Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Functional Medicine Deep Dive: Trauma -The Impact On Physical Health

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman here. My team and I have been working hard on something that I'm so excited to share a little bit about today. It's a revolutionary new platform called Dr. Hyman Plus, which is a premium membership exclusive for my community. With Dr. Hyman Plus, you get a ton of private content and special access that no one else gets. This yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docu-series including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you everything you need to know to heal. You'll also get access to a monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus Community's biggest health and wellness questions. This Q&A is only accessible with a membership. Because I'm so excited to share this premium membership content with you, I'm releasing a teaser of the brand new Functional Medicine Deep Dive episode diving into one of the most important topics in health. I hope you enjoy it and head over to drhyman.com/plush. That's drhyman.com/plus for more information. Okay, here we go.

Welcome, everybody, to the July 2021 Dr. Hyman Plus exclusive functional medicine deep dive. Today we're going to be talking about trauma. and its impact on physical health. My name is Dr. Mary Pardi. A little bit more about myself before we start. I'm a functional medicine doctor and a certified functional medicine doctor through the Institute of Functional Medicine. I'm the founder of Modern Med. It's a virtual telehealth company. We help people nationwide with health concerns. Here are my Instagram handles. We share a ton of information about gut health, but also about general health, wellness, mental health specifically. My specialties are integrative gastroenterology, gut health conditions, as well as mental health and trauma. I really want to give credit to Dr. Omid Naim, he's one of my mentors, and he has a practice called Hope Integrative Psychiatry here in LA. A lot of the ideas that I mentioned in this presentation, some of the messages that I portray are definitely from his teachings. So why are we talking about this today? We're talking about this today because there is a mental health epidemic. About one in six adults use psychiatric medications. One in four Americans will go on to develop a mental illness at some point in their lifetime. And why is all this happening? What's the problem? What's actually going on? Well, we're treating mental health from a name it, blame it, and tame it approach. So what does this mean? Somebody comes in and they're diagnosed with anxiety. that's the name it. Then you say, okay, we're going to blame this on your biochemistry, an imbalance of serotonin or dopamine. And then we're going to tame it with a medication, anti-anxiety medication, let's say a benzodiazepine. And that's really what it's doing. It's taming it. It's reducing the signal that your body is giving because anxiety and depression are signals. They're signals that something is going wrong and these medications are quieting those signals. So, Sometimes we do need to tame these things and sometimes it's really important to tame them so that you can actually get to the root of it efficaciously. If somebody's in a place where they can't handle the treatment, then taming it makes a lot of sense. What is the solution though? How do we move out of this epidemic? So our solution is to really switch our focus and have its paradigm shift around mental health. Mental health is established when a person is able to feel whole. We have certain human requirements, certain needs, and these need to be met in order to feel whole. When these needs of a human are not met, this is when chronic illness arises. And we'll talk about what I mean by these needs as we go on. We need to start to focus on wellness promotion versus just symptom management. So if we're just treating anxiety with an anti-anxiety medication, Then that's really symptom management. We're not getting to the root of why was this person anxious in the first place? What is health? This is a big question. This is a hard one to answer. So I've come up with some ideas here about what I think health is. It's our ability to self-regulate. So our relationships, our environment, our choices, our actions, these all determine our ability to self-regulate. When I mean self-regulate, I mean that we can have our heartbeat, our lungs breathe, our kidneys function, our liver, our ability to create connections with our community and our loved ones. This is our ability to self-regulate. Now, physical health is not the absence of disease though. So instead, physical health, we have to view it as the state of vitality, a place that we can actually create from. These are some of the human needs that we're gonna discuss. When we go to the doctor, we need to start asking, are you thriving? Are you vital versus you're sick or you're not sick? Health is not only not being sick and being vital, but it's also a sense of purpose, a feeling of belonging, and the essence that you're living authentically with your values and belief systems. What is trauma? Trauma is when our ability to respond to perceived threat becomes overwhelmed. So this is a really important piece of it is this overwhelmed piece. Trauma is about becoming disconnected from our bodies, becoming disconnected from our community, from our families, and most importantly from ourselves. So it's actually becoming disconnected from our own self. This is where you can see when we define trauma in this way, that the same event may be traumatic for one person, but not for another person. So depending on the person, depending on that person's community and their support system, depending on which coping skills they've actually learned and have acquired throughout their life period, that can change how they respond to that trauma. and how they assign a different meaning to it. And how they respond and how they assign a different meaning to it can determine if it's even a trauma for them at all. Trauma is part of the human experience. And I'm not saying that traumas are fair. I'm not saying that, you know, we shouldn't empathize with people when there are traumas, quite the opposite actually. But humans are designed to experience hard, painful things. stress is part of being human. It actually makes us more resilient. So I have an analogy, but plants, when plants experience stress, which is wind, rain, these are environmental stressors. This is what makes a plant produce certain chemicals that makes it stronger. Same thing with humans. So humans are supposed to experience stress, and that stress should make us more resilient, stronger, more compassionate to each other. Trauma is essential to the human experience. Without grief, we are not human. This is the big one. We need to feel. So we really need to feel. We need to feel our feelings and when we don't feel our feelings, we become disconnected from ourselves. And this is when trauma can arise. If we have the components needed to feel whole, then we can move through traumatic experiences and become more resilient from them. If we don't have these essentials, these human essentials, just like a water needs plant, sorry, a plant needs water, it needs soil, it needs fertilizer, but if we as humans don't have our essential needs met, then we can get stuck in trauma and we can feel paralyzed, we can feel frozen. Some people will say they feel like they're in the mud stuck and we can even go on to develop PTSD, anxiety, depression, addictions can form. chronic fatigue syndrome, or other chronic diseases, which we're going to talk about the connection between that during this presentation. And the real message throughout this presentation is that trauma does not need to lead to chronic disease. And if it does lead to chronic disease, it means that we can fully heal if we restore those foundations, those needs that all humans need, and become whole again. What are traumas? So these are some common traumas. There's many more. Divorce, emotional abuse, physical abuse, death of a loved one is a very common one. Accidents, including car accidents, sexual abuse, stress caused by poverty, bullying, and nowadays we have cyber bullying as well. Okay, this is a study that was done based on the ACE score. So the ACE score is an adverse childhood event. There's several adverse childhood events that have been identified, and these are traumas that can occur in childhood. Some of these are household dysfunction, divorce, abuse during childhood. And what this study found is that these adverse childhood experiences led to an increase in adult morbidity and mortality and even premature death. So this is where we really see that trauma can affect our physical health. Those with three or more of these ACEs had a 59% increase in the risk for diabetes. Those with one to three ACEs had two times the risk for mental distress. With each additional ACE, the risk of diabetes actually increases by 11%. That means that if you have four adverse childhood events, it increases by 11. Five, another 11%, so incremental increases with each trauma that the child was exposed to. Those with seven to nine ACEs had a 3.5 times risk for poor or fair general health. We also saw almost a four times risk for coronary heart disease, almost a five times risk for disability, and six times the risk for mental distress in those with high ACE scores. This is looking at some of the predisposing factors that we may conclude are what link trauma, and physical health issues. So what we see here are lifestyle factors that actually increase the risk for chronic disease are more common. So these are poor lifestyle factors that are more common than those that experience an adverse childhood event. So those with an ACE score greater than four, which means that they've had four or more adverse childhood events, things like divorce, emotional abuse, neglect. In these individuals, they were more likely to be physically inactive. They were three times more likely to smoke cigarettes, over four times more likely to have low life satisfaction, over five almost six times more likely to use illicit drugs, almost six times more likely to have problematic alcohol use, become a victim of violence, over 10 times more likely to have problematic drug use, and over 30 times more likely to attempt suicide. And so we can see if somebody is physically inactive, if they're overweight, obese, if they're smoking, if they're using drugs, they're much more likely to have physical health issues that arise as well. Okay, now we're going to go in and start talking about how our body reacts to traumas, to stressors, so we can see like what is the connection? How do we get physical health complaints when we experience a trauma. This chart is looking at our central nervous system. So it's looking at our sympathetic nervous system that will get turned on during a period of fight or flight. This is the tiger entering the room, or it's not gonna be a room, but if you see a tiger or a bear in the woods, you're gonna go into this fight or flight sympathetic danger mode. this will elicit fear, anxiety, which is good because it wants you to get out of there, it wants to protect you. And what would happen is that you're going to have things in the body occur, which is increase in heart rate, increase in blood pressure, all of these things to help you get ready to run from that tiger. What can also happen is that you can go into an imbalance where it's a freeze state. So this is fight, flight, or freeze, and freeze is when we kind of shut down. It's too much to handle. We go into disassociation, we try to leave our body, because we can't handle what's in front of us. What should happen here is that when you are exposed to a stressor, you go into the sympathetic fight or flight, handle stressor, and then you move back into this area of safety. So social engagement, you should feel calm afterwards. So we want to go from sympathetic dominance back into a state of safety and parasympathetic tone as well. We're going to talk more about this, but I wanted to show that chart. So again, this is short-term stress. This is how trauma affects the body short-term. This is normal. This is what we want to happen. This is ideal. Got a little picture over here about this cheetah chasing this little guy. I think he's an antelope. And what would happen if this is a human, somebody is chasing us, our brain, the hypothalamus, this little area here is going to release something called CRH, corticotropin-releasing hormone. And this helps to stimulate that arousal experience, startle response. Okay, we have to move now. It's also going to decrease our appetite, our sex drive, and growth in the body because those are not essential right now. We need to just get away from whatever is running after us. The adrenal glands will also go on to release cortisol. Adrenal glands are these two little glands on top of your kidneys. They release a lot of different hormones. One of them is cortisol. Cortisol helps to increase our blood sugar levels so we have the energy to run from that tiger bear. The sympathetic nervous system is going to release epinephrine, norepinephrine. These are adrenaline hormones. These do a ton in the body. They increase our heart rate, they increase our metabolism, they increase our blood pressure, they make our pupils wide so we can see really well. They're also gonna shut off gut function and shut off urine output. So we'll talk about why that's an issue, but right now that's a good thing. So all we wanna do is get up, run, and go. So after the stressor goes away, so say the cheetah gives up, it can't catch them, then there should be an increase in parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest nervous system. And you should return back to normal, back to homeostasis. If you see an animal in the wild, they get chased and then it's over after it's over. They end up shaking it off and they walk away and they start eating grass again. Same thing should happen in humans. We should have a stressor and then we should be able to move through it, shake it off, and return to a homeostasis.

Well, I hope you enjoy that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus all the content from my docu-series, and of course any future ones we're going to release, Plus monthly Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dive episodes. I guess, right, that's why we're calling it Dr. Hyman Plus. Head over to drhyman.com/plus. That's drhyman.com/plus to learn more. I'll see you there.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. this episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.