Show Description
What if your fatigue, poor sleep, digestive issues, brain fog, changing hormones, inflammation and metabolic health aren't separate problems—but pieces of the same story? In this episode of Foundations and Function, Dr. Amich explores why persistent symptoms can leave patients feeling fragmented as they move from one specialist to another, and how looking at the whole person can reveal important connections.
Dr. Amich discusses some of today's biggest health and wellness topics, including gut health and the microbiome, cortisol and stress, nervous system regulation, insulin resistance, GLP-1 medications and peptides, hormone imbalances, menopause, sleep optimization, chronic fatigue, inflammation and longevity. It's a conversation about looking beyond individual symptoms to better understand the foundations of your health—and how those foundations function together.
Show Disclaimer
The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The content is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
If you would like more detailed medical information, please contact Integrative Medicine through their website at https://integrativemla.com/
Show Transcript
00:00:00,100 --> 00:00:32,700 [Speaker 0]
[instrumental music] Welcome to Foundations and Functions Weekly Podcast, where we return to when medicine actually made you better. The information provided in this podcast is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The content is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Today's episode features Dr. Jason Amick.
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[instrumental music] Hello, and welcome to Foundations and Function. This is Dr. Amick, and I'd like to thank you for spending time with me today. I'm gonna tease a little bit here and share with you that there are some exciting changes coming to our practice, so stay tuned for that. I wanna start with a question, what if it's all connected? I mean, modern medicine is excellent at identifying and treating many diseases, but people with several persistent symptoms can still feel fragmented. You see one provider for sleep, another for digestion, another for hormones. What those symptoms may share when we examine all the things about you as a person, your history, your lifestyle, the environment that you live and work in every day, and your own personal physiology, it's all one connected story to us. Look, current wellness coverage and online conversations seem to be centering around some major themes. For example, gut health and the gut microbiome, cortisol and stress symptoms, nervous system regulation, inflammation, metabolic health, insulin resistance, continuous glucose monitors, GLP-one medications and peptides, hormone imbalances and menopause,
00:01:47,560 --> 00:02:40,820 [Speaker 1]
sleep optimization, sleep studies, sleep apnea. Longevity and health span are important topics that are out there right now. And, and I wanna kind of clarify that. What we think about when we hear the word health span is really how to live longer, healthier, how to go a longer period of time and longer into your life without serious disability. Other topics that we know that are out there and talked about quite a bit include brain fog, chronic fatigue. How about supplement overload, huh? Look, the question here becomes, you know, which specialist owns the whole story? I mean, imagine that you're exhausted. Your sleep is unpredictable. Your digestion is changing. You have bloating. Maybe you wax and wane between diarrhea, constipation. Maybe your skin's breaking out. Hey, maybe your blood pressure is creeping up a little bit.
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You may see one provider for your stomach. You might see another for your skin, another for your sleep, and perhaps someone else for your blood pressure. Each visit may be appropriate, and they're important, and each provider may be doing exactly what they were trained to do. But who's asking whether any of these symptoms belong to the same story? That's the question I wanted to start with today. I wanna be clear. Connected doesn't necessarily mean that one hidden condition explains everything. It means we should be willing to examine the relationships before treating every symptom as an isolated event. Your body is connected. Your physiology is connected. And so that's how we should approach any condition or any concern that you have. People are searching for information about things like cortisol, inflammation, gut health, hormone balance, insulin resistance, sleep medicine, and longevity. The interest is real, but the information is often quite confusing. People turn to readily accessible information. They look at search engines. They look to AI. They even look to social media. And what they hear typically on social media platforms are, uh, typically explanations that are singular in nature. "Well, it's your cortisol," you might hear. "Oh, it's just your gut." "Oh, everything-- it's all inflammation-related." Or they might hear, "It's hormonal." How about this? "You need a detox." Or more often, "You need supplements. In fact, you should buy my specific brand of tonic or secret sauce," right? [laughs] The answer is not to replace one silo with another. We don't wanna blame everything on the gut any more than we wanna assume the gut has nothing to do with the rest of the body. Our approach is to look at how a person's symptoms, medical history, nutrition, sleep, stress, medications, environment, and daily habits can all interact. It asks not only what diagnosis fits, but also what factors may be contributing, maintaining, or aggravating your problem. Because look, the whole timeline matters. When did the symptoms begin? What changed beforehand? Systems interact. We know that. Sleep can influence appetite, blood pressure, mood, pain. Digestive problems can affect nutrition and even medication tolerance. The same symptom can have different causes. 2 people with fatigue may need completely different evaluations and completely different plans of how to address their problem. And one point I wanna try to make is that personalized care isn't permission to abandon evidence. You've gotta use the best evidence available and the best treatments available. Sometimes that's traditional medicine. Sometimes it's not. Individualized treatment should be safe, it should be measurable, and it should certainly be medically responsible. I wanna give you some examples of what connected care sounds like.
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So 1st of all, I will say fatigue is not a diagnosis. We see that quite a lot. Fatigue, that's the diagnosis. Person with fatigue might need other things considered. For example, whether or not they have sleep apnea or inadequate sleep. Maybe they have anemia or an iron deficiency. What about a thyroid dysfunction? Are there medications that could be affecting this? I'm gonna elaborate here a little bit and talk a, a moment about polypharmacy and the rule that once you get beyond 3 or 4 medications, almost every medication beyond that is really just used to treat- The side effects of all the other medications. And that's something that we pay attention to. We've actually helped our patients address not only polypharmacy, but also polysupplementation. Depression and anxiety can cause fatigue. Blood sugar problems. You don't necessarily have to be a diabetic to have blood sugar problems. Menopause and other hormonal transitions. Chronic pain can cause fatigue. So can post-infectious diseases, for example, Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr disease, and even post-COVID. The functional question here isn't which supplement or which medication treats fatigue. It's really what kind of fatigue is this
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and what clues have we not connected yet? The next example would be the gut-skin conversation. I mean, look, there's a gut-everything connection, and I'm a big fan of gut health and, and addressing gut issues, but it's not always the only answer. A patient may have digestive symptoms along with acne, eczema, rosacea, and psoriasis.
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It doesn't prove that the gut caused the skin condition, but it might justify examining diet, medications, immune conditions,
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things like food allergies, food sensitivities, you'll hear me say that a lot, stress, nutrient status, and the timing of symptoms. Another example would be sleep apnea and blood pressure. This is well-documented connection between sleep apnea and blood pressure. Someone may be taking medication for high blood pressure while an unrecognized sleep disorder is adding to the problem.
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Treating the blood pressure remains important, but investigating sleep may reveal another actionable part of the picture.
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This is an especially strong example because it shows that connected care can involve conventional diagnosis and treatment rather than just replacing them. And we should also put trending terms through an evidence filter. For example, cortisol. You have a cortisol issue. This is all cortisol. Instead of hearing things like, "All of your symptoms are caused by high cortisol," we ask, "How are you sleeping? What's your stress load? What about medical conditions that may contribute to cortisol? Is cortisol testing actually indicated, and was testing done at an appropriate time?" Inflammation is a big topic that's out there. Instead of hearing things like, "Well, you're just inflamed," we ask, "Look, is there evidence of a specific inflammatory condition? What does that mean to be inflamed? Could infection, metabolic disease, autoimmune illness,
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smoking, poor sleep," again, we throw that in there, "or are there other factors that could be involved?" Again, food allergies, food sensitivities. Under the heading of hormone imbalance, we hear that quite a bit, and we hear things like, "Well, your hormones are out of balance." And frankly, we don't always know what that means. We ask, "Which hormone? When are they out of balance?" Go back and listen to my podcast with Gracie Norton and one that I specifically did about our four-point hormone panel. These will give you a little more insight about how we, uh, think about and address hormone issues. But we want to know what symptoms suggest that you have a hormone imbalance, what life stage is the patient in, and what stressors and what activities led up to the change in hormones. What testing is actually clinically appropriate, and when should that testing be done? And then more importantly sometimes is what was going on before you noticed a change? Was there an illness? Were there medications that you were taking that might have led to changes in your hormones? This one's personal to me, your gut health. And again, sometimes we have patients come and say, "Well, I was told I just-- I, I have gut issues," or, you know, "Everything starts in the gut." Well, look, the, the gut influences lots of things about your health, but it's not automatically the source of every single symptom. You could have digestive medical issues. You could have those food allergies and sensitivities. You could have a nutrient deficiency. And of course, the gut microbiome may be in a state of dysbiosis. But again, we want to dig deeper and find out what level of dysbiosis, which residents of the microbiome are overpopulated or underpopulated. The last topic that I throw out there has to do with GLP-ones and peptides and metabolic health. This is really central to folks who are looking for longevity medicine, uh, have interest in optimization of, of their body, and who are really looking for a long health life. And look, these medications have changed the conversation and landscape about weight and metabolic disease. But medication, nutrition, muscle preservation, sleep, side effects, and long-term follow-ups still belong in the same conversation. These medicines, while they often have a very safe profile, are still not without risks and dangers, and monitoring them and monitoring your health while on them remains paramount. So what functional medicine and integrative medicine should not be, it should not be a situation where you're ordering every available laboratory test that is available to you. We don't want to assume that every symptom has one root cause. We don't like blaming every problem on toxins, molds, parasites, or the microbiome. It shouldn't be about selling supplements and supplement packages to every patient. It certainly shouldn't be about telling patients to stop prescribed medications without some sort of coordination. It shouldn't be about ignoring established diagnoses or necessary specialist care, and we shouldn't assume that treating things, quote, unquote, "naturally" is automatically safe. Look, a longer test list is not necessarily a better investigation. The purpose of personalized care is to reduce confusion, not create an expensive new version of it. At our practice, connecting the dots begins with listening. We look at when symptoms started, what came first, what makes them better or worse, what medications and supplements do you take, how you sleep, what you eat,
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how your body has changed over time, and which evaluations have already been completed and where are there gaps. We want to perform an extended health history. And really pay attention to it. We want to look at a symptom and life event timeline. We want to review all your medications and supplements. We want to review previous lab results and, again, find and identify gaps in lab testing that needs to be done. We want to really take a deep dive in your sleep, nutrition, activity, stress assessment, stress management. We'll coordinate with specialists or your primary care doctors. We focus on targeted testing when it could change the actual management of your condition. And then we want to present you with a stepwise plan with measurable goals and results. The case for our philosophy is not that every symptom has one magical root cause. It's that a person is more than a collection of separate body parts and their care should reflect that. Sometimes the symptoms are connected. Hey, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're very separate. The important thing is to ask the question carefully, investigate responsibly, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. And like I said before, sometimes the Western medicine, the traditional medical model that we live in in the United States is the right answer. Sometimes it's not the right answer, and sometimes it's somewhere in between, balancing the 2 approaches to healthcare. I want to explore the possible connections between gut health and skin, sleep apnea and hypertension, stress and digestion, menopause and metabolic health, and chronic pain and poor sleep. Don't assume everything is connected, but don't stop looking just because the symptoms showed up in different places. Our focus is to get you healthy safely. We place at our core the philosophy to return to when medicine actually made you better. We'll point you in the right direction and help you gain a better health life. Thanks for listening today. I hope this was helpful. And if you're struggling with lots of symptoms or wondering if this is all connected, I hope that you reach out to our office and let us be a part of your healthcare journey.
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The information provided in this podcast is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The content is not a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. If you would like more detailed information, please contact Dr. Amick or Dr. Pavla at Integrative Medicine through their website at integrativemla.com. [upbeat music]
