Podcast: E2:23 - Remission

Listen to the episode here: E2:23 - Remission - https://apple.co/3VrKZKv

Hi friends, I want to welcome you to episode 23 of the Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany podcast. This is one of the second episodes that's actually intended for the general public. Previously, this podcast was exclusively for individuals, patients, clients in my practice. I am Dr. Tiffany and I look forward to spending this time with you today. Thank you for your time and attention, your most precious resources.

This episode is entitled "Remission," and it's about my own personal journey here most recently. Some of you will know this, some of you it's gonna be the first time you're hearing it, some of you won't care, some of you will be surprised that this is my most recent iteration of my health journey. I am a patient and client of my practice and many practices. I love and adore natural healing, natural medicine, amino acid therapy, using diet, using lifestyle, using sunshine, all functional medicine interventions, all the labs and the teachers and all that. I love doing things holistically. I really do. 

Now, I am not anti-Western medicine. I want to be clear if you don't know my orientation, if that's what you need, if that's what I need, that's what I'm going to integrate. But I'm going to wait until it's an absolute necessity personally and then if clients haven't done that if patients haven't done that then I just meet them where they are. And if it's possible to integrate my approach and if they also are interested in stepping down off Medications, I definitely meet them there. Okay, so why is this called remission? So just to bring you up to speed.

And I struggled with the name of it. And this is really just kind of a personal share and a victory. And I just think it's important to bring you into my space, into my world. 2018, I leveraged my relationship with the Amen Clinic. I am a brain coach, brain trainer, brain practitioner. Any training they have out of the Amen Clinic, I'm gonna do it. I love Dr. Amen. He saved my husband's brain through me, and ultimately I think they saved my life. I was having a hard time. I was doing all the lifestyle interventions in 2018. Something was wrong. I wasn't healing properly. My mood was all over the place. My brain didn't feel the same way. I didn't have as much energy. My health had started to change in 2016. In 2018, we were kind of at a crisis point.

I sustained head injuries over the years from car accidents, cervical issues, neck issues from car accidents. I was starting to experience more and more pain in my body and tightness and so forth. When I went to the Aiman Clinic, I had a clean bill of health, so to speak, like traditional medicine said nothing was wrong with me.

At that time, I think I was starting to show some low white blood cell counts, but which was unusual for me, but that was about the extent of it. Everything was perfect. Blood pressure was always low. All the things. My weight was within range. It was super fit. It was all the stuff. The Amon Clinic said, hey, you don't have any irregularities in blood distribution in your brain, which is kind of what the SpecScan does. It looks for abnormalities from that perspective, like low blood perfusion to the prefrontal cortex, etc. which was a relief to me. Only my occipital lobe, which is the vision center of the brain, was showing some abnormalities, but overall it was a fairly normal looking brain. But my brain was very stressed out. The spec scan showed that I had the brain type referred to as the ring of fire, and I've shared that in a previous podcast. I was super, super inflamed.

Something was really upsetting and stressing out my brain. And so because I had done everything and my blood work was normal, I'd done an ANA panel in the past looking for autoimmunity. Their perspective was that I had exposure to Lyme disease and mycotoxins, which is mold. So to fast forward this story, I would spend the rest of 2018 and beginning of 2019 addressing all things environmental illness and I had all things environmental illness. I was having terrible time detoxing chemicals and environmental toxins. I had mycotoxin illness due to a small mold overgrowth in a heating and air system in our home that was remediated. I had Bartonella, not really Lyme disease, but Bartonella and ehrlichiosis, which was from Ehrlichia.

I had, okay, the chemicals and microtoxins, yeah, all those infections. And I had Epstein-Barr, which I regret not treating a reactivation of Epstein-Barr. I didn't treat it as seriously as I needed to. I had other viruses on board as well, but I had my hands full. And I had mercury toxicity because I had numerous amalgams removed improperly.

Okay, so those things were threatening my immune system, partly because I was under an extreme amount of personal stress. I was newly married in 2014. I had multiple businesses, unresolved trauma from childhood that was being kind of re-triggered as an adult. All of these things were feeding into my health issues. So I would believe that by 2019 or so, 2019,

yeah, end of 2019 to beginning of 2020, I thought that I had those things under control. I thought I had done all the things because I'm gonna fast forward a lot here to get them under control. When it ended up happening, is my energy continued to decline, my health became more questionable. I ultimately, after cleaning up what I thought was all of the issues, I just was worried that there was a lot of damage. And you know,

My approach is neurological, physiological, psychological, but each leg has its own level of treatment. So under neurological, I was going to see a neurologist to just have a follow-up. And then under the physiological leg, I also wanted to see how much damage had been done that needed to now be repaired. Now that I detoxed, now that I treated all the toxins and I treated all the infections to the best of my ability.

I'd had, you know, the mercury removed properly. What on damage had been done that now needed to be repaired? And so when you work with me, you not only need to stop the thing that's causing the problems, you not only need to detox, you now need to go back and repair tissue, right? When I finally got myself into a neurologist, the neurologist said, I think you have lupus.

And I said, there's no way I have lupus. And then after much traditional Western medicine workup, at this point I did have lupus. I did now need a rheumatologist. I had now shifted over from subclinical infections and toxins and being completely okay and normal on paper.

to now being in a disease state. And so that's why I often will ask y'all to continue to have a relationship with endocrinology, with rheumatology, with traditional medicine, because it's just something I need you to also have a relationship with them for. And it was a big surprise to me that I had shifted over and all of this treatment and trying to get myself healthy.

I had shifted over, my body had become hypervigilant in realizing that something was wrong and had begun to attack my own tissue. So the initial diagnosis due to ANA and ANA titer that was positive and then all kinds of other variables and blood work that was now a problem. Like I absolutely from my own eyes would say, okay, we now have issues. I am obviously dealing with something. I am attacking my tissues, my body is falling apart, I'm chronically in pain, I'm always injured, I can't recover. I knew it, I knew I was inflamed.

But I then saw the blood work say, yes, you now have an autoimmune process that is occurring in your body. And so that's where I started beginning of 2020 going into the pandemic, which caused a lot of angst and fear for me was with an autoimmune process. So I would then spend, so all of this started in 2018. I would then spend 2020 till now, right?

managing, treating, working with Dr. Karazian, working with the Amon Clinic, working with my naturopathic roots, working with my psychological roots, doing all the things, all the neurological healing. I would spend the next few years trying to figure this thing out, getting it under control as best I could, dealing with the consequence of having all those things go wrong and trying to keep these things managed while I continued to run my practice, right? Simplifying some of the stressors in my life, letting go of a fitness studio that my husband and I ran, letting go of a product line that my husband and I ran to simplify my life. We relocated my practice, we relocated, we moved, we de-stressed and simplified and moved into the country, just trying to figure my life out, okay? So just so that brings you up to speed in my journey.

The official diagnosis after numerous rheumatology visits and working with the Dr. Karazian's Institute being in clinical mentorship was mixed connective tissue disease, which means that I have features of lupus, chogrens, pseudoderma, something else that's like myo, I think it's myositis, because I have a lot of muscle breakdown and issues with pain there.

it looked like a number of different autoimmune disorders. Okay. So 2020 to 2021, somewhere in there, I was thinking things had calmed down and I had kind of got things better managed and really honestly, maybe things were better managed. Maybe something changed, but what I can tell you is this.

Once I moved offices, I think I was re-exposed to mycotoxins. And 

2022, 2023 were the most brutal years of my life. Like, I don't know how I survived. I don't know how I stayed open. It is by the grace of God. And those of you who were praying for me and my amazing friends and clients and my children and just the universe looking out for me. Because I had to close my practice for six weeks because my mycotoxin exposure levels were off the chart. And I moved out of my practice. So I lost another office. I relocated to my home. And that's why if you've seen me over the last year, I'm in a home office. I had to now just try to simplify things even further. Okay. So from all of this, here's why this podcast is called Remission.