Hypermobility: The Hidden Culprit Wrecking Your Health ... Or Is It Your Superpower?

What is hypermobility and why should you care? I want to help you understand a little bit about hypermobility and its impact on people with chronic health issues. One of the things about hypermobility is this is really, really common. There's different studies that say different things. One study actually looked and said maybe 20% of kids have hypermobility. Another study I was looking at, at college athletes showed 12% of college athletes have hypermobility. Hypermobile EDS is what, it's another term for it. But adults just kind of disappears. And part of that is the reason is because one, adult doctors don't look for it in adults. But if you talk to pediatricians or doctors with kids with adhd, dyslexia, autism, or pandas or pans, they see this all the time. But in the adult person world, we tend not to look for hypermobility. It's unlikely that it just disappears from childhood to adulthood. It's more likely that's just being overlooked as well as when people get older, they tend to get a little hotter, a little tighter. But so what's about being hypermobile? You know, hypermobility can be a superpower or it can be kryptonite. There are a lot of elite athletes that are hypermobile. You know, think of Michael Phelps, for example, that, you know, see him in the Olympics. He's like touching, can touch his back, his hands behind his back. You know, you can run a little faster, jump a little higher, be a little quicker, because your connective tissues are like rubber bands. Also, individuals with hypermobility have a bigger cerebellum, which is your organ of balance, coordination of thought and body action. So coordination of thought, thinking really cool things, which is more like your Asperger, kind of smart, quirky, brilliant people. But also physical coordination, but in the wrong situation, wrong place, wrong time. This hypermobility can actually, and there's some debate on whether it's primarily a mast cell activation syndrome or related with it, but there's definitely a mast cell component. And what happens is the hypermobility can get worse. You start getting too much laxity, you start getting chronic pain. The chronic pain can then activate your nervous system, cause fascial tightness that actually can result in inflammation. And then all of a sudden you have this feed forward cycle. And 10 to 15 years later, the individuals are having autoimmune issues, POTS, dysautonomia, and host of other things. So point one, hypermobility is super common. Point two, it's super overlooked. Point three can be good, but many times it's, it's bad. So what are things that people see? What are things you should be looking for if you think you're hypermobile? Well, there's all the basic things. Like if you're a kid you can do cool tricks. You can take your pinky and push it back like more than 90 degrees. As you see, I can't do that. You're double joint, your elbows, your knees. The, the problem with that, it's actually called a Beighton score. That score is that it doesn't take into account neck hypermobility, back hypermobility, shoulder hypermobility, hip. And so if you've dislocated your hips in the past, knees, if you're someone who like used to be able to be able to touch all your hands and your back, that's a marker, you might be hypermobile as well. And there's other things really with like getting really easy stretch marks, getting these things called pisogenic papules which is little micro herniations in your feet. If you want more information on that, we have some more on our website. And there's also the bait and score that's put out by the Ehlers Danish society has all these things on there. Point is this is really super common and it can have systemic impacts. So what? Well one of the things that makes it harder to detoxify your body from chemicals in the environment, mold. One of the things about these tissues that are hypermobile, they also have lower oxygen content, which one makes them more prone to tension, developing fascial points or trigger points. But also when you look at joints with lower bloxygen Lyme disease or borrelia from ticks, loves low oxygen tissue. So a lot of these individuals are more prone to get tick borne illnesses and particularly if they get bartonella, they're more prone to POTS and dysautonomia. So it's really interesting how something related to connective tissue can be related to so many different things. Now one thing I want to mention here really briefly on this hypermobility question is people go and look online, they see like Ehlers Danlos Vascular kyposcoliotic dermatosclerot, they see a bunch of really scary stuff associated with aneurysms, strokes, those are uncommon. I've had maybe a handful of patients with any of those things, but I see regular hypermobility all the time, which is the hypermobile type of eds. I like the term hypermobile hypermobility spectrum disorder because it doesn't have the whole EDS stigma. Of note this name is changing every couple years, so you'll see different names out there if you do research on it. But the gist is that your connective tissues connect with your spinal cord, connect with your central nervous system, affect your inflammation, affect a whole bunch of things and can be underlying cause or root cause for chronic illness. A mediator keeps you stuck in chronic illness and a modifiable factor you can you can modify with nutritional things with body work. It's really interesting how much the stretchiness of your tissues with these over activation of the nervous system, these little bit of pain can over time actually wear on your central nervous system. It's like a chronic stress that can lead to a whole host of things. And so working on your mind, body connection, doing flow tanks, doing massage, acupuncture, a whole host of things can actually be super important therapies for just people who are hypermobile with aches and pains and not feeling so well, but as well with people full blown Ehlers Danlos so those are some brief thoughts about hypermobility and I want to give some more information as well here in the next couple of videos to help you all understand a little deeper about hypermobility and what are some things that can be done in regards to it.