Episode 350: Women’s Health & Medical Gaslighting: The Hidden Struggles of Autoimmune Disease
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Have you ever felt dismissed by a doctor when trying to get answers about your health? You’re not alone. In this episode, we dive into the reality of medical gaslighting—especially for women struggling with autoimmune diseases. From misdiagnosis to being told symptoms are “just stress,” we explore why this happens, how it impacts long-term health, and what you can do to advocate for yourself. Tune in for expert insights, real stories, and practical strategies to take control of your health journey.
If you're a practitioner looking to better support clients with autoimmunity, our LIVE 4-Day Autoimmunity Training Program is for you. You'll learn clinical clues, how to assess for root causes, and empower patients to reclaim their health. Enrollment is open now—click here to sign up!
In this episode:
Autoimmunity: Clinical and Emotional Insights [06:03]
"Medical Gaslighting in Diagnosis" [10:34]
Ignoring Women's Pain in Healthcare [15:30]
Dealing with Medical Mystery [22:55]
The Burden of Chronic Suffering [27:49]
"Earning Trust for Healing" [32:51]
The Importance of Listening [35:14]
Helping Clients Explore Health Options [38:18]
Functional Medicine: Knowing Your Limits [41:32]
In-Depth Health Root Cause Analysis [43:24]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™ (Next cohort starts in April of 2025)
LIVE 4-Day Autoimmunity Training Program (kicks off March 10th)
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Bon Charge (Use code FUNK to save 15%)
Kion Aminos (Get 20% off monthly orders and 10% off one time orders)
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Erin Holt [00:00:00]:
I'm Erin Holt and this is the Functional Nutrition Podcast where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet, culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the fantasy that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do and that's why creating a new model is my life's work.
Erin Holt [00:00:37]:
I believe in the ripple effect, so I founded the Functional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share because you never know whose life you might change and of course, keep coming back for more. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the show. It is your host, Erin Holt.
Erin Holt [00:01:18]:
Most of you are listening to this. Some of you may be watching this. So if you are watching this, I am wearing very minimal makeup and I've got my glasses on because I have my first ever eye stye. Not only that, I'll do you one better. I have a stye in each eye. I'm pretty sure. I think that it's because I was using older mascara. I was quite literally scraping the bottom of the barrel every single time I had to use it and just kept forgetting to reorder it.
Erin Holt [00:01:50]:
And if you're like me and you use more of the natural beauty products, which is a very good idea, just understand that they don't have the preservatives that other beauty brands or, you know, conventional makeup have. And so we have to just be mindful of that and upgrade our products from time to time, especially mascara. So that's just a little pro tip from me to you. Word to the wise, get yourself some new mascara. If you've been using yours for like nine months or more, okay? Otherwise you're going to end up with the old crusty eyes dye like you, girl. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about some very fun, light, effervescent stuff. Instead like medical gaslighting.
Erin Holt [00:02:31]:
How fun. I am currently spending all of my time getting ready for my upcoming four day training, Autoimmunity in the whole patient. It's going to be a four day deep dive for practitioners into labs, clinical clues, functional care strategies for your autoimmune patients and clients. I'm super excited about this. It's been a minute since I've created new stuff. Of course, I'm always creating new stuff within fna, our practitioner training, but I haven't created like a new course in a while. So I'm really excited. I feel like I got my groove back and I'm just so pumped.
Erin Holt [00:03:11]:
The past this is taking a turn. Wasn't planning on saying any of this. The past nine months or so I have really been in the weeds of my business, just doing more of the day to day stuff and not able to step into the visionary and the creative seat that I really love to occupy. And so we have changed a lot of things so that I can do that. And I'm very eager and excited. So I've got this well of creativity coming through me and the four day training is where I am currently channeling it. It's going to be next week, so there's still time to sign up and I really encourage you to do so because I've never done anything like this before. A mini training for practitioners at an extremely affordable rate.
Erin Holt [00:03:51]:
It's under $300. But in true error and form, I have created much too much curriculum because I was so excited. So I just kept going. I have to do some heavy edits, I have to do some heavy pruning. Have no fear though, because all of the overflow will end up in FNA. For the people who want the juice, the magic, the full razzle dazzle that will still be there. And FNA is currently open for enrollment. Just a heads up, we've had some practitioners jump in and join us already.
Erin Holt [00:04:23]:
So that's really, really exciting. But for today, the episode that I am recording today here, it was originally going to be just for the four day training, but ultimately I decided I didn't want this one behind a paywall. Because I want everyone to hear this. I want everyone to access this. I want patients and clients to know that they are not alone. If you're listening to this and you've experienced this, I want you to know you are not alone. I want you to be able to share this episode with people who get it and people who don't. Maybe even more so the people who don't.
Erin Holt [00:05:05]:
So maybe they will start to understand what you're navigating, what you've been going through. Today I'm really going to be speaking into practitioners, but if you are the one experiencing any of this, please reach out to us. If you're looking for support, this is what my team and I do. In fact, we recently expanded the team at the end of last year so that we can serve even more clients and just give them this really comprehensive, high touch care. Part of the reason that we brought on Nicole full time is for her experience with autoimmunity, just because we're seeing more and more of it and we want to be prepared with the support that you guys need. Now, if you are a practitioner listening to this, this is a primer for the upcoming four day training. You can consider it like required listening. In the training, we're going to showcase what someone with autoimmunity looks like from a clinical perspective.
Erin Holt [00:06:03]:
So symptoms sign, specific blood work, specific data, certain clinical clues, when to start thinking autoimmunity and what the next right steps might be from there. But I also want you to understand what someone with autoimmunity looks like from an emotional perspective. I believe you should be just as prepared for this as you are for which labs to run and how, how to interpret those labs and how to strategically build protocols. We have to support people on multiple levels and understanding what they've been navigating and what they're experiencing on an emotional level is huge. Some of you may know that I'm a Stanford trained compassion teacher and what I can tell you with certainty is that sitting with someone in their suffering is a pathway to healing, particularly when their experience has been exactly the opposite. People avoiding their suffering or even worse, telling them that it's not real. And so that's really what we're going to get into today. We're going to talk about the medical gaslighting that women in particular experience, especially if they're experiencing mystery symptoms.
Erin Holt [00:07:22]:
And honestly, most autoimmune cases start as mystery symptoms. We're going to talk about why it's so hard to get an autoimmune diagnosis. And we're also going to get into for practitioners four specific ways that you can support your clients struggling with a chronic illness, including autoimmunity. And again, if you're the patient, I think this episode will work for you as well. If you're a patient, these are the ways that your practitioner should support you and you should expect that good comprehensive care. So let's get into it. I want to start off with some statistics. The NIH estimates that 23.5 million Americans have an autoimmune disease, whereas the American Autoimmune Related Disease association estimates it's closer to 50 million.
Erin Holt [00:08:14]:
And that's a pretty big discrepancy. But as we navigate today's conversation, you might understand why it's actually pretty tricky to receive an autoimmune diagnosis. So that probably accounts for the stats maybe being a little off. Current stats are 1 in 12 women will end up with an autoimmune disease, so that's not good. And then one in 24 men.
Erin Holt [00:09:49]:
So yes, there is a huge gender gap in autoimmunity. We're going to talk about that in the four day training. The reasons why some that we know and some that are my personal theory as a woman who was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition. So there are over a hundred autoimmune conditions. Some examples type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, MS. lupus, IBD, Crohn's, Colitis, Addison's Disease, Graves Hashimoto's, Sjogren's, Pernicious Anemia, Celiac Disease. These are just some of them. But like I said over a hundred autoimmune conditions because the immune system touches everything in your body so it can impact and affect everything in your body.
Erin Holt [00:10:34]:
Now those that list is diagnosed conditions but many people will navigate the healthcare system for years before even receiving a diagnosis and in that time, it's not uncommon for them to experience a tremendous amount of gaslighting. So gaslighting refers, I know it's a term that's used a lot over the past few years, but it really refers to a form of cognitive manipulation within a relationship in which a more powerful person sows seeds of doubt in a less powerful individual, making them question their own perception, their own judgment, and their own feelings of sanity. Like, you start to think, am I going crazy? Like, am I the crazy one? Is this not real? And it can occur in different types of relationships and different types of settings, including medical settings. So one way this can look, this medical gaslighting, is discounting patient concerns or downplaying their worries. So I want to give an example, real world example. A client of mine years ago came to me with extreme, and I mean extreme, digestive distress. This wasn't just like the rumbly dumps, this was bad. She had such awful diarrhea that she had to wear diapers.
Erin Holt [00:11:50]:
She had to eat pureed baby food when she had a flare up, and then sometimes go on liquid diets for weeks when her symptoms flared. And so for six years, six years, she went to her doctor, she went to her physicians, and she was told that it was normal for her. She just had to learn to adjust, basically, like, this is your norm. Just deal. Because her weight was stable, they told her she was fine. So that was like the one metric that they were really looking at. She asked for more labs. She tried to advocate for herself from doctors, from specialists. They told her there was no point.
Erin Holt [00:13:54]:
So telling someone she is fine just because she's not losing weight in this scenario, when she was clearly severely suffering is an example of gaslighting. Because she started to believe like, okay, I guess this is normal. I guess there is no help for me. I guess I was kind of even crazy to think that there was another path for me. Medical gaslighting is not a new issue in medicine. The invalidation, the dismissal and the disregard of women's health have been a long standing practice. We can go all the way back to the term hysteria, which was basically the medical explanation for anything mysterious or unmanageable in women. Hysteria, from the Greek word for uterus, was basically a catch all term for anything that a woman could experience.
Erin Holt [00:14:40]:
They're like, we're not really sure what it is. It's hysteria, okay? And it wasn't until the freaking 90s that this was written out as a disease classification. So in 93, the World Health Organization removed hysteria from the International Statistical Classification of Diseases. And then in 94, it was removed from the DSM as a diagnostic classification. So this is recent history, babes. Like I was in third and fourth grade listening to Salt and Pepa, okay? So this is recent history and it's still ongoing. Even though hysteria has been removed as a diagnosis, it's still a pretty pervasive practice. Collectively, we're all pretty okay with women feeling like shit.
Erin Holt [00:15:30]:
Women are often not taken seriously when they report chronic pain or any other unexplained condition. It's like if we can't figure it out, if we can't pinpoint it with the diagnosis were like, it's probably in your head. There's a tendency for healthcare providers to believe women's pain is exaggerated. Women's pain is more likely to be written off as a psychological issue rather than a physical issue, especially compared to men. One study published in Academic Emergency Medicine found that women who went to the emergency room with severe stomach pain had to wait for almost 33% longer than men with the same symptoms. So this is why I say collectively, we're all pretty okay with women feeling like shit. I mean, I've told you all this story a hundred times if I've told it once. When I was a new mom, I had had my baby, I went to the doctors for an entire year and they just kept being like, yeah, you're a new mom.
Erin Holt [00:16:29]:
This is just it. This is it. You will suffer, you will be in pain, you will be miserable, you'll be uncomfortable. And that's just life as a woman. I'm sorry. Not much we can do about it. Tldr I had a, like a raging autoimmune condition this whole time. But because I wasn't taken seriously, because we're okay with women feeling like shit, nobody was willing to do a deeper dive until I had to self advocate.
Erin Holt [00:16:55]:
Just because women's pain has been normalized doesn't mean that your pain, your suffering, or your symptoms are normal. So just because your pain has been normalized doesn't mean your pain is normal or okay. But it does put women in this funky position of like, what's even the point? If I'm not going to be believed, what's even the point? My friend recently was experiencing some pretty significant chest discomfort. And both myself and her husband were like, you need to go to the doctor. Like, we don't play when it comes to heart stuff, Stuff, especially as a woman in her 40s, we don't play with this. But she was just way too nervous to tell her doctors because she didn't want to sound crazy. So this is the really harmful downstream side effect from this long standing practice in medicine, which is to gaslight women and to tell them, like, yeah, your pain probably is all in your head. Get out of here, you goofball.
Erin Holt [00:17:54]:
Get out of here, you rascal. What are you even talking about? So why is this happening? It's not happening because doctors are bad. Okay? Let's get that right out of the way. I say this all of the time and I think it bears repeating. People don't get into medicine. People don't dedicate their life to medicine unless they genuinely want to help people. Okay? So we have to just step back because it is very en vogue to come down hard on the healthcare system, and we should as a system. But what I don't love is coming down hard on the individuals who are part of that system because oftentimes they are fighting against the very same system that we're complaining about as well.
Erin Holt [00:18:38]:
And the reality with gaslighting is it can occur without the conscious intent of the person doing it. So it's not like, you know, a doctor's like suiting up, putting on his lab coat, her lab coat, their lab coat, and saying, you know what I'm going to do today? I'm going to go gaslight the shit out of my patients. Chances are that's probably not happening. There's a paper that I read that was really good. Paradigms of distrust. Medical gaslighting leaves patients dismissed and disrespected. I'll throw that into the show notes because some of the quotes that I'm pulling are from that article, including this one. Doctors are often up against a lack of time and resources, which can make those challenging diagnoses even more difficult and less grounded in productive communication.
Erin Holt [00:19:21]:
So they're fighting this system, and because of that, or they're operating inside of this broken system, and because of that, their communication might seem broken, their approach might seem broken. And the first thing to understand here, so, you know, the individual medical professionals aren't getting all of the heat. Autoimmunity is actually a really challenging diagnosis. It's really tough to diagnose. There's no one test for autoimmunity. There's no one test to assess these things. It's oftentimes a collection of symptoms and lab abnormalities that leads to a diagnosis. And that can take a lot of time.
Erin Holt [00:20:02]:
So I want to give you a little bit more background to understand. Medical education provides minimal learning about autoimmune disease. This is from the American Autoimmune Related Disease Association. Specialists are generally unaware of the interrelationships among different autoimmune diseases or advanced treatment outside their specialty area. And we know this is. I talk a lot about this on the show. This is one of the chief problems with healthcare. We focus on one area rather than understanding that disease is really a loss of communication and interplay between all areas.
Erin Holt [00:20:40]:
So this is why it can be so hard to break out of chronic disease, break out of that cycle. There's a lack of understanding of how all the interrelationships work. I've used this quote a bajillion times from Gabor Maté. The more specialized doctors become, then the more they know about a body part or organ and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that body part or organ resides. I often talk about practicing intuitive, functional medicine. And this is what I mean. I'm coming back to the human being. When I'm looking at a set of lab data, I want to get to know the human being first, the human being behind the set of data.
Erin Holt [00:21:19]:
That's really important to me. So we have different specialists or partialists as a Recent podcast guest described it. We've got for example, rheumatologists, which really focuses on the joints, the muscles. But there's no like catch all autoimmune specialist. There's not an autoimmune ologist. It's one of the most common diseases in the world, but we don't have a specialist for it. We don't have a specialist for the immune system. There's immunologists, which are more often than not researchers and not clinicians.
Erin Holt [00:21:50]:
And even within specializations it can be really tricky. In rheumatology, for example, diseases often have poorly defined symptomatology. So patients with the very same condition can present very differently. They might have different symptoms, they might have different lab markers. And like I said, it's oftentimes the constellation or collection of symptoms plus lab abnormalities that can over time lead to a diagnosis. More often than not, in conventional medicine, the diagnosis is not usually made until there's clear tissue destruction. And by that point the autoimmune process has already progressed so much. And that's why I do feel that conventional medicine, although it's pretty naive and sometimes overly simplistic when it comes to autoimmunity, I do feel that it can still have a leg up if we're aware of the different stages, stages of autoimmunity and we're screening for them.
Erin Holt [00:22:55]:
And that's something that we will get into in the four day training next week. So somebody might not have diagnostic criteria to say you have this disease if they're in the early stages, but they might have, and they often do have all of those mystery symptoms. And so they're bopping around from specialist to specialist, from doctor to doctor, trying to cobble together some answers for themselves. And there is a lot of uncertainty for extended periods of time. And you know what makes us feel really unsafe? Just our human brains? Uncertainty, the not knowing. And so this creates a lot of distress for people. And in this time, somebody might be under diagnosed, not diagnosed at all, mischaracterize, or just like on the merry go round of seeing doctor and doctor, specialists and specialists and have people. It's kind of like the shrug emoji, like not really sure.
Erin Holt [00:23:50]:
This whole process can go on for years. It can take over four years and up to 20 medical professionals before somebody actually receives an autoimmune diagnosis. So you can imagine the frustration. And unfortunately many of you listening don't have to just imagine it. You've lived it or you're living it right now. I had a client say to me I was gaslit so hard that I started to gaslight myself. Is this real? Am I crazy? Am I making this up? She started to think, like, maybe I'm just too sensitive. Maybe I have to suck it up.
Erin Holt [00:24:27]:
This went on for four years, bebopping around from specialist to specialist, and finally she was diagnosed with. Are you ready for it? Autoimmune hepatitis in rheumatoid arthritis. So all this time that she was having these really clear symptoms but that nobody could explain, it was kind of made out to be like a little bit of a hypochondriac. She had severe autoimmune process happening, and despite these two diagnoses being really scary, let's face it, to her it felt like sweet relief. And that's why I will often refer to a diagnosis as validation. Because a lot of folks are being perceived as hypochondriac from their healthcare providers, from their family, from their friends. They don't really understand what's going on with them. People don't understand what's going on with them.
Erin Holt [00:25:24]:
They can feel really isolated. They can feel really alone. They can start to feel a lot of shame. So a diagnosis, it's almost like tangible proof, like, see, I'm not crazy. This thing is happening. And I really think it speaks to just how hard this experience is that people actually prefer being diagnosed with a serious illness to the experience of searching for answers that great unknown. A survey from Autoimmune association found that 45% of autoimmune patients have been labeled as chronic complainers. Doesn't that just break your heart? Because are these people complaining or are they just communicating their lived experience? And no one was willing to listen. No one was willing to take them seriously. Chronic patients are often dismissed, invalidated, and they oftentimes leave feeling hopeless and powerless
Erin Holt [00:27:45]:
They're given very little answers, very little solutions, and, and very little hope. And not only is there a lot of physical suffering happening, but this also creates mental and emotional suffering. Angst, frustration, despair, shame, confusion, apathy, anger. It's this ongoing process where you feel poorly physically, sometimes so poorly that you have to miss big social occasions, you might have to miss work, you might have to take medical leave of absence from school. And this can start to really impact relationships, this can start to impact finances, this can start to impact future plans. The symptoms themselves can generate a lot of fear. How long will I be like this? Is this my new normal? And then layer on top of that the fact that they have no answers, they're being labeled a complainer, they don't have anyone that believes them. It can feel so isolating. And people don't really understand just how much of a weight that is to carry around.
Erin Holt [00:28:50]:
A lot of people, health providers included, are telling them that it's essentially all in their head, it's not real. So I've described this as a traumatic experience. If trauma is any event, any experience or situation that overwhelms our ability to cope and process what's happened to us, I do consider navigating healthcare with a chronic mystery illness and then the associated medical gaslighting that goes alongside of that as traumatic. And so this is where people are, this is where people have been when they come to us as practitioners. So this is what you might see in practice. And if you're working with complex cases, if you're in the functional space, hey, guess what? You're probably gonna see more and more complex cases. And so ready yourself for this. Spirits are broken.
Erin Holt [00:29:47]:
There can be some degree of distrust built up. And typically the longer they've been navigating their chronic mystery syndromes, the more likely they are to have lost trust over time. So they lose trust in themselves, in their bodies, in their own capacity to Heal. They lose trust in medical systems, they lose trust in practitioners. Somebody on Instagram said this to me and it's just summarizes this so perfectly. Autoimmunity makes me feel like I've failed my body somehow. So they feel like failures and it really feeds this loop that my body is broken. There's something wrong with me, my case is too complex.
Erin Holt [00:30:30]:
Nobody can figure this out. Why even bother? It's horrible, hopeless. And then on top of all of that, the thought of starting up with another practitioner can feel really exhausting, especially if they're not convinced that you can help. So an older client of mine applied to work with me and she said, I've been waiting to work with you for a while, but I was always so tired of starting over with the new healthcare professional. I have many specialists, it's a full time job trying to get the proper care and answers right. So they're overwhelmed with having to tell their story one more time to one more person. And so when they're coming to you, you might notice this. You might notice this in say, a discovery call. There's a sense of prove to me how you're different. You might notice this in an initial appointment where you feel that there's resistance or they have their guard up. And this is where clients can kind of get labeled as difficult
Erin Holt [00:32:43]:
But you have to understand that they've come by this distrust honestly. This is an exact byproduct of what they've navigated up into this point.And if we truly want to help people heal, we need to show up for them in a way that rebuild the trust rather than just puts another wall in their face, essentially. So here, four specific ways that we can earn trust and help our clients struggling with chronic illness, including autoimmunity. And again, if you are a patient, if you're not a practitioner, if you're a patient, you're a client, you're an average Joe listening to this. I really want to let you know that there are practitioners that are willing to do this and that can hold you with so much compassion and so much care. So please do not give up on yourself. Please do not give up on practitioners. Keep going until you find the right level of support for you. So these are things that I want you to know is available to you and keep going until you get it.
Erin Holt [00:33:46]:
Okay? So for practitioners, listen up. We can't build trust by making promises that we can't deliver. We want to make sure that we are instilling hope because that is so crucial for somebody's ability to heal. But we don't want to make false promises either. And so there's a little bit of a fine line in navigating that. But what we can do and how we can earn trust, Number one, understanding. Even if you haven't lived this experience yourself, you can still understand the weight of what they've been carrying and have compassion for that. I feel like this episode should be required listening for any practitioner anywhere, because if you haven't lived this, it can be challenging for you to, like, really, really understand.
Erin Holt [00:34:32]:
And I think that that is why 1. Practitioners who've navigated their own health challenges sometimes make the best practitioners because they get it. I want to just say, I do not think that you have to navigate really hard, scary health challenges in order to be a good practitioner. But there is a level of. I think a lot of people, a lot of FNA students come end up in this field because of their own health challenges. And I just see that really makes for a compassion, a compassionate practitioner. But even if you're not just listening to this and listening on such an emotional level, what people are going through and how hard it is is huge. So many people who are struggling with chronic illness, they feel alone and they feel misunderstood.
Erin Holt [00:35:14]:
So having somebody in their corner who understands how hard this is can be huge. So honestly, just understanding where they've been and where they've come from, really, really important. Number two is listening. And number one. And number two is why I do believe that there should be a great intake appointment where when you're first meeting with someone, they have the opportunity to Dump the bucket, to be like, here's the whole shebang and to tell you. And I think the best practitioners also weave in their own questions and hear some of the words that maybe aren't said out loud and can intuit some of what is going on and ask the right questions to elicit that information. So, number two, listening. I mean, listening is really a lost art in healthcare, I think, even if you don't have all the answers, even if you don't know how to solve their puzzle, because, let's face it, you might not.
Erin Holt [00:36:09]:
It's a tricky puzzle, these autoimmune cases. But don't underestimate the power of allowing someone to share their story. Just listening to somebody can switch them from defense mode into receptive mode. We have to be in receptive mode in order to access healing. So believing their story, validating their lived experience, saying I believe you is a healing in and of itself. After years of not being heard, validated, and listened to, a client of mine said about our work together, she listened, truly listened, when no one else would. I'm getting a little choked up because that. I feel very proud that that's the experience, but also so grateful that I get to hold space for that.
Erin Holt [00:36:58]:
I get to be the recipient of that. I get to cultivate that trust with people. I think it's just a wonderful thing that we get to do. The other thing about this is that believing their pain, believing their struggles, also helps to guide them back to themselves, guide them back to their intuition. It begins to reinforce their trust in themselves. Hey, you know, your body, you know, when something is off, I believe you. Let's figure this out together. That is why I label how we practice here at TFN and how I teach practitioners in FNA as intuitive functional medicine.
Erin Holt [00:37:37]:
It's a little different. I mean, you don't have to, like, burn sage in track moon cycles in order to practice this way. It totally can. I mean, I do. Sometimes you just have to have the steadfast and profound belief in the body's innate capacity to heal and believe that we are all our own best healer. As a practitioner, you get to serve as the guide, the conduit, the co pilot for somebody's healing journey. It's the best job on the planet, if you ask me. But ultimately, intuitive functional medicine is all about bringing people back to themselves, guiding people back to themselves.
Erin Holt [00:38:18]:
Okay, so listening was number two, number three, advocating. So that client that I told you about with the extreme digestive distress, you might have listened to that and been like, dude, obviously that's not normal. You might have thought it was nuts, but because that's all she knew, that's all she knew, she didn't know there were more options available to her. She kept asking for them and she was told there wasn't. So you get to be an ally in a sounding board and say like, hey, that doesn't sound quite right. You could advocate for other types of testing. You get to have a deep, as a practitioner, especially in this functional space, have a deeper understanding of different contributing factors and different triggers to chronic illness and autoimmunity that they might not even be aware of. You know what labs to run based on what's going on with them.
Erin Holt [00:39:10]:
You could advocate for the right testing. You can advocate for a new way. You can show them something different than what they're currently seeing and knowing what to look for in basic blood work that they might already have. So it doesn't even necessarily mean you have to run a bunch of new tests. You might see the tests that they already have and be able to interpret with the new set of eyes. I know in the functional medicine space we love the razzle dazzle of functional labs. Guilty as charged, myself. But sometimes we overlook the most well researched, validated, accessible and affordable.
Erin Holt [00:39:48]:
Affordable lab markers, basic blood work. That's something we're going to cover in. My four day training is just like conventional run of the mill, routine labs for autoimmunity. So we can use that to really assess the health of the overall immune system. Okay, so advocating for a new way and then four is transparency. This one's, you know, near and dear to my heart because transparency is one of the core values of my company. Be transparent with your patients and your clients. Walk them through your thought process in a way that they can understand.
Erin Holt [00:40:23]:
Walk them through every lab, help them understand, help them connect the dots. Trust them to handle the information. Trust them to make their own decisions. It's okay if you have two paths, two treatment paths in front of you and you're not really sure which one is the way to go. Ask your client. I've got this and I've got this. Which one feels right to you? The amount of times I've done that is really, really, really high. How can I help somebody rebuild trust and rapport with themselves if I don't trust them? How can I do that? I can't.
Erin Holt [00:40:57]:
That's the answer. That's the answer. I can't. So I bring them on board. I'm transparent with them. We get to talk through things and Then also know when to refer out if necessary. This is something that I see a lot in FNA with our newer students and something we really help them with is when to refer out, when to build out the team. And honestly, I know it always comes from a good place of wanting to help people, but I think or I see in the functional space some resistance to referring out.
Erin Holt [00:41:32]:
Sometimes I think in the functional medicine space, we feel like we have to do everything, we have to do everything ourself. And that belief can actually do a huge disservice to your clients. So really understanding, being honest with yourself about, okay, where are my limitations? And we want to stretch our limitations a little bit, but we also need to know when it's time to refer out. There's going to be a few examples that I give in that four day training as well. So anyway, as I mentioned before, it can take years in a lot of medical professionals before somebody even receives an autoimmune diagnosis. So they might be finding you somewhere in the middle of this journey. And it's important that we try to discern where are they on the spectrum of healing and discovery, because that is going to help us strategize some treatment and support strategies as well. So the spectrum of interventions, there's really like two very different types of clients that you might see.
Erin Holt [00:42:36]:
One might be eating standard American diet, not drinking enough water, living a sedentary lifestyle. And so diet and lifestyle is probably accounting for at least some of their symptoms. For example, somebody with RA who's still eating a lot of protein, processed foods, maybe eating gluten, maybe drinking soda. There's a lot of interventions there to start with. And that can have a really big change and a huge effect on their symptoms. Just starting with the basics and then, which is what we tend to see in our practice, there's people who have already made some pretty big significant changes to their diet, to their lifestyle. These are what one of my mentors referred to as perfect performers. They're doing everything right, but nothing's really helping, or it helped for a little bit and then they're right back where they started.
Erin Holt [00:43:24]:
And so this is where we begin to think about doing a much deeper dive into root causes, environmental toxicity, biotransformation pathways, different types of overgrowths in the gut, undergrowths in the gut, mycotoxins, life stressors, history of trauma. This is where we can really dive into the root cause. And this can feel extremely overwhelming, both for you as the practitioner and also for your client. Like, where do I even start. So I do want to float this out to you. That is kind of why FNA exists. The type of practitioner who joins FNA is looking for a very thorough and comprehensive approach to their client inpatient care. It's why the program is a full 14 months and why the curriculum is mapped out exactly as it is.
Erin Holt [00:44:11]:
It's building on itself month by month. We also incorporate loads of live mentorship and support both in group settings and in one to one to really help you with these complex cases and to feel like you have guidance and support the entire way through. If you want a little sample size of what we do in fna, if you want a little taste of Rooney, that's what I've got for you. Next week, Autoimmunity in the Whole Patient. It's my four day deep dive into labs, clinical clues and functional care strategies. I will break it down for you day by day. So day one is all about clinical clues, lab markers and early screening. Day two is all about gut health and autoimmunity.
Erin Holt [00:44:56]:
When fixing a stool test isn't enough, this is where I believe functional medicine can take an overly simplistic view of autoimmunity and so we want to make sure that you're really understanding the complexities of it. Day three is hormones and autoimmunity, understanding the link between endocrine health and immune dysfunction. And then day four, one of my favorites, working with the whole human. It's going to be mindset and subconscious patterns in autoimmunity. So if you are into that, head to the link in our show notes. Join us live. It will be awesome. It's just so great to circle up with practitioners doing similar work.
Erin Holt [00:45:33]:
It really is quite a vibe. If you can make it live, I encourage you to do so because I love to reward participation. And yeah, I hope this was a helpful episode. I never know how to end these things, so I'm just going to call it. I'll catch you next week. Love you guys. Bye. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Functional Nutrition Podcast.
Erin Holt [00:45:59]:
If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.