Episode Eighty-Nine – Jennifer Sosnowski Part 2: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode Eighty-Nine – Jennifer Sosnowski Part 2: this mp4 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Kim Pittis:
Hello, everybody. We have a very special show today. I think Jen was just on. We’ll get her all set up and ready to go right away. So as we were saying last week, Carol is not here. She is traveling. I believe she’s at IFM. And today I was able to convince my friend there she is, Dr. Jennifer Sosnoski, to come back on because we had so many amazing comments and questions the last time I had you on. The biggest one was just like when we had Rob DeMartino on If you could slow down.

Dr. Sosnowski:
You know, he complained about that when I talked to and he listened to me too.

Kim Pittis:
I know it’s so funny and I think that’s just a true testament to people who are like super passionate about what they do because I know when I get really excited about something, I start talking like really fast and I just try to get like all the feelings and all the facts out there at the same time. So what some of the feedback that I’ve received from personal emails and from people who I know who listen to the podcast was. And it was very much practitioner-based. We talked a lot about mold and Lyme and what we saw clinically, and I thought today we could still tackle some stuff clinically for the practitioners, but I thought maybe we could do a little bit of a layperson like patient based chat about some of the conditions that you treat a little bit about Functional Medicine, about your practice and stuff like that.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I was certified in Functional Medicine in 2013 after four years of coursework. So lots of hours and lots of money and now there’s cheaper ways to get it done. But it was definitely an expensive and time-consuming proposition. But it was like going to medical school all over again and the on the side while you were still working.

Kim Pittis:
And it’s so funny that you started off with this little nugget because I was listening to a podcast a few days ago and they had Dr. Jeffrey Bland on who is dubbed the father of Functional Medicine.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Know him well.

Kim Pittis:
And they were talking about his journey starting Functional Medicine and the coursework that they were putting together and how the meetings first started and how so many of his colleagues are like, nobody is going to go back and spend more time and more money because we’ve already spent so much time and so much money. And he said, I think you’re wrong. This is where the true doctors will come out of the woodwork, because those of us who have been practicing for a while and those of us who have been like in the trenches see where the holes are. And if you really are looking at betterment for the patient, you’re going to want to do this. And he was right. Yeah.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Kim Pittis:
So why? Why were you not happy with the way things were for you?

Dr. Sosnowski:
To be honest, when I went to medical school, I came from the land of Harvard and Yale. So literally, I was living in Massachusetts. I didn’t know that anything other than MD school existed. And then I went to Johns Hopkins for undergrad, like allopathic medicine at its very worst or best, depending on how you want to look at it. And now look at it more as the worst, because Johns Hopkins was at the head of a lot of the Covid crap. I’m like, my kids will never go there. Sorry. But the when I got out of Johns Hopkins, I knew I wanted to be a family physician. And you don’t stay at Johns Hopkins. If you want to be a family physician, you stay at Johns Hopkins for a residency if you want to be a researcher. So I went back to Massachusetts because they had a great family practice program and it was my home school, my home state, so it was a lot cheaper than elsewhere. And so when I went to medical school, I fell into family practice for sure. Nobody else fit. The only people I liked in medical school were the family physicians, to be honest. Everybody else was so full of themselves. I’m like, God, like they think they run the world, man. I’m just here trying to figure it all out. And from there I had to choose a residency to go to

Dr. Sosnowski:
I ended up going only south of the Mason-Dixon Line and only west of the Mississippi, because I’m like, I have to get out of where I’m at. I can’t do this anymore. And I was looking at a number of medical schools. But my first choice of medical school was the University of Arizona, because they had Andy Wiles program there. And I’m like, I know I want to do something different. I’ve been an athlete for my entire life. I was a swimmer through college and then I was doing triathlons and everything else I could get my hands on. Rock climbing and everything else when I was in medical school. And then in residency, I just kept up with doing all that Swam on a on a older team for people at post-college and all of that, and was doing everything else to keep myself sane in medical school and then residency. I knew already that vitamins and minerals mattered, that food, the quality of the food that you ate was really important. And I knew the basics on dietary stuff. But when I was in medical school, I was doing triathlons in the middle of the no-fat craze.

Kim Pittis:
Aha.

Dr. Sosnowski:
So you can imagine how well all of us did eating no fat because was the de facto nutritionist for everybody in the group because was in school and everybody else had nothing to do with nutrition. And yeah, I look back on like, oh man, what did we do? But when I got to the University of Arizona, I was all excited for Andy Wiles program, and I took one course of his and I was completely dismayed. It was actually a course on Ayurvedic medicine. And I had been to Deepak Chopra’s courses in Boston when I was in medical school there. And he did this four-hour course, and it was just little tidbits of something and it cost way too much money. I’m like, Man, you’re out here to promote your face, not to promote this medicine. You’re out here for you, not for anything else. And then I also learned that Andy Weil, while he had been to medical school, he had never been to residency. He had never practiced medicine. And you don’t know anything when you’re outside of medical school. He just got that MD after his name and never did anything with it. So I lost a lot of respect. I probably shouldn’t have lost respect for him because he’s

Dr. Sosnowski:
made integrative medicine big, but in a very foo-foo way. Those of us in Functional Medicine talk about the integrative medicine that he pushes is Functional Medicine “light”. You got a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of this, but it’s not a holistic picture. Most of the people he trains in his fellowship program are going out to start residency programs or to start programs at a university or something of the sort. It’s not out there practicing. It’s not out there doing it. So I got completely away from integrative medicine at that point. And then in practice I started working in an urgent care. My first job was starting in urgent care. I was leading the urgent care for a multi-specialty group in Sun City West. So in Sun City, West, it’s everybody’s 55 and older. Their executives that are come in from all over the country and they’re ready to retire. And they’re going to lay low and play golf and do nothing. And so it was really interesting population to work with because, number one, they really cared about their health. Unlike everybody I worked with in medical school and residency, who was the underserved and really. Not that underserved, don’t necessarily care about their health, but a lot of them didn’t. So you’re trying to beat them over the head about doing something that they didn’t really care about.

Dr. Sosnowski:
And now all of a sudden, I had all these people that were really healthy in general, older people that really cared about themselves and wanted to get better And they were all sick because they’re older. And I was looking at all of this and I’m like, okay, I’m supposed to be here preventing heart attacks and you’ve got all the right medicines for heart attacks and you’re still dying of a heart attack, or you’ve got high blood pressure that’s properly treated and you’re still dying of a stroke, or it was just over. And I’m like, Wow, this medicine isn’t working. What I’ve been taught isn’t working at all. And then I myself got sick So was four years into practice. And I started with daily migraines and I saw everybody in their brother. I knew that I couldn’t fix what I had because I had no ability, had no knowledge of deeper views. And so I went to everybody and their brother. They had no idea what to do with me except throw me on meds. I was like, okay, there’s something more here. There’s something better out there. And that’s how I ran into Functional Medicine and think that’s where most of us come from in Functional Medicine, because we come at it from a backhand.

Dr. Sosnowski:
We got sick and we realized that the system couldn’t help us or a family member got sick, and we realized that the system couldn’t help. Very rarely do you start out going, Hey, everything I learned A lot of it is. There’s a point for that, but especially working in the urgent care. Going back into the urgent care for a short time between kids after I knew Functional Medicine I would go through every single patient that I saw over the day and say, You didn’t have to be here if you had done this. Or you wouldn’t have been here if you’d done that. And I was like, wow, every single person needs me, but they have no idea I even exist as a Functional Medicine doc. So for those of you guys that don’t understand what Functional Medicine is, my two-sentence blurb of it, it’s using the research that’s done in the lab and taking it out into physical practice and using vitamins, minerals, enzymes once in a while, a prescription drug, but intentionally so to change the body’s reactions so that we can actually rebalance the body and get you 100% healthy without prescription medicines. So we’re using we’re trying to use the body’s own natural healing ability. And sometimes you’re so deficient in vitamin and minerals by that point in time, it would take you 15 years to get amped up.

Dr. Sosnowski:
So you need a little extra help in using supplements and stuff. But very specifically, it’s a whole holistic thought process of how it works. Although I will say one of the things that I was frustrated about in Functional Medicine is I come from the athlete world, right? How does your body outside, your muscle structure, your balance of muscle structure, affect the inside? No understanding of that in Functional Medicine whatsoever. Everybody that started Functional Medicine were in internal medicine docs, literally Dr. Bland. All these people were internal medicine docs. And so they got the internal body and they could put those pieces together, but they had no idea on how to put that together with the external body. Having an external trauma and how that would hurt something. And so I got very frustrated. I’m like, We need a chiropractor in here. We need an osteopath in here. They have much more holistic understanding of how all of this puts together. And so it was very interesting to meet Carol at a IFM meeting in 2010 and oh my God, here she was. And she linked all the information from Functional Medicine. It really made sense to her. And she got it. And then she could meld it with this physical treatment that could actually help the body. And it was a story from there.

Kim Pittis:
And I think it’s just so fitting that she’s on a plane going there right now. And then I have you on here. She’ll be proud of me for putting this together so last minute. But you’re right. I think so many of the practitioners that I’ve met through FSM who do Functional Medicine have a story. You’re right. Like nobody finished medical school who is very content with their practice and the way they’re treating Do they tackle going back, taking all these courses, spending all this time and changing the way that they practice if everything was going great, throwing prescriptions at it. I know as a patient, from my side, I think you start getting a little bit of information, you start learning a little bit about Functional Medicine. You start hearing these stories, and then you start hearing these horror stories of people who are failed by traditional allopathic medicine where everything was caught so late, too late. And like you were saying, when you’re working in the emergency department, if you’re thinking, wow, if I would have just seen you however many months or years before, you wouldn’t end up here. I think for all the patients that are listening, this isn’t a podcast to scare you, but I think we owe so many people of the population. There is another way of looking at your primary care provider and digging a little bit deeper, especially if you’ve got family history of things that you’re working so hard to avoid. So me, myself, I exercise, I eat well. Like you said, there’s other things. If we can put in our bodies to help complement things or help stave off something, I think it’s worth going down that path.

Dr. Sosnowski:
You don’t know what you don’t know until you start doing some of the testing to figure it out.

Kim Pittis:
Yes. Yes. And there is a practitioner that I met at FSM who said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you don’t know what you don’t know. And I’m just like, I got. But he was right about that. Yeah.

Dr. Sosnowski:
And that’s one of the things, honestly, I’m a researcher. I’m driven by data. I want to see the results. I want to see the data. I want to see that something makes sense. It has to make sense. And that’s what I hated about medical school is that nothing made sense. You worked with one doctor, and they told you to do it this way. You worked with another doctor and they told you to do it this way. And I’m like, okay, there can’t be two ways to do this. You got your diagnosis and you’ve got your options to use. Why is there so many options? And it was if you learned it, it was just rote memorization. And in Functional Medicine, there is no rote memorization. It’s okay, let’s use the data, let’s see where somebody is at and then figure out what are all the zillions of options that we could use and what’s the best-fit match for this person in front of me right now? If we all learned Functional Medicine in medical school, which I wish we had, we’d be a completely different country at this point in time.

Kim Pittis:
I can totally see that Again, I’ll speak as a patient, seeing you A simple thing like blood work. I get blood work every year. My blood work typically falls between the little bubbles that they say is safe. And when I question my primary care, why is this on the low side? Why is this on the high side? Oh, it’s fine.

Dr. Sosnowski:
No idea. They have no idea.

Kim Pittis:
No. And they’ll say we won’t worry about that until it gets over here. I’m like, no, this is the problem. I don’t want it to go over here. Let’s keep everything in this beautiful little sweet spot right now. But to your point, they don’t know why this is a normal value.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that made Functional Medicine so exciting for me is there’s an answer for everything. It’s not a Oh, don’t worry about it. There’s an answer. And if don’t know an answer, I can go research it. Or talk to one of my friends. Somebody’s got an answer for that. It always means something.

Kim Pittis:
And with Functional Medicine, are there different modules like as far as like immune stuff versus and then can you specialize in things or do you take everything together? How does that typically go

Dr. Sosnowski:
To get the certification from the IFM, and granted, there’s a ton of other companies out there that are doing it. They’re not as thorough, but that’s because they’re trying to compete with the IFM and be less expensive. IFM ss a pretty expensive task to get all the way through. But it’s a very thorough education from the people that put it all together initially. But there are a bunch of different modules. There’s a cardiometabolic module, a detox module, a immune-hormone. I don’t even remember them all anymore, thank God. But and to pass the certification, you have to do them all. But you don’t necessarily have to be good at all of it to be good at what you’re doing. Though you fill in some of the blanks as you start learning, as you go further along too. And almost everybody specializes in some realm in Functional Medicine because you can’t do everything great. And that’s why my six years of daily migraines happened after a head injury for years beforehand. That turned out to be way worse than it should have been because it was just a fall off a mountain bike. It shouldn’t have been an anything, and it turned into a huge physical deal. So I found out many years after I got better, actually, probably about five years after I got better, I found out that I’d had mold and Lyme disease. So for me, trying to piece all these pieces together and trying to figure out what the underlying causes were and how it all works, once you start recognizing it, you can’t unsee it. And you see it in people that, hey, they were coming in for, hey, I’ve got high blood pressure. No, you don’t. You got X, Y, and Z afterwards. Because you start seeing the patterns and the patterns are there for a lot of people.

Kim Pittis:
One of the talking points I wanted to ask you about We can pick a mold and Lyme topic because I’m sure this could go on for hours and hours. But a lot of people, like you said, have symptoms that they think is one thing and it’s actually something else. So do you have any, sneaky symptoms that some people may have that they’re not necessarily putting together, let’s just say, for mold and Lyme? So you had headaches. Is that a is that a Hallmark mold?

Dr. Sosnowski:
And that’s absolutely hallmark. And actually, my headaches were from adrenal failure. My adrenals were so involved in trying to squelch the inflammation and to let me function that they couldn’t give me the energy for every day. So anytime a little bit of stressful something happened, I’d end up with a migraine and then I’d end up with a migraine hangover the next day that led to the next migraine. And so there was in daily migraines for six years. So migraine headaches oftentimes are an adrenal failure thing, and the adrenals frequently go down with chronic infections because they’re trying to.

Kim Pittis:
You could if you could talk about adrenals just for the laypeople. We hear adrenal fatigue. This has been like a hot word, just like inflammation in the last little while. Can you explain a little bit about the adrenals to people who may not know?

Dr. Sosnowski:
Okay, absolutely. So your adrenal glands are nice little glands that sit on top of your kidneys. They’re responsible for producing a bunch of hormones. But the one that we talk about most commonly here is cortisol. And cortisol is your get up and go hormone. It’s supposed to be what wakes you up in the morning and then lets you sleep at night. So in the morning your cortisol is supposed to be really high and then gradually drops over the course of the day until you get to evening time and it’s nice and low.

Dr. Sosnowski:
So if your adrenals have been put into high gear for too long, they literally use up all the building products of making cortisol or they create a cortisol resistance in the system. The body’s been seeing it so long that it just stops listening to it. We don’t really know exactly what it is. If you do testing, it looks like it’s too low. But then other people have said, Hey, it’s way high. It’s just being ignored. I don’t know. I’m not going to argue about it either, which way. But in terms of how it looks on testing, a lot of times, is that the body is unable to hit those highs anymore and so is a very little minimal peak in the morning and then it’s flatlined the rest of the day. Or it’s flatlined all day long. And then when that does happen, you don’t have the get up and go to do anything. So migraine headaches are one of those. And typically the people that get migraine headaches are the people that have a mitochondrial deficiency in their body. And that affects the brain. The brain can’t make energy well enough. So you diminish energy somewhat with the cortisol because it’s not getting the fuel and then you end up with migraines.

Dr. Sosnowski:
That’s my understanding of it. But usually it’s a genetic predisposition to migraines that people know runs in families. My mom had it. My ten-year-old has it. He’s a boy, so hopefully he won’t be as severe as I was, but he’s already got that kind of stuff already. Yeah. Can you not get everything bad that I have? Come on, man. I didn’t mean to pass all of that down to you But the cortisol, if you’re really low, then typically the mornings are really rough. It doesn’t matter how well you slept. You can’t get up in the morning because there’s no push to get out of bed. You’re not getting enough energy to actually make that motion. And then a lot of times what people will find if their cortisol is really low is that their best time of the day is eight, nine, 10:00 at night up till about midnight. So they start shifting their sleeping curve until later and later because they want to be up that eight, nine, 10:00 at night because that’s when they feel the very best. And the reason they feel the best is that’s when cortisol is lowest in the day. So when you’re closest to what’s already supposed to be low because you’re already at rock bottom, guess what? You feel almost normal for a period of time. So everybody starts switching their sleep schedules to going to bed at midnight and waking up at 11 because then they miss that first curve in the morning where they feel like dog doo, right? They don’t have enough energy to actually get up.

Kim Pittis:
And we know now that we need to be in our deep sleep at least by 10 p.m. for human growth hormone to kick in. So our repair cycle is functional. So that’s the first thing I’ll tell any of my athletes to come see me is what you need to be in bed early. And they roll their eyes, especially the teenagers who do feel their best between 10 p.m. And I’m not saying adrenal crashing, but.

Dr. Sosnowski:
No, it’s just that’s hormonal at that point.

Kim Pittis:
But I’m still saying if you’re if you want to be a high level athlete, we need you in bed asleep at this time. And that means even now in the summer. A time when everybody’s trying to.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Enjoy the sunshine.

Kim Pittis:
Exactly. So getting your adrenals monitored, that’s not part of a normal annual visit.

Dr. Sosnowski:
As a matter of fact, regular medical doctors have no understanding of the adrenals at all. We’re taught that it either works or it doesn’t work, and it’s completely dead, in which case you’re in the hospital because you’re on your deathbed. I’ve seen people producing normal cortisol in the morning is about 19 to 24mg and then in the evening it’s down to maybe 2 or 3. So it’s a huge difference over the course of the day. But I’ve seen people running at 1 or 2mg all day long and you would never know it. You would think they would be dead or really symptomatic because they don’t have anything in the morning. But they’ve just been living in that world for so long. And it took long enough to get there that I can hear it in their history. But most people would never know that they have adrenal issues and the person themself doesn’t realize because it’s happened so slowly, they don’t even know what normal feels like anymore.

Kim Pittis:
And we see that, I think, across the board with anybody from chronic pain to athletes that have just been dealing with the chronic injury, we are so adaptable in a bad way of just getting used to the bad, that the bad is the new normal and you forget all about how great it feels to feel good. Okay, we’ve got patients that have adrenal problems. What’s the first kind of to help normalize that or is that is that why the adrenals got like that? Right. I’m guessing or.

Dr. Sosnowski:
The reason, in mold and that’s why the adrenals are there. So my way of dealing with it is to not kill them any further while we get to the point that they’re healthy enough to treat mold and Lyme. And so in that case, it would be getting off a caffeine, which everybody screams bloody murders. That’s what’s keeping me going. Yeah, but it’s actually making things worse. You’ll hate me for a week. And then after a week or so, mornings all of a sudden aren’t a drag because you don’t need caffeine to wake you up. Your body is. Oh, I have a little bit of energy left now. I can actually wake you up.

Dr. Sosnowski:
You’ve been through that. It’s hard to get people through that five days to a week where they’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t drag myself out of bed at all with caffeine. But I talk about caffeine as beating a dead horse. You’ve got a half-dead horse that’s trying to pull something along and it’s just plodding along. And then you give it caffeine and it goes, oh, boom, boom, it’s going bookin’ along. But then what’s left for the next day? You’ve got half of what it would have had if you hadn’t pushed too far. If you do that caffeine again, then you’re down again even further. And so over time you’re so far down that you can’t catch up. So the other half is getting sleep. On my practice, it’s like if you’re not sleeping, I’m giving you something to sleep because you will not recover your adrenals. If you’re not sleeping at night. You’ve got to stay off the caffeine. You’ve got to get decent sleep at night.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I want at least 7 to 8 hours and then making sure that we address the what was I going to say? The addressing if you’re living in mold, making sure you’re not that. But then we give supplements. You can do an adrenal glandular that actually replace that has cortisol in it and you can replace the level from where it is right now to where it is closer to where it should be so that people actually feel okay. And you can live on those and to some extent there are a lot of people are like, Oh, but it’s just shutting down my adrenals anymore. I’m like, Your adrenals can’t be any more shut down, for the most part. They’re barely functioning. We’re just adding a little bit on top of it so that you can feel functional in your day and you can get stuff done and you can be motivated to stick to a plan because when your adrenals are really bad, there is no sticking to a plan because you have so much lacking of motivation that because of lack of energy that nothing gets done. And I’m sure you’ve heard that a lot in athletes too. I’m just so unmotivated I can’t get out of my own way. And you’re like looking at this person. I’m like, You didn’t get here without being motivated. How can you tell me you’re not motivated? And it’s not sex hormones necessarily. It’s adrenals. And yes, adrenals and sex hormones go down together, unfortunately. But you think motivation, you think hormones and testosterone and that kind of stuff. But a lot of times it’s not. It’s adrenals. And once you get the adrenals up, the whole world looks a heck of a lot better.

Kim Pittis:
And what’s the best way to test your adrenals? It’s salivary hormone testing or.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Yeah, salivary hormone testing.

Kim Pittis:
And are there is this what you can ask your primary care provider to order for you? Do you seek this out for an independent lab just for people who are listening if they want to?

Dr. Sosnowski:
Yeah, most primary care docs won’t know anything about it. There’s a number of companies that test salivary hormones. I use a company called Doctors Data. It’s a very simple test. You test cortisol four times in a day so you can follow the curve and see where it is each part of the curve. Sometimes people are low in the morning and super high at night. What’s happening there? It’s a totally different picture than what it’s supposed to. And then people can’t sleep at all because they’re so high. And sometimes that’s because they’re sleep apnea going on. So you can read a lot into the cortisol panels, too. And and doctors data don’t think most of these companies will sell to somebody that’s not a physician. But if you got the name of the company and you put it together, it’s super easy for any doctor to sign up and or to test. And it’s relatively cheap. It’s just to do the salivary cortisol test is like $140.

Kim Pittis:
So that’s another thing I wanted to chat about. I know of a doctor who shall remain nameless, who thinks Functional Medicine is all a money grab because it’s a lot of things are not covered by health care. Patients have to pay out of pocket. What can somebody expect to look? I guess it depends on what they’re coming to see somebody like yourself for. But what would be an average annual investment to see a Functional Medicine provider? I know it depends on so many factors.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Yeah, it really does. When I ran a fee-for-service Functional Medicine practice in the past, patients would typically see me every 2 or 3 months and they would probably pay something in the line of $4000, $5000 over the course of the year. Yeah, but the problem with doing it that way and the reason I don’t do it that way anymore is that every time you came to see that doctor, it was like a punishment. You knew you were spending all kinds of money. I hate to say it, but it’s hard to spend this big lump sum all at once. And you’d have the visit for the doctor that costs something. You’d have the lab test that were ordered that was going to cost something, and then you had to pay for the follow-up appointment to go over all those lab testing and the supplements that would go along with that. It was like this huge expense and so people wouldn’t come back again for another 3 to 4 months. So everything I’d already told them would be lost before they get back to me. So we’d be redoing the same things over and over again. And I was very frustrated because I’m like, I know this Functional Medicine works, but I can’t get anybody healthy because they weren’t coming back fast enough and get it. I wouldn’t be coming back fast enough either if I had $1,000 to spend. All told, over the course of a two-week period of follow-up visits or whatever, that’s painful. Yeah. And so we started doing what we call a wellness model where we have three-month packages, six-month packages, eight-month packages, 12-month packages.

Dr. Sosnowski:
The eight and 12 months are the really sick people. They know they’re broken. They know there’s nothing working. I tell them that we can maybe get this better in eight months. And they’re like, Really? You can do this in eight months when I’ve been sick for ten, 12, 15 years, I’m like, Yeah, if you do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it and you get on the testing that you need to right away, you could do this in eight months. There’s always the person whose body doesn’t agree with what they’re doing, and then things might take a little bit longer. And that’s not their fault. That’s not my fault. That’s the body being what it is. Our packages run from $5500 to $20,000 if you’re doing a ton of testing for mold and Lyme. And and yet we’ve got the health coach that’s included in there. We got supplements included in there, we got testing included in there. We got education. All kinds of videos to teach people what Functional Medicine is all about. We’re really working from a holistic standpoint, even within Functional Medicine, because we really want every single person to be their own doctor by the time they’re done with it. And you honestly have the skills to do that coming out of our program It doesn’t mean everybody gets those skills because you get into it what you put into it, but you have the skills to be your own doctor for 90% of the stuff that’s going to come forward at you after your way with us.

Kim Pittis:
What I’m getting out of this too, is it’s like how we’re changing teaching FSM is asking the questions, why is it like this? Before it would be like, yes, the nerve is scarred. Treat scarring in the nerve. And you’re going to get some people better, but you’re not going to get everybody better. And those results are not going to last. So it’s asking the better questions. How did this scar tissue get there in the first place? And then going back. And so I remember talking to somebody. I was really anemic in high school and in college, and it was just take iron, you’re anemic. And then talking to somebody 30 years later saying, why were you anemic? I’m like, nobody ever asked me that.

Dr. Sosnowski:
They don’t care in allopathic medicine, they just have a problem and you treat it.

Kim Pittis:
It’s one of those things that you just sit back and you’re just like, wow, there’s a couple questions and I want to just get to those quickly before we go any further before we forget about them. Dana had asked, TMJ and bruxism, is there a Functional Medicine/FSM approach with maxillofacial visits that are unfruitful?

Dr. Sosnowski:
I will say that there is a component of TMJ that’s trauma, that’s an injury from trauma, and then it’s a completely different world. I don’t think that’s more than 10% of people. Most people with TMJ and bruxism is because they have sleep apnea.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Look for the underlying cause once again.

Kim Pittis:
Exactly. And I had done a big talk on TMJ in the last little while There should be some slides and I’d be happy to share them with you I took a very cool TMJ course over Covid that was phenomenal. I have these slides of cadavers opening and closing with disc reduction and displacement. TMJ dysfunction can get like that from trauma absolutely. A punch. A fall. But 90 some odd percent. The exact number is escaping me of TMJ problems are created by the Pterygoids and the Pterygoids get tight because of something. So the lateral pterygoid, especially the superior slip, attaches onto the disc. The disc pulls that fat pad which is very neural. It bleeds easily. So you have all these components, but then it’s what’s caused by by muscles. No. Why are those pterygoids tight? They don’t get like that from outer space. So is there a sleep apnea problem? Thinking about what does that jaw what is that jaw doing seven, eight hours out of the day? So if you’re gasping for air, I guarantee you your mouth is not relaxed

Dr. Sosnowski:
And the other thing that I see that causes TMJ is chronic neck issues, because if you’ve got chronic arthritis of your neck, disc disease, facet disease, whatever, particularly if you’ve got facet in one spot and disc in another, they’re never happy. Carol loves that one. Yeah, they’re fighting with you all the time. Nobody likes whatever position they’re in. Got a neck like that. But the neck gets so in spasm that of course you’re going to have TMJ after that. And so the muscular function of the neck or the physiologic function of the neck has a large part to do in it too. But you see all of that go awry in sleep apnea as well, because the neck has to get into spasm to keep the airway open.

Dr. Sosnowski:
As a matter of fact, I don’t think I said it when I was on last time, but I have a really bad neck. I’ve got a C2 disc and a C-5 six facet and some of that was welcomed to the couple of head injuries I’d had in the past. And that’s what Carol picked up on way back when in 2010, when I met her for the first time. She’s yeah you got a C2 disc, that’s your headache center here. And then you’ve got the C-5 six facet joint that’s really not happy with you. Actually C2 facet and C-5-6-disc think it was the other way around, but I because I have chronic neck issues, I’d had a car accident and so my neck was even worse and I was like, I’m going to run Microcurrent on my neck.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I got to get something to relax here. And I ran myofascial trigger points on my neck. It sent me into a week and a half of horrendous sleep apnea to the point that I was waking up every half hour out of a dead sleep in a severe panic. And it took me three days to figure out what was going on. And then I was like, Ah, I just relaxed all the muscles in my neck that were literally keeping me alive. And they relaxed everything. My airway closed off and there I am. And I’d had so many people told me I had sleep apnea in the past when I had all my migraines because most of my migraines would start at three in the morning. They’re like, That’s got to be sleep apnea. Actually, that’s when your liver kicks in and starts demanding more energy of you. So there’s a reason that they kick in then. But I’d even done a sleep study and it was totally normal and I was like, okay, there’s no way I can have sleep apnea. But then as time went on, before I did this, I started thinking about it. I’ve never been able to sleep on my back my entire life. I sleep on my stomach or on my side.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I broke my ankle in High School. My brother ran the car into a tree and I came out with a broken ankle. Everybody else but the car was okay I had to sleep on my back for four weeks with my foot up in the air I couldn’t sleep at all. I was like, Huh? I bet you that was my sleep apnea. I don’t think I have it normally because the rest of me has accommodated. But I for sure had it And then I sent myself into sleep apnea with the Microcurrent. I’m like, okay, I’m in. I agree. I’ve got it. But it’s funny because there’s a lot of other stuff that goes along with that. I had recession of the gums That was horrible. I had gum transplants from the top of my mouth. Every one. Of course, that’s the trigeminal nerve. Everyone. I’d have a three day migraine after I had four different transplant. Two years later, you couldn’t even tell they were there because I was grinding my teeth so much. The reason you get gum recession a lot of times is because you’re grinding your teeth so much. The teeth move a little bit and the gums recede. Duh. Can we just teach these dentists what they’re actually looking for and what it means? I was so furious when I figured it all out. I was like, Why did they tell me to do this? Why didn’t they look at the underlying problem?

Kim Pittis:
And then you can treat yourself for relax and balance because you’re so worked up because you. But I want to go back a little bit to the trigeminal nerve. So about 25 years ago I was a massive clencher and so I had a lot of TMJ issues. I wasn’t a grinder, I was a clencher. And I think the clenchers sometimes fall under the radar because they won’t have massive wear and tear on their teeth. Their bite can somewhat look normal, but they have these pit-bull-like Masseter and Pterygoids from clenching. My dentist at the time was like, Listen, there’s a new mouth guard out. It’s called an NTI, Nociceptive Trigeminal nerve Inhibitor. I’d love to try it on you instead of the big hockey mouthguard. So it was just this little appliance that snapped onto my two front teeth and the minute my teeth would lower it would send that nerve because your brain will never allow you to slam your two front teeth and your bottom teeth together. It’s a reflexive inhibition, wonderful little reflex. And I wore that for probably four months. And then I left it in a hotel and I was in a panic. But that four months was all it took to relax everything at night and saved my life. It really did, because I was sleeping and I was the same thing. I’m like, I do not have sleep apnea. Oh, but you do. There’s a lot. Yeah, go on.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I find a lot of my chronically ill patients have some sleep apnea. I swear it’s about 90% or more of my chronically ill folks with chronic mold, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, autoimmune. A lot of them have sleep apnea. And it’s underdiagnosed because they’re like you and me, skinny. We’re not the picture of sleep apnea. We’re not morbidly obese. And so it gets missed. And yet we just have a throat that’s too small and the barest little relaxation of that is going to send us into disaster.

Kim Pittis:
Yes. And especially when you’re used to not sleeping on your back or that is triggered and you’re sleeping in the fetal position all tucked in and you said positionally, you’re able to accommodate for that. And then the minute you relax something. So for the practitioners that are listening, that is a big thing. If you are treating somebody’s neck who has a lot of flexion, extension injuries, concussion injuries, any sort of head and neck trauma, you have to treat their neck posterior-anterior before you even think about treating their jaw. But be wary of relaxing those muscles too much. It’s just like dissolving any scar tissue anywhere, we see it a lot in the shoulder. People who have shredded rotator cuffs. And then you relax that rotator cuff and then their pain goes up because there’s labral tears that are hiding in there. And it’s wonderful because it’s diagnostic. However, it’s funny that you put that together yourself like that because the MFTP, the Myofascial Trigger Point protocol that we have on the CustomCare, it does its job very well. And that is.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Very well. Too well in fact. But it was very educational. I was like okay, next time if want to treat I’m going to treat one side or the other side. I certainly won’t treat both or just skip that protocol altogether.

Kim Pittis:
Or maybe do it during the day and then follow up with some exercises so that as you’re decreasing some of the bad tone, we’re introducing good tone. That’s what I try to do in the clinic is I always say it’s like learning how to drive standard. You have to put your foot on the gas and take your foot off the clutch almost at the same time. Otherwise you’re going to stall. And the new teenagers are just like, What do you mean standard? I swear, if we could just all go back to driving manual, nobody could text and drive because our feet and our hands would be busy concentrating on the road.

Dr. Sosnowski:
And the other thing that’s really funny is how many young people have sleep apnea and don’t know it. I look at my family. I was tongue-tied. I was bottle fed. So nobody ever realized it but was tongue-tied when I was little. My husband has a lip tie, so he has his very short frenulum up top. My kids got both. Tongue tie and lip tie. And so when you’ve got some of that, it really sets the growth of your mouth all wrong because things are pulling unevenly and you’re going to be having sleep apnea from a very young age. I’m convinced that’s why I learned to sleep on my stomach because my body was like, No, you don’t sleep on your back. You’re not going to breathe that way. You have to sleep on your stomach. You have to sleep on your side. And know that we’re missing a whole heck of a lot of kids with this, too.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. One of the questions that came in says, What sleep apnea test do you recommend?

Dr. Sosnowski:
Nowadays you’ve got a Fitbit and you’ve got an aura ring and you’ve got all kinds of really cool things. Yeah, I’ve left mine on the bathroom counter this morning was dang it, no data for it. But the the Fitbit and the Oura Ring are actually fairly reliable. I think the Oura Ring is a little bit better in terms of the new beta formula that they use actually seems to be very accurate. It looks worse, but I think it’s more accurate for what’s actually going on. And it actually measures whether you get hypoxic at night, how much you’re wiggling at night as well as what your heart rate is doing. So it really gives you a very good look at all the things that can go awry when you’re hypoxic. When you’re not getting a good breath, you’re going to start wiggling. You’re going to start moving to get a better breath. Your oxygen is going to go down and your heart rate is going to go, Oh my God, I’m not getting enough oxygen here and it’s going to go skyrocketing. So you can actually look at all of that. I have found that’s actually sometimes even better than the sleep studies. Obviously, this is what I do. I’ve been reading sleep studies forever, and now I can just take that information and put it into the Oura Ring or Fitbit world and say, Oh yeah, you really do have a problem here.

Kim Pittis:
I had a patient who went to the lab to sleep and was deemed normal. And I’m like, you’re not you. You have sleep apnea. You could just see it in the musculature of the neck that this man was like dying every night. So sure enough, he just got the Oura Ring. And after three-four weeks, the data on it was just terrifying. Yeah. All the markers that you were saying multiple times, waking up out of, like, dead sleep, heart rate going up, he’s like, Why did it do that? I’m like, Because you’re about to die right there, essentially. And when you’re a single person and there’s nobody around you to tell you that you’re snoring or you’re a thrasher or that you’re all the things, how would you ever know It’s very inorganic, right? Just think about the first night when you travel and you sleep in a hotel, Like you don’t sleep the same way that you do in your bed.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Half your brain is actually literally awake when you’re in someplace new and different. And so you don’t fall into the same deep sleep. Although I’ve also found and I hate to say it, but I think most of the sleep docs are lazy. They go into sleep medicine because they have very little interaction with people A lot of them don’t care to be doing what they’re doing. So there’s a lot of poorly read sleep studies out there. I’ll look at some all the time that when you look at the whole sleep study period, it’ll say, Hey, they’re normal because they’re their apnea-hypopnea index. Apnea is like not breathing at all. Hypopnea is too shallow of a breath The index has to be above 5 to be mild sleep apnea. And they’ll look at the total of the time frame of sleep and say it was at 3. But if you take that data apart, all of their apnea was in deep sleep, so they literally cannot get deep sleep. That is just as damaging to the body as not being able to sleep the whole time. And so you have to look at where is the apnea, what stage of sleep, and is it all during one period? Is it all on one side? If it’s all on one side, maybe you got a nasal obstruction and you’re just not being able to breathe through your nose at that point in You can use it to tell so many things, but they don’t. Is their NHI bad enough to say you got apnea or is it fine?

Kim Pittis:
Totally. The other question is what is a good, reliable Oura Ring? So Oura is the name of the brand. It’s O U R A The new series 3 that came out with the new beta software is phenomenal My husband and I will have a little competition in the morning. It’s like, How’d you sleep last night? Good. Let’s compare scores. It’s not just how do you feel? It’s let’s see what we actually did.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I was never much of a drinker after my migraines. Because I got a migraine after drinking any alcohol. I was a big red wine drinker and was a bit of a party girl before. But after all of this, I drank two drinks a month or something like that. But after I got my aura ring and saw what it did to my deep sleep, I’m like, No wonder I feel like heck the next morning. This is not even worth it for that one drink. I don’t even care anymore because I know how much damage it’s doing me. Because my deep sleep goes from 20% of my night to 5% of my night. Totally.

Kim Pittis:
And if you’re a busy mom/practitioner/athlete/whatever, we don’t have time to feel like crap in the morning. I need every morning to be like, get up, let’s go, let’s crush the day. And yeah, I didn’t I don’t think I necessarily needed my ring to tell me how crappy I felt after I had a glass of wine.

Dr. Sosnowski:
It’s one thing if your body just feels crappy. For me, my biggest worry is my brain. Got two ApoE4 genes. I’ve got a 44% risk of dementia before I even started in this world. My mom has dementia already. I had six years of daily migraines. That’s just wreaking havoc on the brain. I had a couple of good concussions. My risk is tremendous. And I look at that deep sleep, I’m like, okay, I never get quite enough sleep anyway because I find too many things to do that interfere with my time in bed. And then you put that together with a night that was worthless. I just don’t think that’s worth it anymore.

Kim Pittis:
It’s so true. Yes. So get an Oura Ring. I think it’s well worth the investment. They’re not cheap, but they’re not ridiculously expensive. I’d rather have a piece of jewelry for many years and have all the data every day than everything else. Another question that came in about supplement with desiccated adrenal question mark. Yeah, and.

Dr. Sosnowski:
That’s essentially what the supplements I use are. My favorite one is one called adrenal because it’s got the highest amount of glandular per capsule of any of them out there that I’ve found. Any of them will work. You just end up taking 4 or 5 capsules and the first thing in the morning, sometimes I’d go for more in a single capsule just to make everybody’s life easier.

Kim Pittis:
So this is going to be another really broad, broad question that is going to result in you rolling your eyes. But I’m going to throw it out there anyways. If you could paint the world with one brush and recommend some favorite foods or supplements that most people could benefit by taking or cutting out, we all know we should be watching refined sugary foods. That’s like the gold standard. But are there any other like really great food groups that help with chronic illness or chronic high levels of inflammation that everybody’s trying to squander these days?

Dr. Sosnowski:
I’ve been a big believer in the medical medium along the way. He was the first person that. I’d already come to the conclusion or was in the process of coming to the conclusion at that point in time that Lyme disease wasn’t really a bug that appeared in Lyme, Connecticut, in the 1980s, that it had been with us for generations and that we had just started seeing Lyme come out in the population because we were too sick, there were too many toxins in our world.

Kim Pittis:
Was it you that was saying that they had found a tick in the Egyptian.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Lyme bug in the mummy in Egypt? Yes.

Kim Pittis:
So yeah. There you go. Hello.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Done. End of story.

Kim Pittis:
Mic drop. Yes, we’ve had Lyme.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Exactly. So I grew up in the East Coast. I grew up in Boston. So when you say Lyme, Connecticut, that’s my stomping grounds. And I came out with Lyme after all of this. But the East Coast I originally grew up in New Jersey. So it’s just below New York City, which was the industrial age cesspit, as it were. And so think of New Jersey in that area around New York City where so much industrialization was going on with so little care for what they were doing in their environment is really the cesspool of America. So it made full sense to me that where our country started and the industrial age started in this area was where we were the most sick and we were going to see that there first before it got out to the rest of the country. And when I looked at people treating Lyme, I was always surprised that they would use antibiotics, because when I look at the data and what people get the best results with, it’s usually in herbals. And those herbals typically that are treating Lyme also treat viruses. So are we really treating Lyme or are we really treating a virus that’s been around forever? And when I read the medical medium, he was like the first person to say Lyme doesn’t exist.

Dr. Sosnowski:
It’s really Hhv6, HPV and a bunch of these other viruses that we’re looking at, they’re detritus the breakdown products of their capsid and we’re all of a sudden calling it Lyme. So don’t like to break anybody’s bubble and say Lyme doesn’t exist because there’s certainly something that happens after a tick bite with some. There’s something that’s going on there. But I think we all have these bugs with us. They’ve been with us forever and our immune system gets impaired by this bite. Whatever’s in that bite. And then you start seeing the resurgence of childhood viruses coming out as chronic illness. As a fan of the medical medium, I’m not a fan of every part of it. He pushes a lot for adrenal support. So absolutely follow this. At some point in time for adrenal support, you got to eat fruit and only eat your meat at night time and it’s fruit all day long and then meat at night with your vegetables. So I tried it for two months, so I felt like hell, like was like barely functional.

Dr. Sosnowski:
I’m like, okay, man, I’m not sure I believe you there. Maybe it’s my negative genetics that I’m that original hunter-gatherer that I have to have my meat. But once again, what’s proper for one person isn’t necessarily proper for everyone, but he pushes a lot of wild blueberries as being full of polyphenols and things that are going to be very healthy for decreasing inflammation. So I love those blueberries and that’s something I suggest a lot of people put in their diet regularly. All of the all of those vegetables like the Amla berries and the goose berries and the very sour fruits are going to be very good as well. And then avocados are God’s gift to the earth as far as I’m concerned, because they’re meant to that. Yes, they’re fat and they’re a good fat and you can eat it till your ears are green. At that point in time. Most of us don’t digest our fat as well as we need to anyway, or if our guts are not working properly. So the more fats we can get in that are good for us or better.

Kim Pittis:
Yes. Living in California, it’s the only thing that when. What’s the best thing about living in California? I’m like avocados. Can I can I start with that one? Like, seriously, Like. Living in Canada, we didn’t get very good avocados, so yeah, great. And I think people are still so afraid of fat. And so it’s just.

Dr. Sosnowski:
That no-fat diet died, went, pushed really hard and it’s just the opposite of what we need to be doing. We will do best on good animal protein that’s not been fed corn and pesticides. And our vegetables and think fruits are good in there too, but in more moderation to the vegetables in there. Yeah, in general, yeah.

Kim Pittis:
There’s like a new movement called the No barcode movement. And I try to talk to my patients about that. And way back 25 years ago when I became a trainer, we would always try to say when you’re grocery shopping to shop the perimeter. So stay away from the middle stuff. It’s all the processed, crappy stuff fruits, vegetables and yeah, getting high quality good meat is, I think, so important.

Dr. Sosnowski:
It doesn’t happen in the supermarket anymore.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. There’s a company that we use for a long time called Butcherbox and they, you know, local farmers and sustainably raised, pasture-raised and grass-fed is not even good enough. You have to say grass finished because grass-fed doesn’t mean they were fed grass their whole. It’s just What about supplements? Is there anything that we could be supplementing with as a general population? Vitamin D, obviously, with Covid, everybody is talking about vitamin D, Vitamin D into been getting the.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Yeah, I think one of the things that I push a ton is fish oil. If you’ve had a head injury I’ve had people doing nine grams a day of fish oil, lots of fish oil. And it helps because the brain is made of fat and you want all those good fats to make those membranes pliable rather than firm and not letting anything in. And there’s this book that as I was getting into Functional Medicine, as I was taking my initial courses in Functional Medicine, my twin brother, who’s a genius in his own right, he’s a PhD in physics, in optics. And my parents, my mom brought us up very healthy way ahead of her time. She made her own bread. She was doing all kinds of supplements. My brother was brought up with severe asthma and allergies. He missed half of school. Now I know that was because of our basement in New Jersey was damp with leak water into it. Not a lot of water just leaking from the walls when it was really wet outside. So he had mold toxicity at a very basic game. We were born six weeks early and he got mold toxicity and there it was because he had under-formed lungs from the very beginning. But my mom, like took him to this place called the Brain Bio Center in Phenix or in Princeton, which was way ahead of its time in terms of like vitamins and minerals and enzymes to get people back to normal. Made around bread did all of this and we’ve taken it ten steps beyond that because she used to make dessert every night.

Dr. Sosnowski:
She would make a homemade dessert every night. So you always had to have your sugar afterwards. And now I’m like, Mom, why did you do that? You programed us that every meal isn’t done until we’ve had our sugar. Terrible. And my twin brother and I have gotten steps beyond there saying, okay, maybe once a week you can have dessert or twice a week on the weekends you can have dessert, not during the week, or you make some rules around it to limit your access to that. Because you do. You get set up for that. Yeah, but he gave me he given me this book right around the time I was getting into Functional Medicine called “The Queen of Fats.” It’s all about how our population started on the seashore, getting a lot of our food from the water because it was easy and it was plentiful. It was very good for our brain. All of that fish oil. And then as time’s gone on, you can get omega-3s from grass. So the cows that eat grass and the other animals that eat grass, they’re going to be full of omega-3s that are very healthy for you. All of a sudden we’re feeding all of our animals corn. There’s no omega three seconds in corn. And so you’ve lost all your omega three seconds from your animals. So look at this whole vegetarian movement. That meat is bad for you. I’m like, No, it’s not that meat is bad for you. It’s the meat that you’re feeding corn is bad for you and causing more inflammation. It’s not meat that’s causing inflammation. Exactly.

Kim Pittis:
Wow.

Dr. Sosnowski:
The Queen of Fats book was amazing.

Dr. Sosnowski:
It’s about yay big. It’s probably less than 100 pages. And it was like life-changing reading it.

Kim Pittis:
That’s Yeah, I just wrote it down. Thank you for that. Okay. Do you have a favorite quote to end our show with? If you don’t, I have one.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Go for it. You got one.

Kim Pittis:
I’m really good at picking the quotes before the show and it seems to somehow always blend. So my quote today was faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation. And this kind of ties into the whole allopathic you need the date. We think that normal medicine is data-driven, but it’s actually the other way around. What we’re doing now is more data-driven.

Dr. Sosnowski:
And one of the things that prevents a lot of Functional Medicine docs, even those that believe in what it is and have learned what it is and prevents them from doing it is because then we become the pariah and we become the target of allopathic medicine. And it’s a scary place to be.

Kim Pittis:
Totally. Thank you for coming on.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Thank you for inviting me.

Kim Pittis:
We’ll have you on again. But I think this was great just to give some of, like I said, the people who are not practitioners, a little bit of a delve into what Functional Medicine can do and if people would like to talk to you or come visit you, we’ll put that. But what’s the best way? What’s your website? What’s the best way for people to know a little bit more about you?

Dr. Sosnowski:
Our website is www.mvp, as in most valuable player, medicalcare.com. So it’s mvpmedicalcare.com. I started out as a team physician with the Kansas City Royals when I opened my practice full time so I used that sports analogy and I still work with the Royals 21 years later. I’m still one of their team physicians, so it still fits. But now it’s most valuable patient in terms of rather than player necessarily.

Wonderful. I love it. Thank you. Okay, Jen, that’s it for now. Thank you, everybody, for coming. And we’ll see you later.

Dr. Sosnowski:
Okay? Thanks, guys.

Kim Pittis:
Bye.

Speaker3:
The Frequency Specific Microcurrent podcast has been produced by Frequency Specific Seminars for entertainment, educational, and information purposes only. The information and opinion provided in the podcast are not medical advice. Do not create any type of doctor-patient relationship and unless expressly stated, do not reflect the opinions of its affiliates, subsidiaries or sponsors or the host, or any of the podcast guests or affiliated professional organizations. No person should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content provided in any podcast without first seeking appropriate medical advice and counseling. No information provided in any podcast should be used as a substitute for personalized medical advice and counseling. FSS disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on any contents of this podcast.

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