Radically Resilient Health Podcast

When To Seek Help For Radically Resilient Health

Connie Wray: (00:00)
In this episode of radically resilient health with Dr. Carolyn Dolan, we’ll discuss when it’s time to seek help, if you’re still dealing with chronic pain. When do you need to see a physician Dr. Dolan, we’ve talked a lot about supplements, VitaKinetics. We’ve talked about the importance of balance when it comes to inflammation, we’ve talked about stress and the gut brain connection, but there are people who may be listening to the podcast who are realizing that they’re making those changes, but still dealing with pain. This is the time to seek help.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (00:35)
Yeah. And many folks can make small lifestyle changes and have pretty profound impact on their health or their pain states or their healing process. Absolutely, and it’s important to both be patient and mindful because sometimes those changes take a little bit of time. So say for example, you are a person who grew up like my husband grew up – on cereal. I mean, literally in college cereal and pasta was the mainstay of his nutritional profile. Right. And so when we made our changes in our life, starting with nutrition, that was a pretty big change for him. We had to give up cereal because processed foods were one of the main things we were working on giving up. Cause I suspected we had some issues with gluten, and giving up pasta. And we had to shift to the whole fruits, vegetables, and animal proteins.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (01:37)
Right. The overnight success that maybe I thought I had that took maybe a month, took him longer right before he started to notice his improvement. But there, sometimes you can make all of these changes and you tap out, you plateau at a certain level. So say you’ve made all of your nutrition changes. And then you’re saying, well, but I’m still really tired. For example, I’m finding I’m really still low energy. Okay. I’m going to make sure that I’m getting my exercise down. Okay. So I spend some time working on my fitness routine and making it consistent. And then you’re, you’re, you’re still evaluating yourself and you’re like, no, I’m still feeling really tired. Okay. Maybe I’m overly stressed because I’ve got all these deadlines at work. So let me see about, you know, managing that or taking certain obligations off my plate. If I can get my stress levels down a bit.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (02:34)
And then you say, okay, but I’m still feeling really tired. Like I’m falling asleep all the time. And when I wake up, I’m really exhausted. Right. And then you work on sleep and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna make sure my room is dark. I’m going to cut up the screen time, close to bedtime. I’m going to make sure I’m getting natural sunlight on my skin. You go through all these changes that are within your control and you still end up and you’re, you know, I’m really still tired. Right. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Um, and then you can maybe dabble with some supplements here and there, but ultimately that’s exactly what I find. As people start to make these lifestyle changes, then the underlying issue will start to present itself. Right? So in this particular scenario, I was talking about fatigue. And that then at this point, I would say, you know, maybe it’s time for you to go back to your doctor and ask for some blood work to check out your hormones, or maybe you need to have, um, a sleep study done to see a potential.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (03:40)
You have something like sleep apnea because those are things that if you have a mechanical disruption or sleep apnea, that’s not going to be fixed by simply not eating sugar altogether. Right? Like you can’t exercise that away necessarily. You can improve it with weight loss and things like that. But that’s one of the things where listen, if you try to do all these things and you’re still not noticing, you know, wow, my back is still hurting. Um, when I go to work, like I’ve done all these things, it’s gotten a little bit better, but it still hurts. That’s my say, okay, now it’s time for you to go back and get a referral to physical therapy. Now you need to have someone to mechanically work up your back. And what’s really pretty awesome about that scenario. Absolutely. And what I found in the clinic when I was working directly with patients and has been reported with other people, who’ve made these positive lifestyle changes is that it’s actually, when they go in and seek the help that all the sudden it all comes together, that it’s easier to find the right treatment strategy.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (04:52)
Right? So then someone comes in, they’re doing all the good things outside of in their life, but they have this back pain. And then all of a sudden they can respond to this mechanical treatment better or say, the person ends up with sleep apnea or has a sleep apnea problem. The fact that they’ve made all these other adjustments in their life just improves their outcome to whatever treatment then is offered up for that particular mechanical problem. The time to seek help is when you’ve tried the things that are within your control and that you still notice that you’re struggling is when you can say, Hey, I think I need to get a referral to see my doctor and see what they think. Or you can do it at the same time too. You can work with somebody while you make these modifications. But as a general rule, I always recommend if you’ve made all the changes and you’re doing the best you can within your control and circumstances related to nutrition, you know, you’re not eating inflammatory foods, you’re getting regular exercise outside.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (05:54)
You’re getting consistent sleep as you. And you’re working on that connection and stress management piece. But if you’re still having symptoms after you’ve done all those things, if you’ve added supplements in there that seem to help too, you’ve done all those things and you’re still having that problem. It’s always a good idea to get a referral to a specialist, right. And the same goes for mental health too. Like all of these things that we’re talking about can help promote improved mental health. But if you’ve done all of the things and you still feel like you’re struggling, then yeah. Call the phone number to the doctor to get to this like psychology referral or, you know, ask someone to give you a referral. That’s when the specialist can really help guide you. Um, more efficiently,

Connie Wray: (06:42)
I would 100% agree with this. And I specifically remember having a conversation with your husband, who is a surgeon. When I first went in with my leg pain, I had said to him, I have cut out foods that would cause high inflammation. I have adjusted workouts. I’ve gone to physical therapy. And, um, I remember specifically saying, do you think if I just eat some different foods, my leg will feel better. And he said, he kind of paused. And he said, I think that yes, changing your diet is going to be beneficial for your overall health. But what I’m seeing from your MRI and your x-rays is an injury. You have, you need surgery. But in that same conversation, we talked about the continuation of staying on that path of keeping that inflammation down until I was able to get the surgery. And then we talked about some of the changes that I could make after and after the surgery, during the surgery and how to move forward, because this was something that was related to a family history. So there was a great conversation. Uh, and I I’ll never forget that conversation because he was not saying to me, Oh, that’s not going to work. Yes, those changes are still important to be made, but you have an injury that needs to be repaired.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (08:07)
And I think one of the things that you and I have both learned over time with our work and living the healthiest life that we can, and part of how radically resilient health radio was really born was that to be radically resilient, health is, and healthy is not that there’s an absence of injury or an illness or a problem. It’s the fact that you can look at that problem attempt to solve it and work towards the resolution and then recover from it. And in your particular case, you had this mechanical problem that needed to be addressed. There was no exercise, or, I mean, you could adapt life around it like you had, but it wasn’t that wasn’t going to go away without having a surgical intervention. And again, so for a long time, I had this idyllic view that like I mentioned before, when I was researching to try to disprove supplements, I mean, I really thought if you could do all these perfect things in your life, how you’re turning your genes on what, the way you’re living your life and eating all the right foods and doing all this, that it would prevent any sort of need for surgery or that you wouldn’t be getting sick or ever have pain.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (09:33)
And, and that’s, uh, that’s absolutely false. Um, the fact that you can get injured, being a healthy person, could get injured, spraining your ankle, ankle, falling down skiing, um, or you could catch a virus, you know, in this pandemic time, even the healthiest of people can still get really sick with the current viral exposure. Um, and so that’s the whole point, right? Like here we’ll do all the good things to put our best foot forward. And then if something happens, it actually sometimes makes the treatment path more clear and effective. So in your particular case, based on all those things that you have been doing so well with, it made that path to surgery, not as a failure failure, but as, okay, this makes sense. And that your recovery then was much better off because it was the right treatment for that right moment. And you were in a healthy state to be able to recover from

Connie Wray: (10:41)
Back to what you said at the beginning of this podcast was also that I realized the things I was doing to improve my health was not working. I was still in pain. I was limping all the time. I was at the end of the night in excruciating pain and I needed something else. The ibuprofen wasn’t working, the warm bass, the change in diet. And, but going back to what you said, as soon as I had that surgery and was I stuck with that path, I was able to recover faster because number one, I had already started that program prior to the surgery. And then afterwards I was taking my VitaKinetics. I was continuing with getting rid of inflammation, foods that were causing inflammation. I had made those changes. And I can tell you right now that I, 100% was able to recover faster because those things prior to surgery had been put in place.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (11:46)
We use the example of that fatigue or that potential need to have a sleep evaluation. I had a friend of mine who was living the healthiest life that she could and work part-time. She has kids and she was managing all of the things and she was eating well and exercising and getting fresh air and all those things. And she was still feeling extremely fatigued. And she ended up with a sleep study and they found her mechanical problems that needed to be addressed surgically, unfortunately, but fortunately they could easily target where the problem was. All of a sudden everything made sense and she’s on a full recovery and she’s still doing all those good things. And those play a role in that recovery process. I think we want to seek both this ideal idealistic utopia, where if we do all these things, we’re never going to have to suffer any sort of problems or injury or illness and then we sometimes blame ourselves somehow that somehow we were a failure in doing these things that resulted in this problem.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (12:59)
And, and ultimately sometimes stuff happens in life to no fault of anyone’s own bad luck -a viral infection and an anatomic anomaly, that creates mechanical disruption of the joint. I mean, who knows or say you were a person who happened to grow up and had weight issues and was obese, and now you’ve lost a bunch of weight and now you’re kind of paying the price for those years and that metabolic situation, does that mean that you’re, you’re a failure or that there isn’t something, you know, making those lifestyle changes aren’t potentially helpful and important? Absolutely not. I mean, I think like we talked about radically resilient health is about just continuing to move forward, do all the best things that you can and then seek help when you need it. And that all of those things put together help you just keep moving forward.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (14:00)
And here you are now, you’re like the bionic lady, but you’re doing great and better than you were prior. And all of those components played into it. And from my own personal experience, I remember when our son, when he was 10 years old, he ended up rupturing his appendix. And, you know, obviously I’ve tried to raise all of our kids. We’ve transitioned to whole foods, nutrition within reason, you know, we’re not perfect, but we do really well exercise, sleep just diligent on getting the kids good sleep and connection and all that kind of stuff. And here, he ended up with appendicitis, let me, how did that happen? You know, and then I, I remember thinking back, like, what did I do wrong? Did I feed him a food he was sensitive to? Did he get an infection? And I didn’t know. I mean, it could have been any number of things and it could have just been bad luck blocked off on his appendix and it got infected and it ruptured.

Dr. Carolyn Dolan: (15:02)
I thought he had the stomach flu. So here we are now, and he’s made a full recovery. It was very stressful situation. And man was I using VitaKinetics at that time, because at that time it was that mothering moment again, that was pushing my limits of stress and trying to maintain my gut brain connection, health and stuff, and were sleeping in the hospital. And that’s where I’m saying, we need to seek help when it’s time to seek help when all the other things aren’t working. And sometimes it doesn’t look, it’s not always perfectly pretty, but radically resilient health is doing what you can paying attention, being mindful and, and moving forward to what’s the next right thing. And sometimes that next right thing is I need help.