The Art of Healing

A Deep Dive into Holistic Strategies for Mental Well-being

• Charlyce Davis MD Reiki Practitioner

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Join me for the latest Art of Healing Episode, where we will explore how to approach mental health and wellness for a Functional Medicine approach.  During this episode, we will explore:

  • What is Functional Medicine
  • Major Mental Health Disorders
  • How  Digestion Impacts Mental Health
  • How Immune Function Interplays with Mental Health
  • The relationship between mitochondrial health and symptoms of mental health disorders
  • How Hormonal imbalance can masquerade as a mental health disease

Want to learn more about this approach?  Join me for the Live Masterclass:
Toolkit for Mental Health and Wellness
Saturday, May 25th, 2024 at 12:00PM CST (Find your time at this link)

Welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast community.  This podcast is devoted to helping you find what works on your journey to health and wellness.  This podcast is devoted to providing information on many healing modalities.  Learn more about:

  • Reiki
  • Functional Medicine
  • Meditation
  • Energy Healing

and more!

Learn more about Dr. Charlyce here. 

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1-Hour Functional Medicine Consultation
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with code: alchemyofhealing

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Speaker 1:

Hello and thank you for joining me for this week's episode of the Art of Healing podcast. For today's episode we're going to be discussing mental health awareness. Similar to the previous episode a few weeks ago, I thought it might be nice to cover mental health in how we approach it in the functional medicine practice. If you'd like to learn more about my functional medicine practice, including states that I accept, which is recently expanded from California all the way to Ohio, several states in between navigate to drcharlisecom to learn more about how you can work with me. I do also have a quick announcement. We as a community have been gathering once a month and having some great discussions that cover both functional medicine and Reiki. So there is going to be an upcoming live meeting, live class, called the Toolkit for Mental Health and Wellness. This will be on May 25th, 2024 at noon, central standard time. This is free to attend. All you have to do is sign up. If you sign up and you're not able to attend, you can get a copy of the recording. So during this meeting we're going to cover common mental health disorders. We'll go a little bit more in depth with how we can approach those from a functional medicine and an energy medicine perspective. So please join me, especially if you're wanting to have your questions answered live and individually. For today's episode, I thought it might be nice to review what the functional medicine approach is, and then we're going to apply that approach to how we would approach your care.

Speaker 1:

If you are dealing with things such as major depression in which you're treating with medications and you're interested in a strategy to wean off your medications, and you're interested in a strategy to wean off your medications. Another common issue patients will come to me with is suffering from anxiety and wanting to have a holistic approach to heal anxiety that doesn't rely on medications, particularly benzodiazepines, which can become habit forming. So functional medicine is a care delivery model that focuses on healing the root cause of illness. To do this, you have to look at the past, the present and the future, and what you're trying to determine is whatever the dis-ease or disorder, what potentially was the cause? And then, in order to heal the root cause, what you need to do is to try to determine what your body's optimal biology is, so where your body wants to be right now. Then the steps to get your body back to that place In the traditional medical model when we're dealing with diseases or disorders of the psychology or mental health disorders.

Speaker 1:

We would probably look at maybe a few simple questionnaires which you've probably completed them or heard of them, such as the PHQ-9, which is either two questions or nine questions that evaluate your risk for depression. There's also a questionnaire called a GAD-7, which looks at anxiety, and then several other sort of set questionnaires or parameters that we can look at for bipolar disorder, insomnia. Several of those disorders Go over a set of questions, maybe talk about some further risk. Make sure that you're not seriously ill and don't need to be in the hospital Because, as we know, mental health diseases can be severe enough that they can threaten your life and then discuss treatment In the traditional medical model. More than likely the treatment will rely on medications.

Speaker 1:

I found this so frustrating whenever I was in a hospital-owned practice because I would say roughly 70-75% of the mental health issues I dealt with really could have responded to a more holistic approach. That didn't have to be right away the prescription, but unfortunately so many of the public and physicians are trained that once something doesn't feel right you take a prescription. And this is even more challenging when someone suffers from something more in the realm of a persistent mood rather than an overall disease. So someone that may be plagued with worry thoughts constantly doesn't necessarily need to be on a prescription. When they could learn to work with their mind matter, they could learn to work with their thoughts, they could practice mindfulness, but a lot of times that's where it would end up. So in the traditional medical model, you present with what you feel it is and unfortunately, because of the time crunch, many patients self-diagnose. They say I'm depressed and the clinician says okay, here's an antidepressant. Or I'm anxious and the clinician says okay, here's something for your anxiety. So for in the traditional medical model, that approach just starts there and then usually you follow up to make sure the medication did okay or you didn't have a bad response to the medication.

Speaker 1:

This is different from a more holistic, functional medicine approach. So a more holistic approach would start with gathering as much detail as we can reasonably to determine what it is you're truly experiencing. So the gathering of information would include your current feelings or sensations. Now trying to get an idea if there are some physical symptoms that go with it. Trying to get an idea if there are some physical symptoms that go with it, because I could safely say that really there's no mental health symptom that doesn't exist with a physical symptom. It's just doing a little bit of digging to discover what could be related.

Speaker 1:

Learning what we can about your past is important. So learning about your past medical history and, if we have the information available, learning about your family medical history so that can tell us what you may be predisposed to if you have a family history of schizophrenia or family history of bipolar disorder, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will develop those, but it could tell us something about what you could be going through now and then gathering information about anything we know that could have made the feeling or the symptom worse. So it could be something like I started a medication and I felt better. It could also be something like I started a new position at work and I felt worse all the way to. I had a surgery and I noticed my depression was worse during the recovery from the surgery. So clearly it's really no limit as to the factors of what could be making this better, worse, driving it. But gathering that information and it takes time. The longer that I practice in functional medicine, I'm definitely seeing more time as a circular rather than linear, where I'm understanding now that I really will need to have an encounter multiple times with my patients. Sometimes I understand their experience because it's just in layers it just doesn't come that quickly. Layers it just doesn't come that quickly.

Speaker 1:

Once we gather information in terms of what could be causing, creating or making the symptom or experience worse which are sometimes referred to as antecedents, triggers or mediators then we want to start to look at your body's systems or your body's biology. So we'll want to look at how your body can digest material. Are you absorbing nutrients? Is the microbiome or your gut optimized? So actually making a link between your digestive patterns and is it optimized and is that somehow related to your gut health?

Speaker 1:

In my own work with my patients, it seems like the relationship we seem to make a lot is starting an antibiotic for a serious infection and then noticing depression or anxiety several weeks after that event. I think that's the closest I've seen, but then also very much a link between irregular bowel movements, constipation, diarrhea, along with the mood, and definitely a link of someone who has waves of anxiety or anxiety attacks that go with diarrhea. So having a look at the gut health is a great place to start. The next place is if your immune system is working with you or not, against you or not working at all. So, looking at the immune system's ability for you to heal from injury or infection, for your body to heal the joints, is the immune system in overdrive or is the immune system attacking your tissues? And I would say that, although the medical textbooks don't make that relationship, my own work with patients is I've often discovered a link between autoimmune disease and depression, whereas the patient came to me thinking it was just depression, but the more that we're able to interact, that they're depressed in the morning because their joints are swollen and painful. And it turns out that it's not just depression. So if we had just taken the quick route and just treated the depression and put them on an SRI without exploring what else is going on, we would have possibly helped their mood somewhat. Without exploring what else is going on, we would have possibly helped their mood somewhat, but they would have an autoimmune disease that keeps going ahead and it could be causing damage.

Speaker 1:

Many individuals who are dealing with what they suspect is depression complain of severe fatigue with what they suspect is depression, complain of severe fatigue. So, being aware of how their body regulates energy, mitochondrial health, the health of sugar metabolism. That's important to make sure that's not the underlying issue, because there is a strong link between diseases such as diabetes and depression. The last statistic that I heard was that somewhere around 30% of individuals who are diagnosed with diabetes complained of symptoms of depression within the six months of their diagnosis, and it makes sense when you think about the fact that high sugars does. It's not asymptomatic. You definitely have symptoms.

Speaker 1:

The symptoms might be subtle, they may not be stand out or really jump out at you, but just want to plug that there will be a free event for us to connect on May 25th 2024 at noon, central standard time. If you'll check your show notes, you'll be able to see the link for my upcoming live masterclass, the Health and Wellness Mental Health Toolkit. If you're interested in connecting live, you have questions that you'd like to share with me, I definitely recommend you sign up, and if you sign up you're not able to attend live, you'll get a copy of the recording. Other pieces of information we'll want to know are how is your heart health? Even, how is your lymphatic system? Seems like it wouldn't be related, but there is a strong relationship between the health of your heart and the health of your mind. Institutions such as the HeartMath Institute that have rolled out just so much research concerning heart health, coherence what happens individually as far as mental health the HeartMath Institute also looks at what happens with heart, coherence and society-wise. But we do know that certain chemicals produced within the brain can affect the heart and also the heart potentially has ability to store memories.

Speaker 1:

Having heart issues or heart disease could be a precursor to having depression. You may be aware of the link between having major depression after a heart attack. A heart attack is when the corneal arteries become blocked and aren't able to get blood to the muscles of the heart, and when they become blocked, that muscle begins to get very low oxygen, cramps and then even dies off from not having enough oxygen. And it's been a lot of research in the last 30 years that ties in that people who survive that event frequently suffer from depression. And why that is still a little bit of a mystery, but it turns out that the heart has its own neurological system. The heart makes its own set of hormones which influence the vagus nerve, which can influence the brain. So it does appear that there's many reasons why having blocked arteries and a heart attack can affect the brain, and there's even more research coming out that shows that having depression can increase your risk of having a heart attack.

Speaker 1:

The other information that we want to know that could be causing mood issues or affecting your mental health is if your hormone balance is optimized for what you and your body want. I say it that way because the state of our hormones and how our organs talk to each other, it changes depending on where you are in your life. Organs talk to each other. It changes depending on where you are in your life. So, for instance, if you're in puberty, it's an intense process in which there has to be a lot of talk between the brain and the adrenal glands and the organs that determine your gender. There has to be a lot of talk between your bones and your thyroid gland, your parathyroid gland and your brain. During puberty, that should be a fairly intense process of lots of surges and things, whereas during the process of menopause that there are hormone surges that aren't necessarily for reproduction. But as the female body begins to wind down what used to be the phases and cycles of ovulation, she definitely will feel changes.

Speaker 1:

And we know that menopause or, in men, andropause, which isn't necessarily a cessation of hormone production, but the dowling down of making as much testosterone can make us feel differently, and one of the great places to start in terms of a holistic approach is determining where those are, where those hormones might be, because you can find points and places of things that you can optimize that really don't even require a prescription. Things such as if you're not producing enough melatonin, consuming foods that are high in melatonin throughout your day to support resting and sleeping at night, if your thyroid is starting to become inflamed and that's what you sense, that ends up being what's causing you to feel depressed and tired. Changing your diet so that you're not consuming as much gluten, or maybe skipping gluten for a little bit to see if your thyroid recovers. So finding out where your hormone balance is and is it optimized for you and where you want to be in life. So, as we are gathering that information which it takes some time, and it takes time and space to get those pieces of information lined up as far as what's happening in your biology, if we're trying to help your mental health and support your mental health, or, which I mentioned in the beginning, if maybe you're having certain symptoms but it's not necessarily the diagnosis. So maybe there's times where your mood feels low and you're tired, but you don't necessarily have depression. The main places that we know we can interact, that there's some interventions that can happen beyond just prescription medications, are your sleep and if you relax, if you get healthy movement into your day, your nutrition, of course, stress and your relationships In terms of sleep, how sleep could be affecting your mood.

Speaker 1:

For most of us, it's going to be not getting enough sleep. It's just a hazard of modern life. We have so many reasons to be overstimulated. We have screens in front of us, screens in our bedroom, we have work responsibilities in our bedroom. We have work responsibilities, homework, graduate studies a long list but one of the first things we can all do is make sure that we leave enough room in our schedule for sleep.

Speaker 1:

So making sure that you've got a good bedtime routine. It could seem overwhelming, but just even looking at simple things, I know for myself. One of the simple things I recently started looking at is when I need to do my nighttime chores, don't wait until it's time to go to bed. It's so simple, but it finally occurred to me that I was waiting to do my dishes until pretty late at night when I really wanted to be going to bed. So maybe changing that up so that I make sure just to get the dishes done earlier. So same for you. It could be things like you might feel like you're rushing and there's so much to do in the evening. One of the things I ask my patients is, as you're looking at your evening routine and you're looking at what needs to be done, how many of those tasks really have to be done at bedtime? If you don't do that task, will it put someone at harm or put someone's life at risk? And depending on how you answer that, then you can realign your priorities. So we can acknowledge that you may have a lot on your plate but it doesn't all have to be done right now tonight, so that maybe if answering those 10 emails could wait till in the morning and you might do them much faster. If you close the laptop, go ahead and dim the lights in your room and start unwinding for bed. Even if you don't go straight to bed, just start acknowledging that it's going to be time to rest and let your pineal gland make the melatonin that it wants to make. That can help you get to sleep, Moving your body in a way that feels good, or healthy movement and I try to practice that term with myself as much as possible and not so much, say, exercise, because sometimes that healthy movement could look like many things.

Speaker 1:

So there's going to be times where moving your body in terms of maybe you're making too many stress hormones and we want to maybe burn some of those off, so healthy movement could be a brisk walk for you. Maybe in your workup we've determined that your metabolism is not great and you're leaning towards having elevated blood sugars. Healthy movement for you may look like using the muscles and doing some resistance work. So maybe you do it formally in terms of you pick up a dumbbell and actually do some crunches, or maybe you do some resistance work in terms of, as you're putting your groceries away, maybe adding a few additional lifts, or maybe it could even be resistance work as far as doing some sorting of your garage that you hadn't done in a while. I like to see it that way because you can incorporate it into your day without it necessarily being stressful. Unless you really do enjoy exercising, then we can talk about it that way.

Speaker 1:

But for a lot of people that term doesn't bring about warm fuzzies or they don't feel so good. So I like to say healthy movement. Likewise, maybe you're noticing that mid-afternoon or evening you get muscles that twitch. You're twitching in the muscles of your eyes, so your eyelid twitches, or you have twitches in your thigh muscles twitches, or you have twitches in your thigh muscles and as we're working together we discover that you are making excessive amounts of stress hormones. Healthy movement for you might be something where you can engage your vagus nerve, where you can take deep, long inhales and exhales, and maybe even doing that while you're getting a chance to stretch the muscles and let those relax. So that's maybe something more like a yoga practice for a period of time, because it seems that maybe you're tending towards having anxiety, so that healthy movement may be better.

Speaker 1:

Or maybe your body's recently been through a lot of trauma, you've been through a surgery or you're recovering from cancer and we know that your immune system is fired up and the healing systems in your body are engaged and activated and they're going full throttle to heal whatever's just happened. Healthy movement for you may be practicing breath work, doing pranayama, which is a part of yoga, or doing something called yoga nidra, in which you can focus on the breath or even doing guided meditations, where you visualize your body healing and recovering. Recovering that might be healthy movement for you and may go a long way, so that we're not trying to push your body systems that are trying to heal an incision or heal a wound, or you've got a surgical cavity that's still with fluid in it, but we can gently engage the breath and help your body heal itself without adding more stress. So healthy movement can look a lot of ways, just like I was saying, with like hormone balance, depending on where you are right now, when your mental health is not where you want it to be and is not optimized. Of course we have to look at what's going inside of your body. So, nutritionally, are you getting everything that your body needs and desires? Are you getting too much of what your body doesn't want or can't use? Are there nutrients that you are getting but for some reason you're not absorbing them? So, knowing where you are as far as your nutrition, the members in my practice have a few ways that they can track what they're eating along and I can track along with them.

Speaker 1:

And then, of course, does there need to be healthy replacements? Does there need to be things that are eliminated? Are there things that need to go above replacements? Does there need to be things that are eliminated? Are there things that need to go above and beyond? I have a few patients that have. We're saying mental health is just a catch-all term, but I have a few patients who were trying to work on some pretty big things with their health and I'm considering how we might need to supplement, above and beyond, things like fatty acids, omega-3s. Are they getting enough protein so that their muscles feel good and don't drain their digestive system? Are they getting enough what's called phytonutrients colorful food colors in their diet from plant-based foods?

Speaker 1:

Well, of course, there's a number of ways and a number of resources to make sure your diet's optimized, but the quickest, fastest, dirtiest advice is that I tell my patients if it tastes really good and you want a second helping of it, it's probably not good for you, meaning that it's probably something that's too high in sugar. Sugar is not great for our mental health, of course. Too high in trans fats, which you know can lead to cravings not good for our v health, of course. Too high in trans fats, which can lead to cravings not good for our vascular health or inflammation. So if it's something that drives a craving, then probably it's something that we don't want. And in your nutrition, if you're thinking of what you'll be doing as far as wanting to feel better mentally and it's not always a direct link, but just making sure that you've got as much whole fruits, vegetables, healthy grains, beans and legumes in your diet as much whole food as you can and then considering and if you are a DIY in it, this may be when you wanna think about working with someone, knowing where you are as far as vitamins and if you need to supplement. If you are interested in what I recommend, I have listed an online dispensary which I list my highly recommended supplements for pretty much everyone at drsharlicecom. So you can have a look there at my dispensary. But when it comes to nutrition, starting with the food first, the supplement should come after everything else, preferably. But if you're working with someone, discover you have shortages, losses, you may need to supplement in addition to your nutrition.

Speaker 1:

In addition to your nutrition, managing your stress proactively is an important aspect of taking this holistic functional medicine approach. So knowing your sources of stress right now is important, but beyond that is anticipating what may cause you stress. You don't really have to wait for it to happen. You can have a strategy in place. So for you, what that could look like is an anticipated stress maybe starting a new job, maybe travel. I'm getting ready to take a trip and I know that how I respond to air travel and flight with dehydration, my gut health suffers. I always have trouble with elimination. I know that I'm going to have some muscle cramps. So a proactive response for me is making sure I get enough magnesium, making sure I've got a way to stay well hydrated, making it easy, easily available, so I don't create more stress when I know that stress is coming because I'm traveling and a lot's out of my control, that stress is coming because I'm traveling and a lot's out of my control. So having a proactive strategy, so knowing the sources of stress in your life that you can have a strategy for.

Speaker 1:

So if there's a certain meeting that causes you stress, could you take five minutes of mindfulness before the meeting so that you could be centered? Or if you know that you're going to have a long day like Wednesdays are a long day because of da, da, da, da, da is there things that you could do? Is it possible to meal prep Tuesday or Monday and have all of your meals ready and fired up, where you could just heat them up and have them ready to go on those long days. I'm not saying these are things you have to do, just a way that we start to think a little bit differently beyond. Just Wednesdays are stressful. Take a pill. I think you get what I'm saying that we could think in terms of how we could be flexible and be ready to respond to stress.

Speaker 1:

In addition to knowing what has been previous sources of stress for us and how to react, awareness of our relationships also is an important aspect of our care, and these relationships can be relationships with our friends, our family, our spouses, relationship with ourselves, relationship with food. So just knowing how we show up in those and getting a sense of how we feel in our relationships is an important part of mental health and wellness. Of course, that's an important part of working with a therapist and I had mentioned before that when I'm working with my patients, that's often going to be a place that I like my patients to work, because when you're working in therapy, it gives you time to reflect and time to think and you get asked questions you may not have asked yourself before, been afraid to, but that definitely can reflect upon your overall health, especially those core relationships, relationships with parents. For some of my patients, the parental relationship has become a pivotal point in their own health, and it's not so much that we look for someone to blame. We just step back and we start to look at what your parents may have gone through, how they may have modeled certain behaviors and how that's turned out in your life, and sometimes we can find little points in there that something that you may have been doing out of habit is something you learned. It doesn't serve you and you don't even want to do it, and we can just release it right away. It becomes very simple. So that gives us an overview of how we can take a functional and holistic approach to our mental health. Don't forget that.

Speaker 1:

If you want to sign up for the live masterclass on May 25th, check your show notes. Every episode of this podcast I post to my website, healing arts, health and wellnesscom, so if you would prefer to read a summary of it or you wanted to have notes, I will put a link there that you can advocate to to have a summary of this that you can read and also, if you would like, a copy of this sent to your email. Every week, every Friday, I send out a newsletter with reminders, information and a copy of the podcast that you can actually download straight to your device and listen on your own time. So thank you so much for joining me for this week. Next week we'll cover mental health and we're going to cover from an energy medicine perspective. So we'll talk about mental health in terms of the chakras and we'll actually talk some about mental health and the meridians. We'll use a little traditional Chinese medicine. All right, I'll see you next week. Thanks,

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Dr. Charlyce

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