we were open to conceiving at any time. Like, if it happened, obviously that’s, that’s why I came off the pill. Um, also for reasons explained before, I felt like I was going crazy on the pill. But, she was very aware that that was something that we were interested in.

[00:08:11] Fast forward five years and go in for my annual exams, and I bring up to her, I’m like, you know, I don’t really know what’s going on, but like, we’ve never, we’ve never been using any form of birth control and nothing’s happening. Is this something that I should be concerned about? And at that point, I was probably around 27 years old.

[00:08:27] We were finally starting to make some progress on the functional approach to my headaches. And I said, I think I’m maybe entering a place where I could look and now that I’m not in pain every day, I think I can like start to look into this now that I’m in my late twenties. And she said, well, there’s really no reason, you know, to, to be concerned.

[00:08:45] Um, she said we can do like a basic blood panel, make sure everything’s, you know, in normal ranges, whatever. And that’s really all we did. Right. So it wasn’t until probably the third time that I had to push and say, you know, look, I just don’t want to get to like 35 and then be like, oh shoot, we didn’t do anything.

[00:09:02] And so at that point, she sent us to a fertility specialist. Um, so it, it took a lot of sort of coaxing and asking on, on my behalf. So she sent us to a fertility, uh, doctor saying something to me like, you know, there’s probably nothing really going on, but if you want to check all the boxes and go see this, this doctor, that’d be great.

[00:09:20] So we schedule an appointment and within the first appointment at this fertility doctor, I would call him like a modern fertility specialist, IVF type of guy. He said to me, he was like, well, I’m looking at your intake form, and I’m noticing that you reported taking so much Advil on your, on your period every month.

[00:09:38] This is something that my OBGYN also knew. And I said, yeah, yeah, I really, I really have to kind of push through, like, the first couple days of my period. Um, and he was like, well, this is a lot of Advil. Like, this is not normal menstrual cramp Advil dosage. And I said, oh, well, I just have always been this way.

[00:09:54] I thought that was How I should feel, you know, and he was like, no, this, this is usually indicative of something like an endometriosis. If we have this much pain, so that was the first I was introduced to this idea that maybe there was something going on, um, that, that wasn’t normal. Right. And here I’d been seeing an OBGYN.

[00:10:11] She knew about my painful period. She knew what was going on. But I think to her, I was having regular 28 day cycles. My PAPs were all clear. Everything in that regard was all normal. And so anyways, long story short, he, we did a pelvic ultrasound. We started looking to see if, if I was ovulating on my own.

[00:10:27] We didn’t, we didn’t pick up on any ovulation on my own. Um, and then I had a laparoscopic surgery for the endometriosis, where they removed some lesions and different endo. Now, all of this happened, and there’s a reason for this story share, I promise. All of this was happening. Oh, and this takes months, by the way, right?

[00:10:45] So months of this, like they check your ovulation for months. They check, they do these things, they, your surgery gets scheduled. Next thing you know, it’s Christmas, right? Like all these things are happening. It takes time. And, uh, after I had the endometriosis surgery, they said, okay, we’re going to start you on these Ovidril injections.

[00:11:02] Uh, to see if we can get you to ovulate, right? And it did. It produced multiple follicles for me. It’s the step before you do IVF, right? It’s, it’s just, let’s try to see if we can help you along with the ovulation and the conception on your own. No one to this point ever talked to us about lifestyle. No one ever talked to us about nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management.

[00:11:24] All these different things we’re talking about. No one addressed it. And so that, number one, is the biggest difference between a traditional medicine approach versus a functional approach. Traditional medicine approach, in my opinion, is where the doctor is going to intervene with science. Right? Let’s intervene with science and get you the answer you’re looking for.

[00:11:43] Where functional approach is going to say, let’s see what’s going on and why it’s not working. So, fast forward to, you know, they, they give us the green light, they’re like, okay, we’re going to use these injections, we want you to, you know, have sex at this time of day and tomorrow at this time of day, and they give you all those parameters, which nothing says, wow, I’m so excited to have sex, quite like, timed sex.

[00:12:04] So, um, anyways, I digress. So we went through all that, and nothing was happening. So we go back, and we, we follow up again with this doctor. At this point, it’s been over a year. And the fertility doctor says, you know, I really think our next step here should probably be to have your husband checked out. No one at this point had ever suggested that his sperm be checked or anything, his, his genitalia, nothing, nothing had been suggested.

[00:12:31] So we then get referred to a urologist who specialized in, specializes in fertility. We get sent to him. That’s a series of appointments, right, where they do the sperm analysis, they meet with him, all these things. we learned that he has low motility, low sperm count. Um, we noticed, we learned that he has varicoceles and he also needs surgery.

[00:12:49] So he goes through that surgery. We all come out of this 18 months later, we sit down again with the specialist and the specialist says, based on both issues, right? The endometriosis, the ovulation. The, the issues with my husband, you get the chances of you conceiving on your own is less than 10%. And they said, if you’d like to, we can talk to you about IVF.

[00:13:11] We can go down that road. But at this point, honestly, 18 months in, we were at this point personally, where we were just done. Like I was. I was a migraine sufferer and I knew that going on hormones for the IVF could potentially put me back into that spiral. And so for us, it was just, it was an easy decision.

[00:13:28] We went on to adopt both of my girls, very happy with our choices. Um, but it was a journey. And I share this because through that entire process, no one did functional testing. No one suggested lifestyle. No one checked my husband until a year in and after I had had surgeries. These are all things that I want you guys to not do.

[00:13:51] This is the purpose of this course, because if someone had said to me at 27, when they were doing all this workup for my headaches, right. When I was getting the functional testing for that, turns out it’s all connected. The trigger for my migraines was low progesterone, right? My body didn’t know how to produce progesterone.

[00:14:08] I think because I spent years on the pill and using bioidentical progesterone changed my life when it came to my headaches and my pain. And guess what? I don’t think I ever ovulated in my twenties, but I started supplementing with progesterone in my twenties. They corrected my headaches. And now at the age of 39, I have a 28 day menstrual cycle.

[00:14:28] I ovulate on day 14 on the full moon. And actually at the time of this recording today is a full moon. So I’m ovulating today. It’s clockwork and my cycles now operate beautifully. And had I known that at 29 versus 39, it would have changed the game. So that’s the purpose here. And I realized it was a total tangent, but.

[00:14:47] There’s no better way to describe the difference between a functional journey versus a traditional journey than that story, right? And if you see a functional doctor or you’re working with someone like Alyssa, it can really be game changing for you. Because yes, it’s going to maybe cost you a little bit more money to do the testing itself, you know, but trust me, a fertility journey can be expensive through traditional medicine as well.

[00:15:08] So anyway, I hope that that just goes to share. the differences. And I hope that you guys, as we start talking here about testing and what’s, what’s necessary to look at, I hope that you’ll take notes. I hope you’ll take this to your doctor. And by the way, if you take it to your doctor and your doctor rolls their eyes or says, I don’t think this is necessary.

[00:15:26] That’s my sign to you. That’s me waving a flag that it’s the wrong doctor. You need someone new, right? You need someone who says, yes, this is brilliant. We should absolutely do this. So I find myself saying that often to women, right? Wrong doctor, move on, wrong doctor, move on. So, okay. So let’s talk about.

[00:15:41] Testing. Um, where do you start with testing? And let’s talk both male and female. Well, first of all, because it ties so tightly into your story and so many other people’s experiences, we can learn so much by just symptoms alone, you know, uh, understanding for maybe your, your example, when are migraines happening, you know, in relation to your menstrual cycle.

[00:16:07] Um, all of that type of stuff. I mean we can learn so much through symptoms and that’s one of the reasons why Doing like cycle tracking kind of that, you know fertility awareness piece is so helpful because there are so many You know zero or low cost ways to get To get a ton of this information Because you’re right, with this, especially with the functional testing, it can get expensive.

[00:16:32] But, you know, it’s a heck of a lot less expensive than spending tens of thousands of dollars of IVF if you don’t have to. Um, so that’s like, first, number one, make sure if you’re working with a practitioner, they’re starting a time with just off of symptoms. Like, how are you feeling? When, when in your menstrual cycle are you experiencing certain symptoms?

[00:16:55] Um, you can tell a lot just by that alone

[00:16:58] other people say, let’s play more by the symptoms. What is your feeling on that? I’m a huge fan of it. So, um, that’s kind of on my list of like, like nutritional more related, but it really is kind of hormone related too. I’m a huge fan of it. I think where we go wrong is we don’t get in depth enough. And that’s again, like conventional versus functional, right?

[00:17:16] They say, well, I told my, I, I asked my doctor for testing and I did all the lab work and everything’s normal. And in my mind, I’m like, I guarantee you didn’t do it all. And I guarantee it’s not optimal, you know? And that’s a really good point too. Like always, always, always ask for the actual results. Do not just take your doctor’s word for it, that everything is normal.

[00:17:37] They tested what you asked for. Oftentimes you can say, I want these specific tests. They say, okay. And then they don’t test those. So make sure you’re always asking for the results. And then if you’re not doctor, if your doctor is not giving you. What you think is comprehensive answers that you can take those results to another provider and say, what do you think about these?

[00:17:58] That’s actually another kind of good point difference between conventional versus functional, um, is how we look at the results when you get your results and you have that quote unquote normal range. That is. It’s easiest to think about those normal ranges as disease free. We’re not interested in just being disease free.

[00:18:20] We’re interested in being optimal. So the functional medicine ranges of what we’re looking for is typically much tighter than what you’re going to see on like your typical lab work. So even though something says normal, it does not mean it’s optimal. It does not mean there’s not room for improvement there.

[00:18:38] Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I always say, you know, normal is not optimal. And when it comes to normal ranges, you know, if you ever take the time to look on that sidebar to see what the normal ranges are, you’ll notice that it’s usually a spectrum of like five to 500. And you’re like, well, wait a minute.

[00:18:53] That’s a pretty broad range. Where should I be? Right. Whereas functional medicine will say, we want you between 200 and 250, right. Just as an example. Um, so I always like to say, you know, for, for, for a doctor to glance at things and there’s nothing alarming, right. There’s nothing. Like you said, disease.

[00:19:10] doesn’t mean everything’s working the way it should. So this is again why I advocate a functional functional approach.

[00:19:17] Interesting. Isn’t it? That it takes two people to do. Yeah, that’s, that’s amazing. And so again, we’re going to make this simple for you. We went through the description here, but we’re going to also have a downloadable file for you that you can take into your doctor and ask for these tests, your spouse or significant other can do the same thing.

[00:19:35] Um, and if the doctor rolls their eyes at you and they say. I don’t know about this, then maybe it’s time to find someone different or look for a functional doctor.

[00:19:43]

[00:19:43] I’m telling you, my friends, there is so much more goodness where this came from. This is just one 20 minute glimpse into the awesomeness that is the functional fertility course. So like I said, we’re launching this course January 15th of 2024. We will make sure to include in the show notes for you a link to join the email list if you’d like further information about the course launch.

[00:20:04] But again, I’m so grateful that you take time out of your day each week to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to leave a review. This is truly the information that I wish I had had along my journey, right? They always say that you’re most qualified to serve the person you once were. And this fertility course is just another way for me to do that.

[00:20:21] It’s another way for me to share what I wish I had known when my husband and I were facing these challenges ourselves. So thank you as always my friends for tuning in until next time. We’ll talk soon. Bye bye.