POTS

If you've known someone, which most of us have, that's been to multiple doctors, had multiple diagnoses, no one can figure out what's going on. This might be the cause. And the interesting thing about this and the kind of medicine we practice here at Richmond Integrated Functional Medicine, we see patients that are complicated, who've been to multiple doctors, who. Multiple parts of the body are affected, and people are looking for, you know, if someone has 10 or 15 different diseases, what are the odds of that? Maybe it's one thing causing a lot of these. And what I'm talking about is POTS or dysautonomia. Now, POTS is a specific type of dysautonomia. And if you're not familiar what this is, it's basically an issue with blood pressure regulation. But I'm going to describe some of the symptoms to you and share about someone I saw this past week. And just. I want you to think about this. You can get brain fog. You get headaches, problems thinking almost sometimes like you're thinking through jello. Sometimes you have emotional regulation issues. You can have panic hit you all of a sudden, or you can waken from sleep panicking. You have issues with controlling emotions. And sometimes when, like, something stresses you, you stay stressed for a really, really long time. So small amounts of caffeine can rev you up. And you react poorly to certain medications. You might even have palpitations. You might notice joint aches and pains. Your legs might feel heavy. You might have leg pain, muscle cramping pain. And sometimes you feel like you have to kind of move around a little bit to keep. Kind of keep your legs feeling better. You have gut issues. You can have problems with your gut going too slow or your gut going too fast, not digesting food. You can have hormone issues, temperature regulation issues. You feel hot or cold all the time. Your hormones feel like they're a mess. Your sleep is totally, totally dysregulated. All these things can be described or explained by one thing called pots. Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. But you might be wondering, how does blood pressure affect this? And ultimately, the blood goes to your brain, your brain stem, your joints, your hormone, different parts, different glands of your body, it's going to affect how they function. The thing about pots, it's this really super crazy common. Anywhere from 3 to 10 million Americans have this. And when you're seeing people sick with health issues, like we do here at our clinic, you're probably going to see a lot more of it. And the reason I'M bringing this up because I actually saw a new patient this past week. We've been to multiple doctors and had a lot of just different diagnoses. And she's super tough and worked through it. And as I'm talking to her, it's like all the typical things that I just mentioned to you. It's like pots. You know, as I'm talking with this young lady, it's like drinking fluids make her feel better, salt makes her feel better. When she takes her electrolyte, she feels like she has more energy. Basic exercise. You know, so many basic things about pots. And I was just re reminded for the 15,000th time that this thing that I was not trained about in medical school, that I wasn't trained about residency, and that I haven't really read about in my medical journals, it's kind of sort of everywhere now. Those of us in the mast cell world, in the mold world and the Lyme world, in the functional medicine world, it has to be part of our repertoire. Unfortunately, I was not trained about it. In that training I had to learn about on my own because this is so, so common. And if you're hypermobile, interesting enough, a large percentage of people that are hypermobile have dysautonomia, which, according to the literature, maybe up to 20% of the population has it. So all of a sudden, now, something that can cause so many different symptoms, the superconduct.