The Wellness Curve with Terri Suresh (RN, MSN, ACNP)
Hi, I’m Terri Suresh. Welcome to The Wellness Curve. I’m a nurse practitioner and I have an amazing clinic in Texas called Hormonal Health and Wellness Center, and we are focused on giving you your life back. Today my goal is to educate you and give you some information that might be helpful. Anything wellness – we talk about relationship health, physical health, emotional health, etc.
Today, our guest is Dr. Jennifer Ridley. She’s a chiropractor, but she’s also very passionate about what we call functional medicine. Dr. Ridley, welcome to the show and thank you very much. You & I have a lot of mutual patients. I tease people, or say jokingly, when I fix their hormones and I fix their thyroid and they are still having symptoms of fatigue and other things, I say, “Go see Dr. Ridley. She’s CSI for that kind of stuff. She is going to figure it out. That’s really what this whole functional medicine idea, to me, is about – about getting to the root cause. But let’s hear it from you. Talk a little bit about yourself. Tell us how you got to where you are. Tell us about functional medicine.
Dr. Ridley: Functional medicine is a philosophy of health care that gets down to root cause, and that’s what I am very passionate about. My journey throughout life has been to get to a different mindset about healthcare, to stop managing symptoms and get underneath. So, I explain it like this to my patients. If you were driving down the road and your “check engine” light in your car came on, would you ever in a million years dream of pulling over and pulling out the fuse that made that light come on. Pull the fuse and the light went out. Probably not. Hopefully, you would take your car to a mechanic, have them look under the hood and figure out what made that “check engine” light come on so they can fix the root cause and make the light go out. Unfortunately, most people in this country are doing the opposite. They are pulling over, pulling that fuse, making the light go out, and expecting to be able to go on down the road and be OK.
So, functional medicine tries to interrupt that and says, “Stop the madness. We have to figure out what’s making that light come on. We have to ask the right questions. What’s truly going on under the hood so we can fix that.
Terri: Right. I hear a lot of patients that are seeing you that say they were sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. So, a patient that would come to see you is probably one that conventional medicine has failed them. They have gone in for certain symptoms – kind of like they come see me – for depression, irritability, anxiety, and mood swings. They are tired of being put on anti-depressants and sleeping pills
and anxiety pills that don’t fix the problem. So, in your world, what are some pain points that patients cone to you with?
Dr. Ridley: I take care of the patients that are exactly what you describe. They’ve been everywhere looking for answers and they keep just being put on medication after medication that manages
symptoms. So, my typical patient comes in with a whole bunch of conditions, like acid reflux, migraine headaches, constipation, diarrhea, maybe high cholesterol. They’ve been given a whole bunch of medications –
Terri: And tests, scopes, CTs, and x-rays, because we’ve lost the art of figuring these things out. .
Dr. Ridley: Exactly. So, their labs are beginning to come in line, but they still feel terrible, because we’ve never fixed what was causing all of those symptoms. All that’s happened is their symptoms have been managed for them.
Terri: There’s usually a back story, you know, when people go down a certain path and choose a certain field. How did you go from – typically, we think of a chiropractor as adjusting and body alignment, and all those things. How did you get into this area?
Dr. Ridley: I actually started out in acupuncture. That was my first profession, as it were, and I realized there was more to health than just treating the energy imbalances, so that is when I started looking at physical medicine, so I could treat the physical body, as well as the energetic. Then, in treating the physical body, I noticed that I could adjust somebody all day long and that still didn’t fix everything else that was going on with them. So, improving the body from the inside out and then helping the way they eat, the way they move, the way they think – all of those things play into getting someone to where they feel truly healthy. So, that was my goal – to just add enough knowledge to be able to help people eat right, sleep right, think right, feel right.
Terri: So, the whole concept of functional medicine in those patients out there that I see by the dozens weekly, and I’m sure you do, too, that are really looking for that root cause for those things they are suffering from – well, give me some examples. We talk about fatigue all the time is primarily one of the ones, and bowel issues and other things. How do you go about delving into that and finding and figuring that out?
Dr. Ridley: I really practice more of a patient-centered focus and not a disease centered focus. So, in focusing on a patient, you’re looking at their whole body, so I start all the way back at the beginning with my patients. What was the first illness you remember having?
Terri: Even from childhood?
Dr. Ridley: Even from childhood – way back. When was the last time you felt truly healthy? Think about that. Think about what true health feels like, and then think about when things started to go wrong. So I look at everything from genetic influences, to environmental influences, to lifestyle influences, because putting together that puzzle of where they’ve come from is what helps me figure out what’s going on. Because these chronic illnesses aren’t the same as the way we treat acute illness. So, most of the medical models are based on treating acute illness. Somebody walks in with something like pneumonia, you can figure out what’s going on pretty quickly.
Terri: Right, fever, sore throat.
Dr. Ridley: Right, and they are able to be fixed very quickly. But these chronic, long-standing illnesses – like lupus, fatigue, fibromyalgia, hashimoto, heart disease, cancer - these you can’t fix in 2 or 3 minutes. And they all – you may have 5 patients with the same diagnosis, but all have different causes that cause –
Terri: Root causes.
Dr. Ridley: Right. You can’t figure that out in a 5 minute appointment.
Terri: We’re really getting into finding the root cause of disease which is what functional medicine is. There one thing that I see often in my practice and want to touch on it before we move on to the commercials in media and what we’re being fed. When patients come in and they know there is
something wrong and they’ve been to their doctor. They’ve had all these lab tests and they’ve been told that everything is “normal.” That’s when they get the prescriptions for this and the antidepressants and bla, bla, bla.
Dr. Ridley: Usually the anti-depressants, exactly. Since nothing on the lab work is wrong, you must be crazy!
Terri: Right
Dr. Ridley: With those types of patients what usually is going on is that things are starting to get out of balance in the body because with almost every long-term chronic illness – it was preceded by sometimes years of warnings, of things just starting to slip out of balance. So, on paper, their lab work, let’s say their blood sugar might look totally normal, in the normal range. But if you look back at 10 years’ worth of blood sugar, it’s been slowly going in the wrong direction.
I know you’re intimately familiar with hormones. On paper, your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone are in the normal range, but when you look at the balance, estrogen may be dominant over
progesterone, so the devil is in the balance, really. And if you don’t have someone watching for that, they going to keep telling you you’re normal when you know something is wrong.
Terri: And that’s very frustrating for a patient.
Dr. Ridley: Yes. So you really need a healthcare provider that takes you seriously and starts looking for things shifting, things out of balance, not just is it completely high or is it completely low. Because If you wait, for example until blood sugar is high enough to call abnormal, you’re already in diabetes.
Terri: Same thing with thyroid, same thing with hormones, same thing with all of those things. And I love what you’re talking about – about the lab reference ranges and normals, because I see this all the time. And what a lot of people don’t understand is there’s really no “normal” ranges. There are “expected” ranges. And there’s a big difference in an ”expected” range and a “normal” range, or optimal range. So what happens is when practitioners feed patients with this information and
everything’s normal and it gets into your psyche and you think, “OK, maybe I am crazy,”. And one thing that I’m passionate about, as you are, too, is empowering people to say, “OK, I know there’s something wrong with me.” And I tell people all the time, when I speak in front of audiences, if you know that something’s wrong, I don’t care if you’ve been seeing that doctor for 15-25 years, find somebody that will listen to you. We only have ourselves to blame when we don’t. Right? And how do you get away from all of the media? I was just disgusted. I never watch TV, but a couple of weeks ago I was watching the nightly news, just to see what’s going on in the world. But at any rate, there was a commercial
break and 5 out of the 6 commercials were drug commercials. We’re just feeding people with all of this information again and they are treating symptoms. How can we turn on the TV, see commercials advertising all these things and just tune that out. What’re your thoughts on that?
Dr. Ridley: I don’t know that you can tune it out. I just think you have to wake up and know that that is not what you want for yourself. You have to take charge of your own health because no one else will. Health is absolutely a choice, and choosing to do nothing is also a choice. If you choose to accept what you’re being fed, knowing that you still feel terrible, that’s the choice you’ve made. That puts you on a path to getting sicker and sicker. But if you follow your convictions and you empower yourself to go find answers, you have to keep searching until you find a healthcare practitioner that practices what I call functional medicine. Some people call it integrative health, someone who spends more than 5 minutes with you and will help you figure out what’s wrong.
Terri: Some people even call it alternative medicine. In our world, we call it alternative to bad medicine. Let’s specifically talk a little bit about some things people might present with like acid reflux, insomnia, bowel issues, weight gain, all of those things. Pick a topic and let’s just go.
Dr. Ridley: I do want to comment on something you just said about what people call it – wellness care, alternative care. Be careful. There are a lot of people who call what they do “wellness” but they’re just using vitamins and herbs to manage symptoms, as well. So you’ve got to be careful. Just because you’re taking red yeast rice instead of a statin to lower cholesterol, it’s no different when you haven’t figured out what’s driving your cholesterol up.
Terri: Right. I love it when you talk about this.
Dr. Ridley: Let’s talk about cholesterol. Cholesterol is a real hot button in our society because you can’t watch a TV show without a commercial on a statin. But if you believe in the body’s wisdom, if you believe that this system is designed intelligently, you might suspect that cholesterol was in your body for a reason, and it turns out that it is. For one, cholesterol is your body’s natural anti-inflammatory, so it goes up in response to inflammation. If you artificially lower it without fixing what was causing the inflammation, that’s going to continue to rage out of control, only now you’ve taken your body’s natural defense mechanism away, which was cholesterol to go fix that. Your brain is like 60% fat, and a large part of that is cholesterol, so your body uses lots of cholesterol to heal your nervous system.
Terri: And it is the building block for hormones.
Dr. Ridley: And Vitamin D, Estrogen, Progesterone, all of that comes from cholesterol.
Terri: Let’s talk about cholesterol and how high cholesterol may be a warning sign and how conditioned we are to automatically lower that, and I so agree because cholesterol is a building block for so many things. Same thing with this whole idea of acid reflux and gastric acid. I can’t even tell you how many people just pop those antacids like candy. I know that is a hot spot for you.
Dr. Ridley: It is. That is one thing I really try to educate people about. There are consequences to just suppressing that particular symptom, because again, it goes back to the wisdom of the body. Acid is in there for a reason. Acid is what your body uses to digest your food. It is what enables you to absorb your B vitamins. It is also your first line of defense against bacteria and virus. So, if you are suppressing acid production, you’ve just knocked out all of that. So, what might be causing reflux? For a lot of my patients, it’s a food allergy or a food sensitivity, so I do a lot of food allergy testing.
Terri: Or eating too much.
Dr. Ridley: It can be eating too much. It can be that they are just so tired that their body can’t make enough acid, because making stomach acid takes a lot of energy from the body. So if you wake up after not sleeping well, you’ve had a bad day for weeks at the office, your body might start cutting back on acid production to try to give you some energy – assuming this is going to be a temporary problem. You’ll get a good night’s sleep and then acid production can go back to normal. But if it starts to become chronic fatigue, then you start getting chronic low stomach acid, which means food sits in your stomach and churns instead of getting digested well and starts to bubble back up, creating reflux. So most reflux is actually low stomach acid, not too much. Taking something to further suppress acid may make the symptom go away, but it makes the original problem much worse.
Terri: It is such a big problem because we see antacids even being given to babies and neonates. What are some long-term consequences of that?
Dr. Ridley: Think about the fact that the acid was there to help you absorb your vitamins and minerals, particularly intrinsic factor, which gets secreted with acid, helps you absorb your B vitamins. What if for
years you don’t absorb B-12 well, and lots of people have heard of taking B-12 shots for energy. For many, many people that started with not having enough acid or taking an acid blocker. And that’s just one. There are lots of vitamins that get suppressed with this, not to mention that you send partially digested food into your intestines, so often, it is the beginning of IBS, Crohns, constipation, all sorts of bowel issues because you were taking that acid blocker. And think about if you were doing that to an infant that can’t even speak about the discomfort and the tiredness.
Terri: Oh, it is just so frustrating. How do we flip that when we are bombarded with all this
information? We talk about speaking to the pain. I’ll tell you Big Pharma (?) does it really well. They can speak in those commercials to pain. “Are you having this? Waking up with this? Take this pill.” It’s just a really frustrating message.
Dr. Ridley: I try to educate my patients that you can get to the root cause and make these pain points go away. In fact, it is much easier, usually, in the end, once we treat root cause because we’re just fixing one thing. What if it’s digestive problems that have lead to your migraines, your depression, your fatigue. So we’re really just working on improving the health of the bowels. Then, the body heals itself of the rest of those problems.
Terri: That’s really a great point to lead into, because psychological issues, like depression, can be caused not by this chemical imbalance that we need an anti-depressant for so much – and often times it is hormonal – you’ve got some other theories that you just touched on – internally, what’s happening when it expresses as depression?
Dr. Ridley: Malnutrition is one of the big reasons for this sort of low grade depression. Now, I’m not talking about the people who are contemplating suicide. That’s a different category. But most of America is kind of the walking wounded. They are sort of apathetic, no true joy, no real sadness, just kind of this flat life. So for many people, there is something else going on. Their brain is not getting the nourishment that it requires. So, it starts with digestion, #1, because there are a lot of vitamins that can play into depression. I’m not a big fan of just going to the vitamin store and loading up on isolated vitamins that have been known to be linked to depression. I test my patients for all of the vitamins and minerals across the board because just giving isolated vitamins can throw other things out of balance. So, you need to know, for sure, what’s low. If you just start taking massive doses of 1 or 2 vitamins that you suspect are the problem, you can really start to throw other things out of balance.
Also with depression, I do a lot of neurotransmitter testing so I’m not guessing whether serotonin, dopamine, GABA and others are out of balance. These things can be tested and then balanced nutritionally. They all start with amino acids and proteins in the diet.
Terri: Not to get on my soapbox, but a lot of people ask me this all the time. Why doesn’t my doctor know about these things. It makes our job harder to convince people that what we’re saying is true. And honestly, I’ll have to say, I don’t really have a hard job, because it’s what people already know is true, but they just haven’t found the right person. I always defend conventional medicine to a certain degree, because we get our education from the pharmaceutical industries, from profitable industries. So, changing that mindset in conventional medicine, shifting the mindset away from bandaiding symptoms . . . .
Dr. Ridley: It all has its place. Traditional medicine absolutely has its place. They are expert at things I don’t even begin to understand. But when it comes to nutrition, I’m the expert. So, that’s the
difference.
Terri: Why is nutrition is not talked about in medical school? That’s a whole other issue – a whole other show.
We are discussing finding the root cause of things that ail us – depression, anxiety, mood swings, stomach pain, a myriad of things for which we visit our conventional practitioners every day and most often, are bandaided with prescriptions to fix symptoms and not really fix the root cause. Why is it so difficult to lose weight? This could be a whole 30-minutes show in and of itself, but just give us your top pain points on that and pearls of wisdom to share – how what you do plays a role in managing weight.
Dr. Ridley: My first question to people with weight gain or weight loss problems is, “When did it start?” Is this something that just recently happened or have you been dealing with this for a very long time? Those are two very different people. So, if it’s a very short time, they’ve usually just started eating wrong and it’s a quick fix. But for the people that have tried everything - they’ve tried diet after diet – they exercise all the time; they keep gaining it back or they just can’t lose it. You know, for those patients, there’s something else going on. It could be a hormone imbalance that needs to be addressed – estrogen or progesterone being out of balance can make weight loss very difficult. It could be that your adrenals are not doing their job, and very few physicians actually test for adrenal fatigue.
Terri: They don’t quite believe in adrenal fatigue.
Dr. Ridley: Right. And it’s a big player in metabolism and energy. Same with thyroid. A lot of people have had their thyroid tested and been told that it’s totally normal, but a sluggish thyroid, within that normal range, can really contribute to weight loss problems. And most importantly, what I counsel all my patients on is, “A body under stress does not lose weight.” So, whatever that stress is – for most of my patients, it is chemical stress. They are still drinking soda. They are still eating artificial sweeteners and chemicalized food. So they are keeping their calories down, but the quality of the food they are putting in their body is creating massive stress inside. So as long as you are under lots of stress,
whatever is triggering it, it is incredibly hard to lose weight. So, for my patients, I help them dig through their life. Are you exercising wrong? Are you exercising to the point that it is causing you stress? Some of those marathon runners that can’t lose weight – it’s because they don’t give themselves enough exercise recovery time. Are you - even though you are keeping your calories under control – choosing the wrong foods? And I illustrate that with my patients – if you had a 500-calorie diet, or a 1200-calorie diet, something more realistic, and you ate 1200 calories of Snickers bars or 1200 calories of broccoli, which day do you think you’d lose weight? The body knows the difference. It’s not all about calories. So, getting the foods right – and for me, I do a lot of allergy and food sensitivity testing – because sometimes a health food can be a problem if you have a real sensitivity to it.
Terri: And these are things you may not even know. For instance, I always share this story – and I have several of them now that I’ve been sending patients to you – I had a particular patient that I sent to you that hormones balanced, thyroid balanced – and I am really liberal with thyroid because of this whole thyroid resistance and Type 2 hyperthyroidism is a big deal right now. It’s always been, but it is coming to light. I still couldn’t figure her out. I saw her a few months later and she had already dropped 20 lbs. She said, “Can you believe I was allergic to coffee?!” We think that when we have an allergy that we break out in a rash, that we have this head-to-toe thing, and so, who knew, every morning when she had her coffee, it was creating this inflammatory response. Briefly touch on that because people think, “I don’t have any food allergies because I’ve never broken out.”
Dr. Ridley: Right. There are 2 different kinds of antibodies in the body. The kind that is on your skin is what allergists test for with skin testing. So, a lot of people have had the skin testing for food and been told they are fine, but you don’t smear food on your skin. So, what needs to be done is the blood test, which is an IGG test, which is a whole different kind of food allergy test that tells us what happens once the food hits your blood stream. So, it may not be hives at all. It could be anything that gets worse with inflammation. Once you eat food that you have a problem with, it creates inflammation in your blood stream. Now anywhere the blood goes can have symptoms. It’s different for different foods and different people. Everyone is very unique in this regard. (Omit “very” – if you are unique, you can’t be more unique)
For some people, this creates loss of focus, so a lot of the kiddos I help with ADD and ADHD. Once we figure out their dietary needs, what’s good and bad for them, their focus recovers remarkably. Migraine headaches – same thing. It often goes back to something in the diet. All of these foods that you might ingest – if you are creating an inflammatory response, that’s very stressful, and that goes back to high stress – your body doesn’t lose weight.
Terri: Chronic stress and chronic “dis-ease” and chronic disease processes throughout the lifespan – cancer, diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol – all of those things that we talked about . . . . So, your mission is to change the way people think about their health. What do you mean by that?
Dr. Ridley: I want people, #1, to feel empowered to look for root cause – that they are the ones that have to live with this body; and, #2, I want them to start thinking about health as vitality, not as an absence of symptoms. Health is NOT, my cholesterol is ok as long as I take “x”, I regularly make my headaches go away with these pain pills; or if I take my Ambien, I can still sleep. If you quit taking whatever remedy it is that you use and the symptoms come back, then you still have these problems. That is not true health care, that is just symptom management.
Terri: If I don’t look at my checkbook balance, it’s not zero, right?
Dr. Ridley: It’s teaching people that they can be truly healthy and vital again. And that comes with improving the body, inside the body, and then letting the body heal itself.
Terri: How can people get in touch with you, if they want to work with you? And even people who don’t live in the area - I know you do some long-distance care, too.
Dr. Ridley: I do. I think you have my website up (www.LiveWellDFW.com). Certainly, you can contact my office if you are local, but I do work with a lot of people all over Texas by getting in touch with their family care practitioner and arranging to have the lab work drawn that we need, and then I can work with them over the phone to look at those lab results and how we can help them.
Terri: Thank you, Dr. Ridley. Hopefully, we can have you as a regular guest, because we have a lot of topics we can cover, a myriad of topics. Thank you for listening and tuning in. If you just caught the end of it – Dr. Jennifer Ridley at www.livewelldfw.com – and I’m Terri Suresh at