In this episode, host Magic Barclay interviews Dr. Amy Duffy, a renowned expert in functional and integrative medicine. Dr. Duffy shares her insights on the importance of addressing the root cause of health issues, rather than simply treating symptoms. She discusses the limitations of the traditional medical model and the need for more personalized and comprehensive approaches to healthcare.
Dr. Duffy also emphasizes the significance of sleep, nutrition, and stress management in achieving optimal health. Throughout the conversation, she highlights the pillars of health and provides practical tips for accelerating physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Listeners will gain valuable insights into the power of functional medicine and the steps they can take to transform their health and live their best lives.
In this episode, host Magic Barclay interviews Dr. Amy Duffy, a renowned expert in functional and integrative medicine. Dr. Duffy shares her insights on the importance of addressing the root cause of health issues, rather than simply treating symptoms. She discusses the limitations of the traditional medical model and the need for more personalized and comprehensive approaches to healthcare.
Dr. Duffy also emphasizes the significance of sleep, nutrition, and stress management in achieving optimal health. Throughout the conversation, she highlights the pillars of health and provides practical tips for accelerating physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Listeners will gain valuable insights into the power of functional medicine and the steps they can take to transform their health and live their best lives.
if we do it the right way, then I don't have to talk about all the side effects to expect with our treatment because my goal is to get you back to normal. Normal doesn't have side effects.
Magic Barclay:
Welcome back to A Magical Life. I'm your host, Magic Barclay. And today Dr. Amy Duffy joins us. She is the number one best selling author of Normal Doesn't Have Side Effects, award winning speaker at Harvard Club of Boston, CNN Center and NASDAQ, New York City Bar Association and the Philadelphia College of Physicians. Dr. Amy Duffy has shared the stage with Martha Stewart, Suzanne Somers, Ice T, and Dr. Oz. She is a frequent podcast guest and expert guest on the ABC, NBC, and CBS networks, as well as Fox Network TV shows. Dr. Duffy is the founder and medical director of Carolina Integrative Medicine in Clemson, A mum of four girls, tennis player, and she is helping women who are sick and tired of being sick and tired to transform into girls that want to have fun. Welcome Dr. Amy. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. I am so glad that you are here because we speak the same language about the body being so amazing. You know, there's no point in being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Like that says it all. I love it.
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so amazing what the body can do when it's just given the right tools. You know, I think that, what we talk about all the time is, is looking for the root cause. And I think, you know, it's really the root causes. Um, and as we start to help people to understand why they feel the way they feel and give them the tools, then it empowers them to be able to make the changes that need to be made and, and really let, life come back to what it's supposed to be. People need to be able to live their, live their best life and not be, you know, struggling with the sick and tired of being sick and tired. I'm so, I'm so exhausted all the time. I can't do anything. And, You know, that's just what I see every day and it's just disheartening. So my goal is to get the word out that there's a different way to do things so we can figure it out.
Magic Barclay:
Totally. And you mentioned root cause. Now this means so much to me. In my own practice, Holistic Natural Health Australia, that's what we do, treat root cause. Why do you think the world Has kind of gone down this symptom chasing pathway. Why is it that there's only a few of us around the world now that look at root cause and yet so many dismiss it, just want to, I guess, muffle the symptoms and muffle the message of the body.
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
Yeah, you know, I think it becomes a band aid world and there, there's probably a multitude of things, you know, to me, what I, what I have experienced in working in different aspects of the healthcare system is, in what we would call the insurance or traditional model, at least in the U. S., doctors, unfortunately, I mean, maybe they would Want to seek the root cause initially, but they're not given the opportunity because they're not given the amount of time, you know, they're pushed in the medical system with, with insurance model. And, the big brother model, I guess you would call it of being owned by these big systems, you know, these big health group systems and things like that, that they're, they're governed by how much time and how many patients they have to see a day and how many boxes they have to check in there. electronic health record and things like that, that it's really driven them to just do the quick fix. You know, what can they do in the seven minutes that they're allotted to actually, you know, talk to the patient. and everybody's just in a hurry, you know, patients are frustrated that they're having to wait so long and, you know, nothing's being covered anymore. So the, you know, the doctors have to see more and more patients because they're getting reimbursed less and less. And I think that that's probably a huge part of the struggle is, Most doctors, or providers of any sort that go into the medical field, I think, ultimately had the desire to help people at one point in time. You know, we didn't go into it for the money. Maybe way back when, but not now. so we really deep down, we want to go in to help people, but I think unfortunately the majority of practitioners that are, that are owned by the health systems aren't given the opportunity to take the time to have the conversation or the time to do the detailed testing that needs to be done. and to guide the patients as to what, what the outcome would be. Or what the steps are that needed to be take to, heal, you know, and, and really find the root cause, but also then start to fix the root cause. And it's just not present in the traditional medical model.
Magic Barclay:
Agree. Okay, Dr. Amy, I ask all my guests the same three questions and everyone gives me different answers and I'm really excited about yours. So here's your first one. What can your expertise do to accelerate health, not just physical, but also emotional and spiritual health?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
Well, I think that my expertise comes not only from, you know, my medical knowledge and background, but from, you know, my experience as a person. you know, I tend to just be one. Everybody says, how do you do it? How do you do it? I have four kids. My first one was born in my third year of medical school. Second one was born first year of internship. Third one was born first year out of residency. And then the fourth one came, you know, 20 months later. And you just persevere, you know, you just get up every day and you, you know, you got to get out of bed and you got to keep going because there's no other option. And when I think about it from a professional perspective, making the decision 12 years ago to get out of the traditional healthcare model and open my own practice was one of those just, I was going down this rabbit hole that I didn't like. I didn't, Like how we were taking care of people. I was in an OBGYN office where we did a lot of women's health and hormone health and, our treatment for just something as simple as hot flashes and a post menopausal woman was kind of like, do you have a uterus? Yes or no. Okay. If you have a uterus, then you get this. If you don't have a uterus, you get this. And then we'll start at the lowest dose and see how you feel. Come back and see me in a few months and then we'll see where we go from there. You know, and there's very little actual. Okay. thought processes to what's going on with the human person. so, you know, really, I think that it's a, it's a matter of just making a decision that you want to do better. better for my patients, better for myself. I knew that I was stressed out, you know, I was going home and putting babies to bed and then getting, getting on my computer and sitting on the couch for two more hours, charting, um, and being exhausted and grouchy and not being the mom that I needed to be for my girls. So, and I was probably 30, 40 pounds overweight trying to be this doctor who is promoting health, right. but I wasn't taking care of myself. And so making an awareness that not only do I need to change for myself, I need to change for my kids. I need to change for my patients. I love the quote from. Hal Elrod, who's the author of the Miracle Morning and the Miracle Equation. it's just a great, super motivational book if you haven't had the opportunity to read it. But in one of his speeches that I had the opportunity to meet with him and hear him speak, he said, you owe it to those you love to be at the best potential that you can be so you can help them be at their best potential. And that quote just resonates with me, not only on a personal level with my children, you know, I've got to be at the best place that I can be so that I can be the best mom for them and, present, you know, the world to them and in the best eyes that I can see, but also I owe it to my patients to be the best doctor that I can be in the best person. And I think we see so many doctors get burnt out. that they're just not. There, you know, they show up and they're kind of like checking in and checking out and, going through the motions and not really being able to enjoy what they do. I absolutely love my job. I love my interaction with my patients. I love my team. our team is a family and our team is really driven to take care of ourselves because we need to be at our best potential so that we can, you know, help our patients be at theirs.
Magic Barclay:
Exactly. And that brings us to our next question. And we talk about wealth here. People think that's just financial, but really that stems from our level of personal and emotional wealth. So what are your top three tips to creating wealth?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
I think it's the same thing, you know, it goes back to, are you, are you putting yourself first? And as a mom, it's very hard to do that. I have a lot of mom guilt. And you feel like you're being selfish by putting yourself first. But, I think you have to have wealth in your health to some degree. I mean, if you're not, if you're not feeling your best, then it doesn't really matter if you're talking about wealth from a financial standpoint, you know, money is not going to buy you happiness if you feel miserable and you just want to be in bed all day. So, doing things like getting adequate sleep, you know, I, I, I, I rarely will get less than seven hours of sleep. Generally, my goal is to get eight hours of sleep. So, you know, I'm going to bed early because I want to get up early and I have things I need to do before I get kids up out of bed. making sure that you're fueling your body with, the few. fuel that's going to feed it to make it grow and heal and, and, uh, do its best and not putting things in that are going to make your body have to work harder. So, I would say that your wealth comes in the form of your health and then leaving a legacy behind and whether that is raising kids to, be at their best potential again to be good contributors of society. If you want to call that whatever they're going to do. I hope that they're good people and that they're leading by example. And, um, one of the things that I love about not just being in practice in front of patients, but doing things like this, you know, writing my book, being on tv, speaking, things like that, is that I wanna make sure that there are as many people as possible who know that there's this type of medicine out there. So, you know that somebody might hear me on a radio station or a podcast or TV or something like that. It's not about me marketing to get more patients. It's about me letting people know that there's a different way to do things. And if that person goes, huh, I wonder what functional medicine is or integrative medicine, what is this about? And they do a little search and they find another practitioner in their neck of the woods that can help them be at their best potential and get their life back on track. Then, then I've done, something to help that life. And so the more that I can leave behind and not have it all stuck up in my head, the more wealth I think that overall my life is going to be. So, those are my thoughts on what it means to be wealthy.
Magic Barclay:
I love it. And our final standard question is about weight loss. Now you and I have both had struggles in that realm. And I guess so many people do. And many people discount weight loss. the effect of stress on weight. You know, we often know as mums, as single mums, we get the cortisol belly happening and, you know, people just say, Oh, you know, eat less, move more, you'll be okay. And that actually increases the problem because it increases our cortisol. Cause our body thinks. I'm starving and now I can't move, you know, what's going on. So what are your tips to the listeners about that cortisol weight or about any weight in general, what are the main ways to kind of win that battle?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
I think there's so many ways that you can look at it. I do think it's so much more than just calories in and calories out that we were, you know, told back in the eighties and nineties counter calories and, we'd get on the treadmill, you know, and put your hands on the, on the monitor and it would tell you how many calories you were burning and, That can be very frustrating for people because you know I hear I hear women particularly all the time saying, you know, I'm exercising more I'm eating less and you know I've gained two pounds where other people might have lost 20 pounds or whatnot so absolutely it becomes frustrating and I'm going to go back to my statement about sleep. I think that There are so many people that just don't sleep. They don't get enough sleep. Um, and they're staying up late, they're waking up early for work, or they allow themselves adequate time to sleep, but they just can't sleep. I see that more and more in women as they're getting closer to menopause. You know, I think a lack of progesterone, which is something that we see, affects sleep. We get night sweats, things like that. I think, the amount of sugar that we're consuming that we may or may not be conscious of in the form of wine before going to bed, in the form of, we live in the south of it. The United States and we have a lot of sweet tea, and so does, and I think people just mindlessly drink, calories and they don't realize that, and just, you know, our, our consumption of carbohydrates and sugar in general is, is outrageous. So, Like you said, I mean it really affects cortisol and I tell people all the time. It's like we're sprinting this marathon of life running all the time. And our body doesn't recognize whether we're being chased by a saber tooth tiger we've been chased by our calendars and our phones and our kids needing to be wherever they need to go and. The more that we exercise and push ourselves through these intensive exercise, if your cortisol level is low, which, you know, most of my patients, when I test them, we see low cortisol, not high. but low cortisol is really telling your body and your brain that you, you need to stay in the cave. You know, we're not going to be able to be out running that tiger if we get out there. And the more that we go and try to make our bodies think that we're being chased by the tiger. Yes. The brain wants more cortisol, you know, we want to solicit more cortisol, but it just makes it worse. And you get kind of stuck in this vicious cycle. And then we get sort of depressed. And when we get depressed, we're going back to not sleeping very well most of the time, but wanting to lay around and be lazy for lack of a better word, even though we're not actually sleeping. And then depression leads us to be More, impulsive if you want to call it and in our food choices. So, and, and low cortisol and adrenal dysfunction does that too. We tend to crave carbohydrates and we crave salt and we tend to go back and forth. That's why going to a Mexican restaurant is our favorite thing to do because we get to eat salty chips and drink margaritas that are sweet and salt. Right. And we just go back and forth. We want to eat salt and then now I need something sweet and now I need something salty again. And this drive to, to need to increase our energy levels because we're not getting it from our cortisol. We end up getting it from sugar. even though, you know, we're trying our best to eat less. I think that that's really a huge part of what we're seeing is not putting the adequate fuel in and not getting enough sleep.
Magic Barclay:
Definitely. Now, Dr. Amy, let's turn it over to you. What do you think the listeners need to hear today?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
you know, again, what I say, my, my passion and my drive for doing what I do is really to get the message out that there's a different way to do things. And when we start to sit down and connect the dots, you know, people are reading articles, how do you lose weight? You know, the top five ways to lose weight is to. Do you know, decrease your calories and do HIIT workouts or something like that? Or, we're finding the need to take Band Aids for things. And, and I think just like we talked about earlier, you know, part of the dysfunction is. in the medical system not having enough time, but I also think that it's the consumers or our patients who don't want to do the work, that it takes to feel better sometimes. So patients are really looking for, some guidance. That is going to drive them and help them. And when you find a practitioner who really takes the time to understand you and your own individual body and what's going on. I mean, we can definitely see trends, but everybody's a little bit different as to what's driving the bus of their health and I think people need to realize that there are practitioners like us out there that are looking at what are their hormones look like? what is their insulin resistance levels? what are some deficiencies going on in their system? What in the world is your gut doing? We haven't even talked about the gut, which is such a huge part of, of our health these days and and the fact that we've got hand sanitizer everywhere and antibiotics and Chlorine in our water and things that really kill off our good bacteria On top of that we're eating a lot of chemicals and consuming a lot of chemicals that's damaging our gut and that leads to a lot of dysfunction as well, so What I want people to know is that you may not have all the answers, I know what I know about doctoring and and about functional integrative medicine and women's health care and hormones and all the things that we're talking about now, but I don't know anything about, you know, let's say. Accounting and finances and things like that. I mean, I have a business, but I, I depend on those experts in the field or professionals in their field to help guide me, and I think that people really need to go back to really relying on the medical system to help them. And there's so much out there where people are trying to do it themselves. Not that they can't do it themselves, but. If they don't have the right direction, they don't right have the right information, then they're just going to get stuck in this, hamster wheel of doing busy things without getting anywhere. And that can be really frustrating so I want people to know that another way exists and if we can find the reason why you're feeling the way you feel it's so much easier to correct that and get you feeling better.
Magic Barclay:
Terrific. Now tell us a little bit more about your book.
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
my book is titled normal doesn't have side effects. And it's one of my favorite quotes when I'm talking to patients in my practice. and I'm describing some of the things that we might be doing to help support them. So we may be. Giving them some supplements for things that are deficient or when I talk specifically about hormone balancing, I do bioidentical hormones in my practice. And, and what I say is I'm, I'm looking at what your levels are and my particular regimen that I'm going to prescribe for you. All I'm trying to do is get your hormone levels back to normal and back in balance. And if we're doing things the right way, then we don't have to talk about what side effects are you going to expect with. This regimen, because if we get you back to normal, the normal doesn't have side effects and we don't have to be, you know, worrying about, call me if you have, you know, palpitations or if you get dizzy or you get nauseous or, you know, all these things that we list when we're talking about prescribing a medication, right? So that's really what drove, the title of my book. Cause I just say it probably five times a day when I'm talking to my patients. And, and it really does drive us if, if we're getting back to the way that we want to feel normal, you know, so many of my patients say, I just want to feel normal again. And, you know, to them, normal means. You know, I don't have to think about it. Another one of my favorite quotes is, the true definition of health is not having to think about it. So you wake up in the morning and you're like, man, I feel like going for a hike. Or I feel like, doing some yard work or I've got to go to work today. And I love work. And I'm, you know, I have all the energy that I need to do whatever I need to do. And you don't stop and think, can I do this? Is my body going to be able to do this? Is my mind going to be able to do this? You know, so if we're again feeling our best and we're feeling normal, then we don't have to hesitate to do the things that come at us that we want to do. So, that's really what drove the title of the book. And then, you know, what I love about this book is, I wanted it to be somewhat entertaining and not just another sort of medical book, although I think anybody that writes a functional medicine book is not a typical medicine book. But, I really started to incorporate some of my own life stories and it helps people to connect with me in a personal level. I'm not just a, you know, some doctor up here on a pedestal, but I'm actually a real person going through real struggles. so it talks about, myself and my kids and, My story, if you want to call it of going through, some various struggles that I've had in my own life. And then I incorporate that into what I call my pillars of health. So, um, in my practice, we do programs where we walk patients through the pillars of health, which are gut health and detox. hormone balancing, finding deficiencies and supplementation, fitness and exercise, and then stress management mindset are kind of the big pillars that, um, we really have to focus on. So each of the sections in the book is talking about one of those pillars and how it relates to how, We go through life. So that's really what I put together and hope that one it's entertaining, but it's also informative. So again, people can start making changes based on those different pillars and, and searching for somebody who can help guide them and support them. So stress management mindset really also means you need to have a mentor. And I've had many mentors in my life, whether it be business minded or medical minded. And, you know, I wouldn't be successful where I am today. If I didn't have. those people who've been there before me that, you know, have kind of figured out the way. Quit trying to reinvent the wheel and find somebody who, um, is successful in what you're trying to accomplish and, and let them help you. That's, that's what mentoring is all about.
Magic Barclay:
Terrific. Now, where can people find your book?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
it's on Amazon, it's Kindle ready right now. so they can go to Amazon, Normal doesn't have side effects, Dr. Amy Duffy, or, I also have a website is amyduffymd. com and there's links there to all kinds of different, things that I've done, including my book there.
Magic Barclay:
Great. So before we wrap up, we love freebies here. What can you offer the listeners and where can they find it?
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
there's several different ways. So I have a YouTube channel, Amy Duffy MD. I'm on Facebook. my medical practice, Carolina integrative medicine, and you can go to Carolina integrative medicine dot com. I have a whole page of blogs and information there on all these things that we talk about, adrenal health, hormone balancing, gut health, detox, um, stress management. Mindset, you know, how to meditate, all sorts of things, how to get parasympathetic. I talk a lot about that. so those are all kinds of ways that you can find videos, and things that you can read.
Magic Barclay:
Dr. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a fantastic episode and listeners. I do urge you to get in touch and really get in touch. Get your hands on that book. That's just fantastic information for you all to help you lead a magical life. Dr. Amy, again, thank you for your time.
Dr. Aimee Duffy:
Thank you so much. I enjoyed being with you.
Magic Barclay:
Pleasure. And listeners, thank you so much for your time. Go forth and create your magical life.