Note: The text below is a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
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Today we’re going to do the first in our no BS series on chronic pain and today. The first presentation that we’re going to do is going to be on fibromyalgia and in today’s broadcast we’re going to be discussing why so many of you have felt dejected, seeing your doctors we’re going to discuss how a lot of doctors don’t even want to see Fibromyalgia patients.
We will also go into the underlying causes of fibromyalgia, including childhood trauma and emotional trauma. We will also discuss how small fiber peripheral neuropathy has recently been discovered as a cause of fibromyalgia, as well as going into how the gastrointestinal tract is highly important.
For most fibro patients, including gluten reactions – and we will finish up by discussing the thyroid, but before we get into all that, I think it’s important that most of you know that Dr. Rutherford is a fibromyalgia sufferer and I think it’d be good doc.
If you told the audience your story and how your fibromyalgia came to fruition some of the obstacles, you came up against and misconceptions as well as stigma associated with your journey. Okay. Well, this is where the no BS part kind of comes in.
You know there’s a we’re talking about now, cutting through all of that all of the things that dr. Gates just got done talking to and them I wouldn’t say I’m a big sufferer anymore, but I definitely was a sufferer at one point, so I mean in the End, I have fibromyalgia, peripheral, neuropathy, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis gut problems I specifically have celiac.
I would I had fatigue and yeah. I had all those things and, and so so as you’re going to find out dr. Gates, is going to expand on that quite a bit, because you’re going to find a lot of consistency among those as dr. gates just talked about fibromyalgia. For me, most people come in here think that fibromyalgia starts at time when you had the event and for me the event was, I was under a tremendous amount of stress going through a very stressful time and at the same time I got pneumonia and I got Pneumonia – and I was down for several weeks and then suddenly I started developing symptoms and the symptoms were tremendous fatigue.
I started putting on weight, I started to my hair started thinning out and I started losing my eyebrows and I started getting my bow problems which I already had had for. Most of my life at a very low level started getting really severe.
He started getting numb and some tingling might be eventually. I started getting like real sensitivity on my skin and it was kind of difficult because it was confusing for me because I’m waiting for me to come out of this pneumonia thing that was going on and on and on.
I was coming back to work. I couldn’t work like the I. In fact I would come to work for a half a day and then I’d realize I couldn’t be a whole day. I’D have to go home and that whole thing really was difficult.
I don’t think my wife had ever really seen me sick. I never really missed days of work, and so you know I think she had some question about. Maybe if I was losing my sanity or something like that, even though I wasn’t feeling well, even though I was putting on weight, I would say on a daily basis.
You know it’s. I can’t get out of bed, I’m so for family tired. My joints were starting to ache and, and I’d have to stretch and it’d. Take me literally sometimes a half an hour to get out of bed and get moving.
The point where I was able to come in and do my job, which was a very physical job. At that point in time and very energy draining, so I went to colleagues of mine, I’m here in Reno Nevada, we’re going to Val used to be the alternative mecca center of the of literally the United States back in in these times back in the 90s.
Because of the laws and what was allowed here, so I went to a number of my colleagues who were alternative medicine doctors. I went through it’s your thyroid here. Take some thyroid supplements. It’S your adrenals here.
Take some cortisol supplements. I went through take this for your gut. I went through you have heavy metals. I went through taking the mercury out of my mouth. I went through its chelation a lot of things, no real diagnosis.
It was just kind of like nobody even said. I had fibromyalgia at that point in time of this kind of life. You know. Well, you have these this sickness and we just have to keep doing this, and I have a little background in anatomy and biochemistry human anatomy.
Biochemistry before I got into doing musculoskeletal work and – and so I’m just thinking – you know – there’s no organized gameplan here and I’m these are good guys and they’re taking care of me, but this isn’t it so.
Ultimately, I I really had to kind of probe my own way, which we will. We don’t really need to get into that whole thing, but I did find some people who were able to help me but along the way, along the way.
You know I had people, you know like what’s wrong with you and and your personality has changed and you know you, you know, I think you need to go see like counseling or so I don’t ever tell me like psychiatrist or anything and and and people.
You know some people around me were kind of like you know, you just need to get up and you need to go to work and you need to do this and and – and I never said anything because I didn’t really know what was going on – and I’m Not one to go well, you know I’m not going to go to work so, and I and other than the fact that I started putting on weight, which sometimes I’m kind of a stocky guy, can can maybe be hidden a little bit.
You know I most of the fibromyalgia patients who come in here as myself, we’re in maybe maybe on a scale of 0 to 10, maybe they’re up 4 or 5 or 6 or maybe even a 7 or less. You don’t look sick. You know you wish.
You start getting to be like a 7 or more. You start. You start drooping down. Your hair starts getting really thin, but you don’t look sick and that’s really difficult. You don’t look sick people. Look at you! They’Re, like oh, you know you and you feel, like your whole.
Insides are falling up and people can’t touch you and there’s days you can’t put your pants and then there’s days you feel good and then you go whoa. I feel good. I’M going to go to work, I’m really going to bust it.
Then you know so I experienced all of this and ultimately I don’t know how far you want me to go with this, but but those are the things that really were the the highlights. There’S something more specific, I should, I think, that’s good, and I think it’s also important to note that you had epstein-barr when you run my goodness I when I was a kid so okay, so you want to go back that far cool, so so in the end, The most I sped sight the most people come in here.
They think it happens. They’Ll put down a date June of like four years ago and that’s usually when the trigger happened. For me it was an overwhelming infection and stress hormones. Okay, those were the big triggers and the stress hormones probably were not just the trigger, but they were part of the whole thing is you’ll find out which eventually led to thyroid dysfunction right.
So I eventually led to a gluten diagnosis right, silly act yeah, I didn’t know if you wanted me to go – and I think that’s important, because you’re good case studies so to speak for a lot of 500 miles or patients to look at man.
What is this? I said in the bullet points is we were talking about the the agenda of today’s talk. Fibromyalgia can be caused by many different factors can be caused by irritable, bowel syndrome. Two small fiber peripheral neuropathy, two autoimmunity to the thyroid.
All these are factors stress childhood trauma and use the fibromyalgia patient. You may have one of those four or five conditions I just mentioned. You may have all five you may have two or three, and so what we’re trying to do is bring it all together today for you to really understand your condition, what’s potentially causing it.
So you get more understanding because there’s so much unnecessary confusion about fibromyalgia out there, okay, so I get it so to take it back. I probably had this start when I was kid okay and I and I was born with a bad gut.
I actually had to have what’s called a pyloric stenosis have surgery of five weeks old. What we now know is, as you have surgery you, you probably end up having a leak lately guy, I grew up in a stress family.
My dad had post-traumatic stress syndrome from fighting in World War. Two we won’t get into my mom and my mom was pretty strict, so it was a lot of stress there and by the time I was in third or fourth grade.
I had severe gut problems and I even had a pass to go to the bathroom, because my gut was bad and I would have to have diarrhea and I’d go any involvement in things of that nature, and what we’re fighting today is.
If the kid has those types of problems and they don’t have pathological disease, they probably aren’t kind of a chronic stress cycle or they have autoimmunity. In the end, I pride both moms Italian, okay, I’m eating pond and pretty much a one income minimum wage family.
So there were financial challenges: there ate a lot of pasta, lots of pasta. My mother was the master pasta, bread, pizza every other Friday night. That was our going out to dinner and never realizing how much that was damaging me.
Eventually, I got a diagnosis of celiac. Okay, I look back and it was just it was almost comical at this point in time, but the point that dr. Gates is having me make – and I kind of alluded to it briefly – is that these things start way back there like dominoes.
That start back here and then they come forward and then they come forward. I think the paint the point that dr. Gates wants me to illuminate the most is I went through that I went through that went through high school.
We get stressed before I played sports before I go to play, sports I’d, be like then I’d be like having diarrhea and night and I’d be very nervous and then it at the age of 21, I believe or 20. I got Hep Steen bar virus, so I was overdoing it and, and I and I got epstein-barr virus and strep throat, and that was the first time I noticed a change in my physiology up to that point in time I was athletic.
I played sports. I was very active. I could eat everything and never put on an ounce of weight and – and at that point that changed so and the other thing is. I was sick for almost 12 to 14 months, which I now understand.
That usually means that I probably developed and that’s the enviros react reaction to nation, chronic infection, and so at you for mono you should be sick for four or five or six weeks I was. I could either cancel my entire year of sports.
I couldn’t play. I just start controlling my weight. I was putting on a little weight and I think this is silly and I’m glad dr. Gates brought me to this. I was putting on a little weight all sudden I put on like 15 pounds, I’m going to like all sudden.
I realized that my clothes are getting tight. I was like like whoa. What is this like? Okay, I’m 21. I must be getting old now. You know not realizing that something changed in my physiology. I also started to not have quite the energy that I had at that point in time, and so it was subtle.
Okay, it was like Earl. I I needed to sleep more. I needed to start kind of balancing out my life a little bit more. I need to start tasting, but it wasn’t anything. It’S not me from doing anything, and so I just looked at it as a natural evolution like which, in retrospect now I probably got an Epstein bar virus attack, probably get my thyroid change.
My thyroid you’ll probably talk about Hashimoto’s right and then it was a subtle for a number of years and whether you, I don’t know a major stress and it was subtle from the time I was 21 until I was 48.
I believe it was and 48 is. When the pneumonia and the stress response came together and boom, and the next thing you know it just blew up and that didn’t get chronic fatigue, then headpin – all of your body you’re later found to have neuropathy Tiger Gates, knows this, because when I first came here, I had to evaluate me and he’s looking at me like.
Do I tell this guy how really bad yeah? That’S it. So that’s why you know so clearly, what’s going on, but yeah in fact yeah I developed all of that. So then all those dominoes fell apart. So ninety ought to be good started back there buh-buh-buh-buh-buh and at this point I think it’d be good if we went to your office – and we talked about really the the underlying brain factors, as well as the physiology going into a little more depth so that the Fibromyalgia sufferer can really understand what’s going on with their condition, as these dominoes fall.
That’S great because I think when we say no b.s, I think I think it’ll come together a little bit as it is that we walk through how we, how we go through a fibromyalgia patients, history and then what dr.
Gates just said. You’Ll see how it all comes together and then dr. gates all be in then he’ll really be able to go with through with you. What fibromyalgia really is and kind of clean it up a lot of the BS.
That’S out there about that movement right, we’ll get into all the details, but now let’s go into your office and let’s talk about the physiology. Let’S do that: okay, okay! So now we’re in dr. records, consultation, room, dr.
reffered has done thousands of consultations with chronic pain patients and by seeing thousands of patients, he’s really had an ability to establish patterns that he sees with the fibromyalgia sufferers.
Now, though, I do treatment. This is your area, and so why don’t you kind of go through what a lot of fibromyalgia sufferers come in with to your office, okay and kind of the explanations that you give them as to why they’re suffering, okay, dr.
Gates, is right. I mean I’ve been interested in chronic pain since 1987, been interested in even more. I’Ve been in practice since 1980 been interested in even more since I got sick, so so yeah. So it’s given me the opportunity to just listen over and over and over again and as you hear these histories over and over again in the beginning, when I started doing this like, oh my god, how are you going to figure out fibromyalgia patient I mean they Got chronic fatigue, they got for a ferocity, they got 8 million different symptoms, or I mean, but in the end it’s interesting.
It comes down to a handful of major systems that started to pop out in these histories. So my job here is to do the evaluations. Initially determine does that patient have the type of of a condition that we can treat we’re talking about fibromyalgia today and in the end, does that patient kind of may be qualified? Do they have it I mean? Are they going to be able to respond to the types of therapies that we do? I can kind of pick a lot of that up in the history.
I can get a feel for where that pay embraces the concepts that we’re talking about we’re talking about. No BS today, that’s kind of my job is to come in here, cuts through the BS and see how the patient reacts and and see if they cling to old ideas, they’re going to sabotage what we’re doing okay.
So that’s what I do and in that vein, we’ve developed a very simple intake to to accomplish that. And it’s it’s amazing at how you look at the intake, and you can almost tell like at a glance as to what’s going on after you’ve done.
As you put thousands and thousands and thousands of intakes, so let me walk that through that with you and what a fibromyalgia patient looks like when they come in first, what they look like when they come in here.
This is usually a patient sitting in front of me, and you know a lot of them are kind of like little weary, they’re kind of like hey. You know: okay, here’s like the twenty seven person. I’Ve been to who’s going to tell me that it’s in my head or they’re going to cure me.
Okay, I will tell you right now: nobody’s going to cure you, because you’re going to have an autoimmune problem and our gates are going to illuminate on that later. But you can be like me frankly, when I feel like really good.
You can be like me, be like 95 % better. You can be functional, but have the tools necessary? You’Re gonna have to change your lifestyle and have the tools necessary to stay better, and so people are coming in here.
Trying to figure out like what’s going on. Is this gentleman though these doctors know and and and and Kenny or am ia candidate? You know serves little tension there and I’m trying to figure out. Okay, is this person have a problem that we can help with the types of things that we do? Are they a candidate? We do have people that we cannot help and I think you need to know that there are people we cannot help.
So that’s why we take so much care to screen you, because we understand what the BS is out there on fibromyalgia, we’ve cut through it and we can get to the point here and here’s the point history, as we just started with my case, usually does not Start three years ago, when you happen and when a person puts that down, I always have to gingerly kind of lead them back to the beginning, and the patient usually always gets ultimately, okay but think, but but but there’s usually a trigger date, usually as a trigger And the trigger is, it was July, 4, 1989 T 8 and, and it was July 4th weekend and and and you know there was some guy who was drinking too much and he hit me from behind or the or it’s usually like.
I had a baby that day or I had a surgery that day there are a number of triggers which dr. gates and I may discuss later on and and then the person has that perception that that’s the beginning. Okay, usually that person’s already a compromised host and in the way that we go through this, we have to bring them back and and and and ultimately we’re going to talk, probably prominently about emotional trauma childhood trauma.
Those types of things with dr. Gates is going to talk about later, so we kind of walk through that by looking at their history. First thing I look at is actually, and some of these things can seem silly to you, but they’re, not first thing.
I look at is the person’s height and weight if the person got fired, myalgia they’re, overweight, it’s going to tell me: maybe they got a bad gut. It’S going to tell me: maybe they got stress hormones can tell, but it’s really good timing.
Maybe they got a thyroid problem. I look through to see, if they’re divorced and when okay, because divorce can be a little stressful, I’m going through these things, because you’re going to hear that net code and dr.
Gates is very thorough presentation on what the main pieces of Friberg myalgia are, and so You know I look to see, are they doing well, did they just begin or they in it or they? Are they really like ready? Have they like been everywhere? Tried everything hit the wall done every diet, that’s out there.
I’Ve done every supplement. That’S out there have their teeth taken out going and taking, like you know, it’s the parasite since the candy, that’s the best patient, because all of that has already failed, and so that helps me to understand that.
Not only is that patient may be ready, but that they’re going to understand what I say because they’ve already been through all that. I will then look at their allergies. If people have a ton of allergies or if they have specific allergies, the gluten or weight that gives me a hint that they might have certain things like order, like foo sensitivity’s, maybe Otto immunity’s, I look at their drugs because I de lady come in here yesterday.
Sweet gal she’s in here she’s got all of these problems from fibromyalgia, but she has marks nothing down here, but she puts all of her drugs. Well, you can kind of tell what’s going on person from there drugs that have high blood pressure, that they have a bad gut, their supplement already taking probiotics.
Are they on vitamin D, if you’re on vitamin D and your vitamin D is in the toilet, guess what it’s probably cause? You have an autoimmune problems, probably not because you have been out in the Sun enough, okay, so these are things you can really really tell by listening to the person’s history, and you can start to create an idea, especially if you have an understanding or fibromyalgia is Already you can start to create an idea of okay.
Is this patient in our ballpark and do they actually have fibromyalgia? People come in here and fibromyalgia is you’re, going to cover later can still be a diagnosis of exclusion, and so so do you really have Pharma or do you have something else, so we can or can’t treat okay surgeries.
Somebody comes in here. Their gallbladder is out their appendix is out their uterus, Azad’s or tonsils are out. I’M gonna have to look any further. I know that they have an autoimmune problem. These are clinical pearls gleaned from thousands of histories that we’ve done and let me just say Doc Gates has been here for eight years and he’s been doing all the exams, not just the histories, but comparing the histories to your exam findings and to the results that We’Ve gotten from a lot of trial and error, we’re not trial and error phase anymore, but we were okay.
It can really come from all of that, and so, if you have like four organs out and several of them have to do with your immune system, like your psyche like your tonsils, because they had to come out or your appendix because they were inflamed or your Uterus because you had endometriosis which, by the way, is an autoimmune problem, you’re building our understanding that you pry of an autoimmune problem, again you’re, going to see why that’s important in a few minutes, and then we have these disabilities section where people check off boxes.
Here’S what the fibromyalgia patient checks – usually it’s most, if not all, of these, but it’s somewhere in here and here’s how good this is the order in which I even look at tyroid problems. Yes, sometimes today, sometimes people will actually write down Hashimoto’s.
Okay, all right. Five years ago right, nobody wrote down how she voters and then I’d have to go through that whole thing of like yes, there is such thing as Hashimoto’s, yes or there’s a book up here from my mentor.
Why do I stop thyroid symptoms or my lab tests? Are normal okay, but a lot of you are familiar with that today, Hashimoto’s you’re, going to find out why I mention that so i roid yes, they haven’t marked out most depression.
Yes, they have that marked down some diabetes. I write that down because most of you do not have diabetes. That leads me to ask them about in saw resistance to get tired after you’d a big meal and cetera you’ll see why that’s important digestive bowel problems, everybody puts that down, doesn’t have to be celiac.
Like I have, it could be irritable, bowel syndrome. I could be having a surgery like I had when you were when you’re five weeks, old or surgery or bypass or things of that nature, but digest about big deal.
Dizziness and vertigo. Most of you write that down and – and the point is a lot of you – aren’t connecting the dots here – okay and then like dr. Gates, brought out in me when we did the initial these are like dominoes.
You start this problem started back when you were a kid, whether sorry, with your gut, whether it started with stress responses where it started with an autoimmunity which started with like zillions of rounds of antibiotics, destroying your gut.
It started back there, the dominoes start falling and you don’t always connect the dots, but in the end, what we find out here is everything’s connected virtually every chronic condition. You have from the time your kid until you get here we’re connected, and then we have a fibromyalgia box.
You want to know something: 80 % people walk in here. A fibromyalgia don’t check up so then so because maybe they’ve been diagnosed and just like go like well, they told me it’s a diagnosis. I don’t know what’s wrong, maybe I’ve five-mile J.
Maybe I don’t want fibromyalgia, so at this point I’ll usually tell them what fibromyalgia is dr. Gates is going to do that as soon as I’m done with this and then high blood pressure, some people mark it down some people don’t.
But if you have high blood pressure it significant because if you have high blood pressure, it’s not your heart! It’S not corroded arteries! It’S not your kidneys! You’Re going to have the main problem that dr.
Gates is going to share with you that created the pain that causes your fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. That’S that’s! That’S a big one, all right, because if you recall maybe you know the history of there, not Doug Gates is going to go over it, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, or linked like this in the 90s there’s a reason for it.
They both have the same causes. Okay and so so, chronic fatigue, cold, hands and feet because you have a thyroid problem or because you have stress hormones and a lot of people mark down asthma attacks.
I’M going to go over that briefly, and a lot of people marked out arthritis. A lot of people because they have joint pain but I’ll, ask them. Is it rheumatoid? Well, no, I just got joint pain and then the tests were normal, but but they diagnosed me with arthritis and then urinary tract infections, low libido, brain fog, really comic short term memory, loss extremely common, now who’s that sound like if you’re watching this and you have Fire management sounds like you, okay, so so this is.
This is end, and this is part of the no BS thing I mean I mean most, people are going to like at least five or six or seven different doctors for these things. Yeah. That’S a really good point, because you mentioned that there’s kind of one or a couple underlying causes to all the death, whereas most of you are seeing a doctor for each one of these conditions.
It may not be that egregious of an example, but truly we have a lot of patients who come in seeing seven seven specialists come by for all these problems. Look the average fibro patient comes in between five and fifteen medications.
Now I’m going to have to dock your exes because we’re did is just a tick, we’re just doing this. Okay, we rehearse this or anything like a here’s the deal is it not true that more than three major drugs is considered polypharmacy, I believe so.
Okay, polypharmacy is what taking too many medications. Yeah average fight that I’ve had people take boards in your more than 15 drugs and they’re, mostly going to at least a multiple number of doctors to be taking all those there drunk most of all what it doesn’t know which ones the other ones given here.
They’Re. Not talking to each other stuff like that and if you’re a Bible, magic patient, I went through this you’re going through this. I didn’t go through as much as you because I was a little resistant to a lot of drugs.
I do take a medication now. I do take a thyroid medication, but o-net. That’S it and trust me. I’Ve had everything that you’ve had probably except polycystic ovarian syndrome, so so so does a job. So no, I think that a really important point that the fibromyalgia suffered get is the importance of stress hormones.
So, as we talked about in the introduction, I’m going to go through each one of the main components of fibromyalgia in detail. But doctor effort really has a great understanding of how the stress hormones affect physiology, and his explanation of that I think, is quite profound and I think it’d be really important for a lot of you to understand this, because, as many of you will tell us, I’m Not stressed, I’m not stressed, and it’s different from that, so maybe you can elaborate on that and and and it’s so true we don’t even we don’t even put it down.
We don’t even put stress down on our intake because there’s a couple of things that people just don’t want to concede and one is that they’re stressed or that they can’t handle stress. And frankly, it’s not worth talking about I’ll see a couple of things in here.
Maybe they’re taking maybe they’re taking Prozac or maybe they’re, taking some sort of a xanax or something like that or maybe I look down here and they can’t sleep and I’ll say well, you have difficulty falling asleep.
You have difficulty waking up, there’s some neurological things that you can see when a patient is actually sitting there, that I know that their brain is going a million miles an hour and it’s flooding their system with stress hormone.
So usually what I’ll do it gently summarize? What dr. Gates is going to tell you here in a few minutes as to what fibromyalgia and our paradigm is is? Is I don’t know if I say it’s different? It is different, but our paradigm is more targeted.
You know I I didn’t give my credentials in the beginning IMS before I was probably one of first certified functional medicine practitioners in the country. A long time ago I studied with the gentleman who was developed these things a long time ago and I’m a little bit hesitant.
Even I didn’t mentioned sort of functional medicine in the beginning, because functional medicine is fine, functional medicine, but for fibromyalgia, functional medicine is kind of like a lot of times.
You’Ll get too many supplements too many drugs too many too many procedures. This is where maybe you’re doing the chelation, and maybe it’s a parasite – and maybe it’s this and maybe you did all the diets and it didn’t work and – and so so these things play into the fact that that a person needs to be a little bit more Targeted so I’ll go through our paradigm with them I’ll go through what you’re going to go through and in the lat and there’s like four major players: fibromyalgia and I and I always go over the main one which you’re going to find out to be.
This stress response last because it’s sensitive because it sent it. So what when I, after I’ve gone through this and I’m absolutely certain that the person sitting in front of me is experiencing the stress response, I’ll just let them know I’ll just say: look you have signs that this stress response might be going on and you need To understand how important is so, let me walk through this with you and here’s.
What we’re talking about this is a major major major major key. What is your problem if you go back to what I talked about in the beginning of when I shared my story with you? Pneumonia was the trigger, but I was under a tremendous amount of stress at time for years and that was just wearing on me and I thought I was handling it well by the way.
Okay, I wasn’t stressed I was, I was thinking good care of it, and I’m saying that because that’s what I hear from a lot of you all the time, because you’ve already been told to pull up your bootstraps you’ve already been told, you need to see a Counselor, you aren’t even told us, what’s not that in fact, technically you’re not even stressed as you’re going to find out here in a second and technically your fresh response that you need to go see a counselor for is not a personality disorder.
It’S it’s not a! It’S not a weakness, not a mentally its fist and here’s what this is okay. This is this. Is your brain okay, yeah over here, you want to move your arm. You want to move your right arm.
There’S the left side of your brain or let’s go the right side of your brain. You want to move your left arm. This guy tells you to do that. You want to talk, there’s a part of your brain that helps you to talk.
This is the part of the brain, that’s the thinking brain. I think I do. I think I get an idea, but this is the part of the brain that controls everything else. Okay, so this is the brain stem all right, there’s three parts to it: the bottom two parts keep you calm.
Okay, these two parts of the brain, keep you calm for those of you who heard of the term parasympathetic nervous system. This is where it resides alright, when this is working, life is good in absence of pathology and absence of cancer and absence of tumors, and your gut and absence of problems with your kidney or your heart.
In absence of that, when this is working well, you sleep. Well, you don’t tell me I wake up. I can’t go back to sleep and stuff like that. Okay, your heart beats. Well, your blood pressure is good. You digest well, your saliva works.
Well, your tears work. Well, everything works well because you are designed to be in a state of relaxation yeah, that’s our normal state, and so when this is working well, that’s how you are now. We have a mechanism that is built into our brain and our neurology.
That is a good mechanism. It’S a survival mechanism and that survival mechanism is your fight flight syndrome. Okay, I think that’s what most people are aware of it and being called okay. We call it sympathetic dominance, sympathetic wind-up.
We have a. We have a number of words where I’ll explain those in a sec. So when you perceive danger, okay, you’re walking down the street, it’s late at night, somebody’s somebody’s crossing the street.
It’S like dark and you’re gone and they’re like twice your size and maybe a hat pulled down over your eyes, so you can’t see what their eyes look like your brain and me goes. This is not good. At least my brain would go.
This is not good because I’m just a little guy okay, so they come so they can walk in at you immediately, there’s a part of your brain that perceives danger. It’S this part right here that you see I poked about a million times.
This part of your brain is the fear center of your brain. It happens to be very engaged in your entire emotional system, but this is. The fear thing you need to know is. This is the fear center, your brain, your Center gets set off.
Okay, even if it’s a loud noise – and you go like this – this can be a very, very rapid response, but let’s stick to the guy walking across the street, so this gets set off now it tells the upper third of your brain, which we haven’t talked about.
Yet there is danger in it sent a signal here and it sets off the upper 30. Your brain, which speeds things up bottom part slows things down. Upper part speeds things up. That’S called your sympathetic nervous system, okay.
Thus, we call it sympathetic dominance because the sympathetic speeding up part of your brain dominates the parasympathetic slowing down part of your brain. It then sends a signal down your spinal cord out to the most the infamous adrenal glands, which many of you have been told or the problem.
This is part of the no BS part I’ve written a couple of articles on it. We’Ve written a couple of articles on this on the adrenals or the wrong target. I think they should call your adrenal glands the balanced glands, the homeostasis glands.
They control your blood sugar, they control your electrolytes, they help to control your blood pressure and they send out stress hormones, okay and when this occurs, all of that happens rapidly, and so what happens? Is it sends out these stress hormones your electrolytes? Get you send you some blood sugar into your into your blood.
You send out. Adrenaline start heart starts pumping you send out epinephrine. So now your bronchioles are gone. So now your breathe, your heart’s pounding so you’re, sucking in tons of oxygen you’re, getting blood sugar pushed from your liver into your into your arteries, because that’s what your dreams are doing, they work with.
You then put out something called glucocorticoids and that gets blood sugar out of your liver and into your arteries. And now your blood pressure goes off and you’re pushing all that stuff into your cells.
Your brain now you’re stronger. You can run faster, you can. You can jump higher, you can you can fight better? Even your senses become more acute so that you’re in a position to be like you know, mutant ninja, I’m going to beat this guy up or track star run the other way.
Okay. So then what happens? Is the guy walks past you and you see him put this key in his car and you go and what happens? There is mainly, as I understand it, there’s a part of your brain that tells your frontal lobe and your frontal lobe is like the big guy here.
Okay, this is the important part. This frontal lobe is supposed to shut this amygdala, this fear center down and it does and then all of that stuff in your adrenal gland stops getting signals and everything goes down.
You go on your way, so that’s not what’s happening that. That’S what’s happening to you! That is what’s happening to you, but you there’s a there’s a significant difference. This mechanism is a survival mechanism and is a good mechanism when it’s engaged for minutes, maybe 10 20 minutes not much more than that.
You know the people who maybe 30 minutes or something like that or a couple of hours, but not much more than that. Now, dr. gates is going to talk to you about this in a few minutes, when a person develops emotional trauma, it could be that you have a and who had post-traumatic stress syndrome from fighting with General Patton like I have.
It could be somebody who it could be. It could be a difficult relationship with your parents when you’re a child. It could be that you were, and when I say this to a patient, I usually don’t look at them because I don’t want them to be uncomfortable.
I usually look down, take it be physical, verbal, sexual abuse, because those are very sensitive things, it could be a and it happens more often than not in the fibromyalgia patients. That is what is priming this amygdala it could be.
It could be that you had a severe divorce like the eye. One person sit here and said I in one day, you haven’t seen this person yet and one day she saw somebody got shot and she had somebody point a gun at her and not have it.
Go up, that’s emotional trauma work at the perfectionism okay, so these are things to know, because these emotional events engaged the fear center, but these emotional traumas for some reason which dr.
Gates might explain to you in more detail later. They literally program this so that, even though the emotional trauma is when you were three years old and we’ve had people who come in here, I was sexually abused from times four.
Until I was eight eight, even a motional trauma is 35 years ago. It’S still here and then this whole thing keeps going and when this keeps going, this is a problem. It’S not just that you’re always stressed here’s.
What it is. Those stress hormones from the adrenal glands first thing they do is go back and sabotage the frontal lobe. So that it can’t shut this down and it’s a big part not all, but a big part of the reason you have depression yeah, I realize you’re going through a lot, but in our world, depression is a bad frontal lobe, and this is a big part of What makes your all of that by bombarded it with stress hormones, then it attacks something called your hippocampus a little thing, not coincidentally, it sits right next to your fear center and that creates short-term memory loss.
It also creates the condition in which I can’t go to sleep. I wake up. I can’t go back sick because it controls your circadian rhythm, because short-term memory-loss turns into long-term memory when you’re sleeping so they’re, both in the same hippocampus and then that contributes the brain fog.
Among other things that dr. Gates is going to discuss. It can create immune inflammation when you have that many stress hormones going for that long, a period of time and it’s one of the causes of what dr.
Gates is going to talk about later relative to your thyroid. It can create chronic infections of your cavities, your sinus cavity, your lung cavity and your intestinal cavity. So the lady was sitting here.
Yes, my god I mean I’ve had chronic sinus infections, my whole life, and they can’t find out what it is. The people who check asthma off the people who check off sometimes even different types of bronchitis, but mostly like asthma, things of that nature.
What happens is they will? This is? This is a part of that? Okay and a lot of times it will calm down when you calm down that inflammation, it affects the gut and the gut it affects. It totally damages the guy in the short term, in the short term, when you’re a fight flight – and it’s not this chronic thing.
You’Re got to shut down your bout, their bladder shut down and your adrenal glands shunt chemicals into making stress hormones. I should be making your estrogen so so you’re, so so in the long term, that’s eight! So so, okay, and so in the short term.
It’S taking a lot of stuff and it’s pushing it everywhere else, so you can be strong because you don’t need to be pooping or peeing or thinking about sex when you’re, when you’re fighting or flee. But in the long term your gut gets damaged, decrease blood supply to your gut decrease, Bagle response, which is the nerve that controls your bowel movements, alas, constipation and and even the back up on that.
These stress hormones cause your stomach to not make hydrochloric acid, which doesn’t allow you make the enzymes that digest your food. You can’t digest your food, you can’t kill bacteria, you can’t kill viruses they’re supposed to be going into your intestines you’re you’re, not digesting your food.
The height block of hydrochloric acid tells you Anker is not. The word tells your gallbladder not to work no BS series. You come in here taking hydrochloric acid pancreatic enzymes and going bile salts for your gall bladder and you’re ecstatic, because part of your symptoms are better.
But what is that fixing? Nothing because this and you’re going to find out other things are causing that. Then all of that slows your gut down you’re now getting stress hormones that are actually attacking the inside of your gut.
And now you have the now better known and more accepted leaky gut, which I prefer minterm intestinal permeability will go with leaky gut, and then that creates food sensitivities and between the stress response and other things you get constipation.
Ultimately, depending on certain things, you can create different imbalance into bacteria. You can small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you can get gas, you can get diarrhea next thing. You know you get irritable bowel syndrome, because nobody knows what it is and so on and so on and so forth.
You can get chronic urinary tract infections, because if your bladder is shutting down – and it thinks you’re continually it’s bike flight because of this amygdala, your bladder is confused as to whether to stop as the weather should I should I let them you’re native or so to Not let them you’re right, you get little drips in there.
It becomes a petri dish, the urine becomes a petri did in it like a petri dish, it gets infected, you get antibiotics and it’s community bikes do what screw up your gut. That’S already screwed up. This is like the cycle here and it’s really it’s really crazy, and then you get the low libido, because the stress hormones, I think, is a good point.
The stress hormones are being made of the same chemicals in your adrenal gland that are that are making your estrogen or testosterone and when your estrogen levels start getting off. If you come in here – and you say, I have female problems, I have too much bleeding too little bleeding too long a period too short a period.
It’S cramping just about anything. You can imagine if you don’t have endometriosis, if you don’t have polycystic ovarian syndrome or something like our cancer, that’s causing that or probably your pituitary gland, it’s the stress mechanism that is causing that and so you’re up now, you’re off to the no BS your now You’Re off the hormone replacement therapy group: okay, when the problem is here and one or two other things that are causing that to be an issue, and I could go on for even longer than this.
Okay. But the reality is. This is just one of the four areas that dr. gates is going to talk about in his presentation here in a few minutes and his discussing what fibromyalgia actually is, but we believe – and I don’t it’s not a belief – selasa, okay and our position is this – is The key this is not just the key to getting better.
This is not just the key to staying there, but this is probably what desynchronized the entire system to create the other things that you’re going to talk about. That ultimately resulted in your truly having a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which you’re about to find out what that entails.
Mm-Hmm, I think that’s a great explanation. It’S a great way to open it up and truly that was perfect because use the fibromyalgia patient out there need to understand everything. Dr. Ruffer just said: you need to go back and watch what you said again.
I highly recommend it because this stress mechanism, this fight/flight response, is a better way to determine, is the thing that is destabilizing so many fibromyalgia patients. It’S the underlying cause in a few minutes, we’ll talk about other factors as to why this fight/flight response just keeps going uninhibited kind of like without the brake pedal there, but with this.
This is why so many of you are running from medical doctor to medical doctor from alternative specialist to alternative specialists, like you said, with bioidentical hormones on and on and on taking supplements taking this taking bile acid, because no one’s addressing this underlying factor – and this is Our and this is you know, and I got to say this – and this wasn’t planned or anything like this, but this is like this is like a new paradigm, and patients who come in here are starting to get it first.
There was the functional medicine paradigm. It was all the brain. There was a functional medicine, I’m sorry, emotional, neurology paradigm. It was all the brain. There was a functional medicine protocol that it was, it was Hashimoto, thyroiditis and gut, and then there was functional medicine here, take two bags of supplements and go on the Paleo diet.
This is more, you know, and maybe it’s a little hard to call it BS, but the reality is functional. Medicine has become a little bit commercialized. I grew up a functional medicine. Okay and truly it disappoints me that now it’s basically it’s like it’s kind of like boilerplate.
If I come in, it’s the Paleo diet, it’s the fodmap diet, it’s the SIBO diet and here’s the test that doctor dr. crossing put together years and here’s the blood test and we’re going to give you a supplement for every single one of those blood tests and And we’re going to give you adrenal supplements for this chronic fight/flight syndrome.
Well, you’re probably going to repeat this later, but that’s kind of like teen on a forest fire right exactly, and so the idea is – and we’ve done this – that’s why we can say it from experience. We did a whole period of time where we weren’t addressing the bank.
We address the brain first and we had appeared. We were just addressing a lot of these problems with functional medicine. What we found is that these problems are not resolving in the long term because we were missing.
The stress response like dr. alfred is talking about. This stress response is the holy grail of so many chronic pain, chronic fatigue conditions, there are exceptions, but for the most part, this is the factor that we’ve seen to be the underlying unifying factor as to why so many of you are not getting better yeah.
So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to go to dr. gates. Our gaze is going to go over this with you, but but people are starting their standard coming here, and people who are pretty prominent in their areas of expertise and in the healthcare world are starting to recognize this paradigm that we don’t have a name for and We’Re not going to call it the power health miracle get better and stay better paradigm.
It’S not we’re. Looking for we’re. Looking for you to look, we’ve been there. I’Ve been sick, okay, we’re been there. We just want you to be better, and dr. Gates is now going to present to you the the main keys to what is fibromyalgia, how you diagnosed by budget, how you know what it is for sure and how you help that patient to ultimately improve to the Point where they are on most days feeling pretty darn good and on other days still having symptoms, because there’s no cure for this, because you’re going to find out there’s an autoimmunity in there and you’re going to find out that on those bad days, you’re going to Know why you felt bad and what to do and you’ll have the tools to control it.
But only if you understand what dr. Gates is about to go over with you and if you really embrace this – and this really understand that these are the things that need to be developed and it’ll. Make your life a lot simpler.
Because you’ll be empowered. And you won’t have and you’ll know that aren’t as many moving parts as you think there are motto or our mantra here is less is more less supplements or more, unfortunately, less exercises more and dr.
Gates is going to go over the nuts and bolts as to. Why all of that is not Theory, nothing that he’s going to go over with you over the next 10 or 15 or 20 minutes is going to be theory and and and you can go to our website.
Frankly, we have about 400 hours online. If any of these things interest, you specifically, you can refer to those and dr. gates, is the research nut of the world? That’S all he does. Okay, he’s no life, he researches, okay, and so each one of those presentations online have anywhere from 15 to.
I think the one on on linkage. I’Ve has like 110 or 120 peer-reviewed journal references attached so that if you’re of that mindset, you’ll know we’re not making this stuff up, it’s in the literature and we have gleaned it from thousands of patients that we have worked with on trial and error and and Our current results are consistently successful in the properly selected patients.
So I know this has gone a little bit long, but please stay tuned because you are about to find out what’s really wrong with you. Okay, all right! So now, you’re somewhat familiar with the different parts of what fibro myalgia may be, and we talked about them a little oblique ly when we were just going through what a consult looks like with the patient.
So, let’s get a lot more specific now, because in our world, fibromyalgia has a very precise and very specific diagnostic meaning and there’s a handful of moving parts that are there. Virtually every fibromyalgia, patient and Doug Gates would like the fibromyalgia patients to really understand the full breadth and complexity of what fibromyalgia is all about, and to do so we’re going to have to kind of go back a little bit through the history.
If we want to really understand the suffering of the fibromyalgia, patient and some of the suffering comes with just not being understood having years and years and years of people telling you that well, we really don’t know that you have it.
We don’t know that it really exists. I just heard literally two days ago from a very educated person who is it came in here with soccer profiler who’s, that up until now, I thought that this was a fake disease.
She said, but now I think I have it well so now we’re going to so we’re going to get into that and we’re going to get into the specific physiological and neurological aspects of what’s causing your chronic pain, so understanding the suffering understanding the suffering goes back To gosh the 1980s on fibromyalgia first started gaining traction.
Researchers started looking into. How could someone like you be experiencing so much pain? They started doing muscle biopsies trying to figure out. Was there something actually wrong in the muscle fibers? You know that’s what it’s named after fibromyalgia means pain in the muscle fibers, and they determined that really there’s nothing wrong in your muscles and so from there.
Some of the research, especially into the early 2000s, was looking at a component called central sensitization. What that really means is that your pain nerves, all of us, have teams coming into our brain, but our brain drowns out those pain signals, but what they’re, finding with fibromyalgia patients is that their brain or your brain is not drowning out.
The pain signals coming from your body cells down one of the first big revelations and then another major revelation was the association between stress responses and that central sensitization. So then they started looking further into how elevated levels of stress or trauma could influence.
How much adrenaline your body is producing how much cortisol your body is producing and with that making you more sensitive to pain? The research then further went into how the brain starts to learn pain when it’s chronically receiving these pain signals at too high of a rate.
Then we began to find out how insomnia – which many of you have really negatively affects your brain stems ability to shut off pain, signals coming from your body and then we’re going to go through also autoimmune thyroid disease and detail gut reactions to certain foods and irritable, Bowel syndrome, as well as neuropathy, so that’s kind of the template for understanding your pain as a fibromyalgia, sufferer, okay, and we’re going to hit that more.
Specifically one of the frustrations that I found and I and I hear it almost a couple of times a week here when I’m doing interviews – is that frustration of I don’t know that the doctor really believes me.
The doctor says all my tests are normal. The doctor says I need to maybe go through some counseling. Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t you just pull up your bootstraps like everybody else does, and I and I, and I assume that part of it is because a lot of this, at least in the middle or early to mid stages.
Don’T look all that sick but apparently there’s more to it and and there’s actually data out there on this, so so maybe it would make the fibromyalgia world patients feel a little bit better to know. Maybe we won’t feel mega feel a little bit better.