Leaders in Frequency Specific Microcurrent Education

Episode One-Hundred-Eight – Knees, Ankles, and Fibromyalgia

Hosts: Carolyn McMakin, MA, DC Kim Pittis00:20 Fibromyalgia patients treating themselves 03:08 Keeping control and having a plan, but flexibility and adaptability mindset 04:00 Pain pattern for spinal trauma 08:10 Learned so much since 1997 09:30 Knee replacement 21:54 Ankle fractures 29:25 Fibromyalgia 44:34 Neurofeedback 48:36 CRPS POTS 51:15 Demethylate stress hormone 55:19 Hypermobile

Episode One-Hundred Eight.mp4: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode One-Hundred Eight.mp4: this mp4 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Kevin:
Please help spread the message of Frequency Specific Microcurrent by clicking on the like button. You can subscribe to us on YouTube or any podcast app. If you have any questions, please leave in the comments. You can find the podcast transcription at Frequency Specific Microcurrent as well as more information about Frequency Specific Microcurrent.

Kim Pittis:
Okay. How are you?

Dr. Carol:
I am wonderful.

Kim Pittis:
Great.

Dr. Carol:
I had a patient last week. I don’t know if we talked about her. She had fibromyalgia for maybe 20 years. No auto accidents. But she was a labor and delivery nurse.

Kim Pittis:
Oh, right. Yes.

Dr. Carol:
Right. That was lifting and doing all that stuff. I treated her Friday. Her last appointment was yesterday, Tuesday. And the pain stayed away until Monday morning. So, it went Friday, Saturday, Sunday and then when it came back. She said, I need a CustomCare, and I need to be able to be out of pain. I got use in one week. She got used to being out of pain.

Kim Pittis:
And so that’s great. And it’s terrible all at the same time.

Dr. Carol:
And what’s really fun is she loves to knit. And she said, but I have terrible arthritis in my hands, and she does have some knuckles. But she’s also hypothetic at 6, 7 and 8 on her right hand and 6 on her left hand, so she’s got discs in her neck, and the only thing it took to get rid of her arthritis was 40/396. Just treat inflammation in the nerve and then have her grab the washcloth with her hand while you’re running scarring in the nerve.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
And she said, do that thing that you do to my brain so I don’t mind the pain so much.

Kim Pittis:
Very good.

Dr. Carol:
It was so much fun.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
To give her control over her life and to be able to say, this is easy. This is core-level stuff. Everybody should be able to do this. It wasn’t that hard. The abdominal adhesions might have been a thing, but the rest of it, the nerve pain, the neck pain, the fibro and concussion in Vagus. It was so fun. I love being us.

Kim Pittis:
Yes.

Dr. Carol:
I love that we can do this.

Kim Pittis:
But part of it is the responsibility of having the control that we have control over. Right. And we talk about layering the frequencies all the time. And my thought process of today was going to be about being adaptable. Because I love having a plan. I lay out my plans the night before. I look at who my patients are. I have a loose plan of what my treatments are going to be like, because before FSM, I had a hard plan. I knew the range of motion that was going to walk in. I knew what my limitations were as a therapist So you you expect certain results, and with FSM, you still expect those results. But you have to learn this

Dr. Carol:
Flexibility.

Kim Pittis:
Flexibility, adaptability, mindset that your hypothesis could be wrong. And it’s okay if it’s wrong because you’re not going to hurt them. But it’s going to be wrong and when the results come, they’re going to come fast.

Dr. Carol:
Well, and this is the part where I really should warn you that the next step is don’t even make a plan until you find out what walks in the door.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
Because if you planned on X and G walks in the door, why did you spend any time planning for X, when you had no idea that G was going to walk in the door?

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. So I just wait till I get the history and do the physical and then, the plan evolves during the history and with the pain diagram.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
So much fun when you see a circle on the shoulder, a circle on both hips, circle on both hands, both feet and the back of the neck, it’s like, oh, goody. Well, check. That’s 40/10. And then when she starts crying during the history, check concussion in Vagus 40/89. And so pretty much before she finishes the history, you’ve got 70 to 80% of the plan, and then you do the physical exam. And for this lady, just because I do it on everybody, I did Fields of Gaze and the Tuning Fork because one of her complaints was anxiety. Well, cid you have a head injury? Did you have an auto accident? No. Okay, so I’m treating her with 40/10. She starts to get slightly stoned and she says, oh yeah, I forgot. About five years ago, I fell in the ice backwards and hit my head. And now that you mention it, after that, I haven’t been able to read. Just so that’s my plan evolves from the history, the symptoms. The physical exam. So by the time we get them on the table, I already know.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
So.

Kim Pittis:
Okay. But even with a patient that you’ve already seen maybe 5 or 6 times,

Dr. Carol:
Right.

Kim Pittis:
you still get surprised sometimes. Right. Sometimes the surprises for the better and sometimes it’s for the worse. Sometimes I’m like, wow, I’m pretty sure this range of motion would have held. The pain would have stayed down, and sometimes they come in and something else is sore or the pain is worse, and then you have to go back and troubleshoot. Well, why did it get worse? What did you do? Chances are they tried to rearrange their entire house because they felt so good.

Dr. Carol:
You lifted what?

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kim Pittis:
Right. Yeah. And so again, it’s learning to be flexible with your treatment plans, I think, is the most important concept.

Dr. Carol:
I totally agree, 100%, that flexibility.

Kim Pittis:
Yes, you always change it. You’re like it’s a gift. Because I would say it’s forced me to become a better detective, which is true. However, I feel like it was force-fed to me. There’s no slow learning curve.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah, and the the patients that I saw between 1997 when we started this and probably 2010, 13 years later when I really had more of an idea of what I was doing, I just shredded 85 boxes of charts from that era.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
And I really wish I could just call them all back and say, come back. I know what I’m doing now. I think.

Kim Pittis:
Oh, yeah, geez, I have that feeling even after two years.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Now the learning curve is easier now because we have more of a map, more of a guideline like a terrain map.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
If this, then that, if this then that.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. There’s less of a recipe and it’s more of a concept.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Exactly.

Kim Pittis:
So my computer is being kind of silly. So if you lose me I will rejoin again with my phone.

Dr. Carol:
What does your computer do?

Kim Pittis:
I’m not sure what’s happening with it.

Dr. Carol:
Okay.

Kim Pittis:
If I knew that, it probably wouldn’t happen.

Dr. Carol:
True story.

Kim Pittis:
All right. We have a couple of questions in already. I want to get to the one actually, that we had at the end of last week’s podcast, just so we don’t forget. And we have time, because I promised I would start with that one,

Dr. Carol:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
It was about a knee replacement. I took a screenshot of the question.

Dr. Carol:
Right.

Kim Pittis:
So forgive me if the practitioner is watching right now and I miss something, but it was a knee replacement and she has her up to 90 degrees of flexion, but is in extreme pain. She also has degenerative disc disease but does not have low back pain. She was on, I am probably mispronouncing it meloxicam.

Dr. Carol:
Anti-inflammatory.

Kim Pittis:
Every day for 25 years.

Dr. Carol:
Wait, wait.

Kim Pittis:
I didn’t make it up. I’m just reading what she had written.

Dr. Carol:
Okay. Meloxicam is a prescription version of Advil.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
So, it’s an NSAID?

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
25 years?

Kim Pittis:
Yep.

Dr. Carol:
How’s your kidneys? Would be the first question I would ask, but a long time. Moving along.

Kim Pittis:
She can’t get the pain down.

Dr. Carol:
Is she in pain at rest or just when she flexes her knee?

Kim Pittis:
That’s a great question. You know what? I might written notes down because I thought I was going to be on my phone. So let me see if I can still pull it up here. Because I wrote all the notes down thinking I could multitask. She had run metal toxicity, 40/10. Nothing is helping. No.

Dr. Carol:
It’s going to be.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. It just says severe pain with flexion immediately post-op and now post-manipulation, she has 0 to 90 degrees but significant pain at 90. She was on that drug every day for 25 years prior to the knee replacement. She’s done 40/10, metal toxicity, bone marrow trauma and scarring frequencies with various knee tissues. No changes.

Dr. Carol:
No. It’s 124/77 would be.

Kim Pittis:
Torn and broken and connective tissue.

Dr. Carol:
So Let’s say between meals so that you don’t have to worry about your digestive system, watch a video of how they do a knee replacement.

Kim Pittis:
No.

Dr. Carol:
That’s a good face. And so they take off the end of the femur. They put the insert in, I think or maybe. The tibial plateau, I think they leave intact and they put a landing pad on it. The curve on the femoral condyles is a thing. But if you think about what happens when they do a knee replacement, two things happen. One is it’s not a 40/10 thing, it’s a 40/396 thing. In order to get the knee parts in, they have to do this. And so they’re tractioning the femoral nerve and the sciatic nerve and to some extent maybe the tibial nerve. But those would give her pain below. Pain at the knee, I would look at nerve traction injuries, So, 40/396 for the nerve. And then they do manipulation under anesthesia and you also don’t want to watch that at bedtime.

Dr. Carol:
because basically they tear the connective tissue. The intention is to tear the scar tissue. But there’s no way to do that without 124/77. And if you think about the hamstrings, you may even have some torn and broken in the round tendons in the back. So, the pain at 90 degrees is the worst. So, when you’re flexing your knee, I was hoping you would unfreeze by now. But apparently not. So when you bend your knee to 90 degrees, you have scarring in the nerve. That’s a possibility. So, the femoral nerve that goes down the front, if it was adhered, you stretch that when you flex your knee and then so scarring on the nerve, inflammation in the nerve from the low back to the knee, and then torn and broken in the connective tissue, torn and broken in the joint capsule because they leave the capsule intact. That would be my guess, straight up.

Kim Pittis:
There was another comment that they have different patients, same surgeon that also has pain starting at 50 degrees. So yeah the nerve traction injury with surgery is a real concept that I don’t think we think of because we think of all the things with bone, cartilage and yes, that’s important. However, there’s a lot of trauma to that nerve.

Dr. Carol:
Oh and they put a tourniquet it up right just below the outflow of the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve. So you’ve got hypoxia but the nerve traction injury at 50 degrees, if I had to guess, if you think about the mechanics of the knee when it gets to 50 degrees, if I had to guess, I’d guess that the joint capsule is getting caught in the implant At least with the hip, they leave the capsule in. Right. They take apart the capsule and they put it back together. 50 degrees is not very much. And lady that’s stuck at 50 is looking at manipulation under anesthesia too. And it’s the same surgeon. So there we go. So does the motion just stop?

Kim Pittis:
I don’t know the practitioner is on. I saw her comment so perhaps she can add more if you go to the Q&A, maybe,

Dr. Carol:
Here it is. Hi, Leif. I

Kim Pittis:
Sarah is the one that wrote it. Hard end-feel with significant pain.

Dr. Carol:
Hard end-feel. Knees are complicated. There’s so many.

Kim Pittis:
Components.

Dr. Carol:
Components. It’s the the curve in the femoral condyles is the thing that I have become aware of. I don’t treat that many knee replacements, but from what I’ve seen, you know, with hips, they look at the size of the femoral head and the angle of the femoral neck and there are lots of options you can pick the right size head and choose. Like a mix and match wardrobe, right size head, right size angle. And you know Bob’s your uncle. You’re good. Hard end feel.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. That’s the scary part. When it’s not a squishy but a soft end feel that there’s resistance. The one thing that’s been my saving grace is treating the fat pad in the knee. People tend to forget about that anterior fat pad.

Dr. Carol:
That’s a good idea.

Kim Pittis:
And it gets very hard when there’s limited range of motion. So, when we’re dealing with ACL reconstruction, meniscus, anything that has that knee hard locked into 90, that fat pad turns to beef jerky in no time at all. So scarring in the adipose or sclerosis in the adipose and then vitality and increase in the secretions to 97. I’m not sure that that would be indicated with this case, but with the hard end feel.

Dr. Carol:
I’d still look at. I mean, if you think about what they have to do to reattach the joint capsule where it belongs.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
It’s what if, if you were the cerebellum and the joint capsule sort of got sucked into the joint at 50 degrees? I’m not sure if that would create a hard end-feel, but maybe.

Kim Pittis:
I don’t know, I always just think of hard end-feel as being totally like bone, like joint, like a hard block where there’s something limiting.

Dr. Carol:
And then the challenge is, Sarah, I don’t know what your degree is, but getting the original surgeon, the challenge is the surgeon sees them at one week, two weeks, and sending the patient back to the surgeon and asking for an x-ray with the knee bent at 50 degrees. Patient has hard end feel at 50 degrees. Can we do an x-ray? Well, the good news for me is I can order one. You go to Clearview and you say flex the knee to 50 degrees. Take an x-ray. Tell me what’s going on? And then you’d find out. It wouldn’t tell you about the joint capsule, but it would tell you about the hardware.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
Is everything where it belongs? Did something slip? Was something put in wrong? Which is part of why the surgeons don’t follow up. They don’t want to know. This is not been a good week for Surgeons for me.

Kim Pittis:
Me neither actually. So, there is something going on. It’s my computer and it’s the surgeons.

Dr. Carol:
It’s like for months I have a patient that had ankle fractures. First surgery, the ER orthopedist did the lateral malleolus. It was in like slivered almonds. He did the lateral malleolus repair with a plate and screws without doing a CT scan. That’s a good face.

Kim Pittis:
Buthow do you do that without seeing the soft tissue?

Dr. Carol:
Oh, it wasn’t even soft tissue. That was the problem. It was two weeks later when she went to see the orthopedic surgeon for follow-up. A different orthopedic surgeon. He took an x-ray and I was there. And you know how the tallis is supposed to be right up against the medial malleolus? 5 to 6-mm lateral.

Kim Pittis:
Oh, why does this sound familiar? Did we talk about this or do you have?

Dr. Carol:
We must have. And so about eight weeks into this, when her pain was still way beyond what it should have been, I said, you need to do an MRI for avascular necrosis and infection. Well, they didn’t. So the second surgery put in. Fixed the other three fractures that the first guy missed. And then, the third surgery, when the wound didn’t heal and the scab came off. And what you saw were all the screws. Third surgery was to take it all the hardware. And then last week, she fell. Got out of her car without her walker. Stood up and fell. So this week. We ordered an MRI. She has avascular necrosis in the posterior tibia, calcaneus and the medial malleolus. And stress fractures from the fall. But those are new. I’m just like. After the third surgery, somebody should have done an MRI to find out if there was a vascular necrosis.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Kim Pittis:
I find that sometimes we’re just like the cleanup crew. So, we’re not just getting patients with their pain. It’s cleaning up so many other people’s messes.

Dr. Carol:
The poor things, I have compassion for them so they don’t diagnose it because they don’t know how to treat it. And the patient I saw yesterday, different patient, had an ankle replacement 2-4 years ago. And the nerve that runs along the fifth ray, which is probably the superficial peroneal nerve, runs along the fifth ray, hyperesthetic and nerve pain. And the surgeon said, oh, that happens with ankle replacements. Ankle replacement went great. I’d already seen her last year. Took the scar tissue out of the ankle. Everything was fine. She kind of didn’t tell me about this pain and hyperesthesia along the fifth Ray. She had a fall. Came in. We treated the nerve pain and the way she fell she just transitioned the distal superficial and peroneal nerves and the tibial nerve. Just like traction. 40/396, took care of the hyperesthesia and then got to the fifth ray along the side and she said, oh, that’s still hypersensitive. But he told me it would be because the ankle replacement damaged the nerve. If 40/396 reduce inflammation in the nerve, that works when there’s a nerve traction injury. What this surgeon told her was this branch of the nerve is damaged when we put the ankle replacement in. So, from her ankle or her knee to her toes, I ran increased secretions in that nerve. And it was normal sensation and zero pain for the first time since the ankle replacement.

Kim Pittis:
Wow.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah.

Kim Pittis:
But it makes sense.

Dr. Carol:
Does it make sense to you guys? There are 30 out of you. It’s like, it made sense to me. If 40 takes care of the brand-new nerve traction injuries but she’s got a nerve that is so traumatized, it can’t conduct. I have a frequency that will make it conduct increased secretions in the nerve says I don’t care. I already ran 40. You got no excuses. Let’s just increase secretions in the nerve.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
It worked.

Kim Pittis:
I think some people like self-admittedly, I was like this too early on because I thought increasing secretions to the nerve would just increase pain.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah, it depends on what’s wrong with the nerve.

Kim Pittis:
Depends what’s wrong with the nerve? That’s exactly right. Do you run, like, 94/294 on the nerve? No! I do. I have been going back and running it recently with pretty good results.

Dr. Carol:
I’m so proud of everybody that’s so thorough. my hallmark has become the most bang for the buck. It’s like, okay, fine, I’ll go back and run 94 if I have to, but most of the time, what it takes to get a nerve functional. According to the medical literature, if you look up the medical literature on nerve pain, what they create is either inflammation or ligature. They constrict the nerve. Well, it can’t conduct. So, it’s either you start with 40. If that doesn’t do it, you do it 81. You increase secretions. Yeah. It was it was pretty fun.

Kim Pittis:
And I’m like that with the cord also. I’ll do 40/10, 81/0 and then when only when those two don’t work. And it’s very rare that those two don’t take care of something, then I’ll go back and maybe there’s adhesions, but the adhesions tend to be with the dura, not really with the cord as much, I don’t know.

Dr. Carol:
Well, and if especially this fibromyalgia patient, God bless her. The first day I treated her with 40/10, you know how the endorphins go up and they get all floaty and stoned and serotonin actually goes down while the endorphins are going up. More neurochemistry than you need to know. And she just started sobbing and so I went from 40/10 to 40/89. Just quiet down the midbrain and some of it was relief. And then, she started shivering. So remember when we talk about fibromyalgia, the side effect of shivering, it’s just quiet the sympathetics. And she’s still sobbing. So we finally set up. I mean, she’s already running on concussion and Vagus. I set up another machine to just run 40/89 and everything settled down. And the thing I say to her, it’s like you have been so brave. Right. So some of it is, if you’ve been living at a 7 for 15 or 20 years, and in 60 to 90 minutes, your pain goes down to a 1. And they just start sobbing. It’s relief. She said I don’t know, I’m so emotional. I just cry so easily. It’s like, well, of course you do. Excuse me. Of course, you cry easily. Why? Well, your pain’s been a 7, which keeps you right on the edge of what’s tolerable. You fight so hard to just have a conversation to just not punch somebody out or scream at somebody.

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
Hide in your room. Oh, so there’s a portion of our work, I think we treat the patient. Doing FSM is relatively easy with fibromyalgia. But to treat the patient, it’s to validate them. Well, of course, you cry. Excuse me. I would, if I was in your shoes and I have a frequency that will make that easier. Hold that thought. And then you’re on 40/89. And when she came back in yesterday when pain went back up it was at a 6. And she said run that one that makes me not care.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. I don’t I don’t know if 40/89 makes you not care. I think it just makes you not quite so emotionally attached to what’s happening to you. Like, I feel like there’s a bit of, like that disconnect where. And I’m just doing it for my own experience. Like when I run it, I don’t want to use compartmentalize, but it packages it up in this neat little package where you could observe it. I don’t know if you’ve ever done those meditations where like, you put the trauma or the issue, like on a lily pad and you just watch it, like go by on the stream. That’s what I feel like 40/89 does. It just gives you that safety of I am not this condition, I am not this pain. I’m not this limitation. It’s happening. I’m going to correct it because it’s safe to do so. And then off it goes.

Dr. Carol:
As you said, it tells the limbic system to take a nap.

Kim Pittis:
Just go to the corner. Here’s your blankie. Here’s your stuffy,

Speaker3:
It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. And it’s a real neurologic thing.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
I met with a friend of mine on Saturday who I knew from the pain world way back in the day when we were both lecturing in the fibromyalgia and the pain circuit and Talking about central sensitization and the ability to control the nervous system. Knowing now what I didn’t know back then, and he just sat there because he lives in the academic world. He’s a general practitioner now, but he was a pain specialist and he said I had to leave that world because they don’t do research on it. Because you can’t make fibromyalgia curable because nobody will fund the research. If you can cure it, they don’t want to hear about it. And he said, so what do you do? I said, well. I train people to cure it. And patients find us, and there’s never any guarantees. The fort. It’s almost half. It’s like 40% of fibromyalgia patients get their fibromyalgia from spine trauma. And I just happened to run across in Health freedom news. I’ve got a bunch of paper copies, but that’s the journal Health Freedom News, Pat Carroll, took my fibromyalgia article and edited it very nicely. And it says you cure fibromyalgia by fixing what causes it, not by treating the symptoms. So it comes from adrenal fatigue or exhaustion, if it comes from severe prolonged stress, if it comes from food sensitivities, if it comes from Lyme or mold infection, if it comes from toxicity, you treat what causes it? Well, how do you find out what causes it? You ask a proper history. So when was the last time you felt well? I mean, that’s the thing I handed him as he headed for home was the fibromyalgia video workshop that Roger Billica and I did. For those of you that haven’t seen that, it is like the best compliment I ever got was the rheumatologist that stood up in the back of the room and said, this is absolutely, without a doubt, the best presentation I’ve ever seen on fibromyalgia.

Kim Pittis:
Oh.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah. So.

Kim Pittis:
I have a couple of questions for you actually, so I remember taking my first Core on in person. And you talked a lot about fibromyalgia, and that’s for a lot of the data points where how has diagnosing fibromyalgia from that point? So whenever that was to now, how has that changed or has it?

Dr. Carol:
It has. In 2009, American College of Rheumatology, the diagnostic criteria used to be nonrestorative full-body pain. So you can’t have fibromyalgia of the right shoulder. Full body pain. chronic nonrestorative sleep. And 11 out of 18 tender points. Tender to less than 4 pounds per square inch pressure. So I was teaching a course in 2009, and one of the practitioners in Los Angeles informed me with some degree of irritation, “you know, the tender points are no longer part of the diagnosis.” It’s like, excuse me. They took out the tender points and they put in something. There was hand-waving involved about central sensitization. So, the next summer, in 2010, after David Simons had passed, I went up to Seattle to focus on pain and John Russell was there. John Russell was the President of the American College of Rheumatology, the fibromyalgia section and got to listen to his lecture and then go up. And I could call him John because of his relationship with David Simons. And I said, John, can you tell me why you took out the tender point exam? It was the only objective finding. And he rolled his eyes and sighed, and he said, Carol, I took it out because after 25 years, we could not teach MDs. So those of you that are watching, if you press your thumb against your finger, where to go? There it is. You press your thumb against your finger, and you look at your thumbnail when it blanches. When it turns a little bit white, that’s 4 pounds. He said we couldn’t teach them to do that. And I said, well, I bought an Algometer. They’re 150 bucks, but I used it every day. And he said they were too cheap. They wouldn’t buy one. So they took out the criteria because they couldn’t get the physicians to use them. I still measure with an algometer 11 out of 18 tender points, tender to less than 4 pounds per square inch pressure, and that gives you an objective measure as they progress. Besides their pain score, right? And so yeah.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. Because you’re not dealing with range of motion. Right. Because range of motion is the objective finding that most of us use. Right? That’s how we know things are getting better, even when the pain maybe stays the same. Where it can be frustrating. We’re like, well, the pain really hasn’t gone down. I’m like, yeah, but look how high you can return. Oh yeah, that’s right. I can grab the cup. I’m like, right, so we are moving in a direction. Although typically when you increase range of motion pain does kind of correlate. It follows that same track. But yeah that’s really sad and really interesting.

Dr. Carol:
So fibromyalgia to some extent is a little like. I wouldn’t say it’s like cancer, but it’s like you give them a diagnosis that’s incurable. And you can write them off.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
You don’t have to think. You don’t have to it. And when I was talking to Dr. Wood, it was like, Patrick, it’s not a Lyrica deficiency. It’s not a gabapentin deficiency. It’s not even a dopamine deficiency. His area of study in neuroendocrinology when he was in research was dopamine and fibro. Of course, dopamine is low. Dopamine is made with branched-chain amino acids and when fibromyalgia patients, when their gut wall gets thin, they’re short on all the branched-chain amino acids. So they can’t make dopamine. They can’t make serotonin.

Kim Pittis:
I have another question, though, okay? It’s like my own personal Q&A day right now. Okay. It’s the least I can do with my phone being glitchy. Is there more or less fibromyalgia diagnoses now than there was when you started? Do you know what I mean? Because sometimes, like, we have those ebbs and flows where we see Ehlers-Danlos all the time or we’re seeing. Just diagnoses changing, right? Like.

Dr. Carol:
Actually. I don’t know.

Kim Pittis:
Okay.

Dr. Carol:
That’s a good question because it’s like, honestly, I see less fibromyalgia now than I did 20 years ago. Right. We saw it all the time. the diagnosis you see now is MCAS and Sibo. So the diagnosis you see more often is the thing that they develop a test for. Right?. So now Sibo is the new Candida. So back in 1998 through about 2004, if somebody had gut trouble, I have Candida. It’s like, okay, now people come in and they have Sibo and then they have MCAS, and those two are real things. But they shouldn’t last for ten years. Not if you treat the gut. Not if you turn on the Vagus And then the other one is cell danger response. That one. God bless them. They found a mechanism for how inflammation and histamine response in the body happens. But it’s not even a diagnosis, it’s a mechanism with no cure. Let me give you something incurable. So I’m off the hook, Right? So I don’t know about fibromyalgia. It’s like, what are you guys seeing?

Kim Pittis:
We have we have a few questions. Why don’t we get to some questions here? I can’t see them that great on here, but I’ll let you maybe.

Dr. Carol:
Okay. Carrie, where are we? Neurofeedback or the programs or deal running. If you’re going to do neurofeedback I would do concussion in Vagus. So if you look at the vagus nerve webinar, there’s that one slide that shows the vagus increases all the good stuff and decreases all the bad stuff. So, run concussion in Vagus before. and then do your neurofeedback and see if your baseline is different than it was before, but it’s a confounding variable. The other thing you can do is use a Magnetic Converter, down around your waist, and it should not cause an artifact in the neurofeedback. And I’m not sure what you’re doing new or feedback for. So that’s the other question. But it seems like concussion in Vagus would be your friend. Hypermobility, EDS, week here in Grand Junction. It’s everybody’s EDS. Once you start seeing it, who was it? Mike Cirami, came to the Portland. Two-day practicum, he said. It’s 20% of the practice. They walk in the door. I check everybody. It’s 20. It’s everywhere.

Kim Pittis:
Well, why?

Dr. Carol:
It’s because people are used to Ehlers-Danlos being, you know, nasty gums, cardiac trouble, POTS really the more difficult end of the spectrum. But Ehlers-Danlos is a whole continuum of hypermobility. A hypermobility syndrome. Spectrum disorders is a version of Ehlers-Danlos. I think there’s 5 or 6 genes involved in Ehlers-Danlos that affect different systems, depending on how many of the genes you have that are positive or tend you towards EDS. So if you have two of the five, then maybe you’re just hyperbumble and a great gymnast but then you get in an auto accident when you’re 22 and oops, then you have ligamentous laxity in the spine, and that means you have nerve pain in your hand or arm.

Kim Pittis:
You have a question?

Dr. Carol:
Hypermobility, week here in Grand Junction, 3 machines on Monday. Yes. Results are amazing. Yay! If the connective tissue is still so, she’s still a Beighton zero. Can I run 13, 51, 91? Release the crunches and knees and shoulders from previous dislocations. I try 13/396 13/480 So, scarring in the nerve. Scarring in the joint capsule. And see where you get with that. I wouldn’t do anything with the connective tissue. What do you think?

Kim Pittis:
Yeah, I agree. Just my hypothesis and precautionary thoughts on that.

Dr. Carol:
Okay. So new coming in on Friday. For CRPS, on the foot. Found out she has hEDS. What’s hEDS? As POTS, MCAS and endo. Well, that means vagus nerve isn’t working, but that isn’t surprising if you have CRPS. So to treat the CRPS, it’s not easy, Watch the video, 40/396. 40/562, 40/10, 40/89, 40/92. That whole thing. And then concussion in Vagus So run in the background. concussion in Vagus over and over again. And when you’ve got the standard concussion in Vagus. So in a patient that has POTS, MCAS and I’m assuming endo is endometriosis. and take the concussion in Vagus protocol and increase the time on 40/89 from 4 minutes to 8 minutes and increase the time on increased secretions in the Vagus to 20 minutes. I mean, I’ve run vitality in the Vagus for 60 minutes to get rid of POTS. MCAS, you’ve got to got to start feeling better. So they can modify their diet. Talking to them about avoiding wheat while they’ve got MCAS, CRPS, and POTS is like, no, no, they’re just there’s no thing. Endometriosis, in my world, my limited experience is they can’t phosphorylate B6. And if you can get, a CBC on them, look at the size and the volume of the red blood cells. So, the endometriosis usually means that they can’t phosphorylate B6. And you know that because they wouldn’t have endometriosis if they could metabolize estrogen into a non-inflammatory form. Right. So phosphorylate So P5P, phosphorylated B6. Look at the size of the red blood cells and the volume. Are they big? Then they need either adenosyl and hydroxy B-12 or methyl B-12, depending on their COMT status on their ability to demethylate stress hormones. Well, that’s like it’s don’t even bother to unpack that because there’s, just, that’s a whole hour.

Kim Pittis:
That’s a lot. That’s a loaded question right there.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah, it really is. and I learned it from a patient who learned it from Amy Yasko. Whoo! It’s like stress hormones in your brain are epinephrine. Epinephrine and norepinephrine and epinephrine and norepinephrine have methyl groups on the end of them. And they’re stress hormones in your brain. Okay. There’s only two ways to get rid of stress hormones in your brain. And that is this enzyme, catechol-o-methyl transferase. So it transfers the methyl group off of epinephrine and norepinephrine and sends it on its way. Well, if you don’t have that enzyme you don’t even have to do the genetics. But it’s nice for people to see it in print. They are the people that have to run or they feel terrible. Yeah. I mean, I don’t even have to look at your 23andMe and NutraHacker because, like, you’ve pretty, pretty sure you’ve got snips in all 5 or 6 of them, I do, I’m missing one and I have snips in the other five. I always ran, I climb mountains, I scuba dive, I was always running. Even when I was a drug rep. I ran in my high heels between the car and the doctor’s office. So if you give these patients methyl B-12, which is mean, methylation is like the big hot thing now. But if you give them methyl B-12 and they don’t have that enzyme,in three days, they’re crazy person. They’re like having panic attacks every 5 minutes or 30 minutes. Right?

Kim Pittis:
Right.

Dr. Carol:
So that’s where you kind of tweak it. So what do you do for fun? I run five miles a day. Okay, so right then you have the information that says this person does not have most of the enzymes, so automatically you prescribe or suggest adenosyl and hydroxy B-12. Methyl folate, they can get away with for some reason, I don’t know why. And then the endometriosis is being able to phosphorylate B6, because phosphorylating B6 allows you to take estrogen down an anti-inflammatory pathway. It’s way more than that. But it turns out.

Kim Pittis:
It makes sense. You have a few minutes. So let’s try to get to some of these other.

Dr. Carol:
Oh, wait.

Kim Pittis:
You can probably see them better.

Dr. Carol:
Woman who had 94% of her body burned, also is Hypermobile.

Kim Pittis:
Well.

Dr. Carol:
Okay, well, it’s still 13/355, 13 in the skin and 13/77. And then maybe run 124/77 to help.

Kim Pittis:
What about vitality and secretions? I just think of something that’s been burned. The elasticity could use.

Dr. Carol:
Yeah, that’s a.

Kim Pittis:
Viability.

Dr. Carol:
Wow. Oh, okay. Hypermobile, hEDS. Yeah. So it’s HSD.

Kim Pittis:
Okay.

Dr. Carol:
Okay, Alice, we’re going to have to. myasthenia gravis, 83 years old. Leaky gut 40/116. Supposedly they’re in the. Sorry, Alice. Can’t go there in.

Kim Pittis:
Three minutes.

Dr. Carol:
One minute.

Kim Pittis:
One minute.

Dr. Carol:
They replaced her left hip three times.

Kim Pittis:
Oh.

Dr. Carol:
Okay. find out what they replaced it with, but odds are she’s allergic to chromium.

Kevin:
Read the question.

Dr. Carol:
Oh, sorry. 91 year old female. Very active in the gym. Three times a week. Does all her own yard work. Drives, cognitively great. Significant left hip pain. Following three hip replacements to the same hip. Now, hurts to put any pressure on it. Can’t lay on that side. Can’t walk very far without pain. Maryland, my money is that she’s allergic to the metal they put in there. Unless they switched, if all three of them are stainless, that just doesn’t make any sense. Unless all three of them are stainless and she’s allergic to chromium.

Kim Pittis:
And running 9 would be quite diagnostic.

Dr. Carol:
Well, 9 and then 16 in all the parts around the hips, so see if that helps. Marilyn.

Kim Pittis:
We have to wrap up.

Dr. Carol:
We do. How did that happen? It happens that way every week.

Kim Pittis:
Well, it was extraordinarily wonky with my bouncing between devices, but I’m glad it kind of worked.

Dr. Carol:
I’m so proud of you for getting it sorted out without this.

Kim Pittis:
This is me with my plan a, b, c, d, e, f, g.

Dr. Carol:
There you go. Okay.

Kim Pittis:
So you’re not here next week. so, ladies and gentlemen, I have secured David Musnick to come on with me. I’m not sure if it’s going to be the 25th or the first. It will be one of those days. So you’re just going to have to come and see who else I have on there. But it should be a lot of fun.

Dr. Carol:
Oh, it’ll be good. You’ll be fine. You don’t even need to have a guest. Because you can talk the talk and walk.

Kim Pittis:
I can talk a lot. I know this. So if there’s anything that anybody would specifically like me to address with my scope of practice, you can email me and I can throw some things together, and we’ll put some surprise guests on and we’ll miss you.

Dr. Carol:
And I’ll be back November 15th. Now, here’s the thing. I land in the US on the 14th, right? In general, my brain arrives about 4 or 5 days later, so, I can’t guarantee that I will speak in complete sentences on the 15th.

Kim Pittis:
I will.

Dr. Carol:
My face will be here.

Kim Pittis:
Right. And I will have all the barricades in place so that you can’t derail the trains.

Dr. Carol:
Oh, yeah. It’ll be interesting.

Kim Pittis:
So funny. All right, everybody, thanks for coming. We’ll see everybody, I will be here. You have a safe trip. Have so much fun on the other side of the planet.

Dr. Carol:
We have 30 people in Australia and we have 30 people in Taiwan. We have full classes in Australia and Taiwan. And, our devices, CustomCare and PrecisionCare are approved by the TGA and in Taiwan, they have a CE mark. I’m just so proud of Bio-Therapeutics and the kind of quality. And then the new software is amazing. Like you can tweak a program for a patient on the patient’s software.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah.

Dr. Carol:
And then decide that you like it so well that you can add it to your mode bank.

Kim Pittis:
Yeah. What a time saver that is.

Dr. Carol:
And then adding the ability to copy and paste.

Kim Pittis:
Yes.

Dr. Carol:
That’s so cool. Anyway, so we’re going to have fun. It’ll be cool.

Dr. Carol:
Of course. Have a good time.

Kim Pittis:
Thanks. You too. We’ll talk to you later.

Dr. Carol:
Talk to you later.

Kim Pittis:
Bye, everybody.

Dr. Carol:
Bye.

Kevin:
The Frequency Specific Microcurrent podcast has been produced by Frequency Specific Seminars for entertainment, educational, and informational 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 expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on any contents of this podcast.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp4 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including automatic transcription software, powerful integrations and APIs, world-class support, enterprise-grade admin tools, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.