Surprising Facts about Long Covid and Chronic Fatigue

Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Sanda Moldovan, periodontist and nutritionist. Welcome to the Holistic Dentistry Podcast, the show that gives you the tips and tools to detoxify your mouth for a healthier body as we explore together the root cause of disease. Remember, you're not healthy until your mouth is healthy, so take care of it in the most natural way. Hi everyone, welcome to today's show on the Holistic Dentistry Podcast. It's a great episode. We're gonna dive into chronic fatigue, post-COVID, what kind of symptoms are we seeing with this. And with me today, I have an amazing guest, Dr. Jenny Tufenkian. She is a licensed naturopathic physician with two decades of experience, specializes in empowering health-conscious professionals to conquer long COVID and chronic fatigue. She's practicing virtually, but you can find her in Portland, Oregon. However, you're seeing clients pretty much from all over, right, Dr. Jenny?

Correct. Yes, I am.

Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here to talk about chronic fatigue and Long COVID.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Yeah, same here. And you know, you and I met, I was part of your summit. Thank you very much. I think it's amazing you have a Long COVID summit. That's going to re-air shortly, so we're going to post a link for that in the show notes. So please join us. You're going to find some, uh, like deeper dives into some of the things we're going to be mentioning today. How did you end up here, Jenny? I'm curious, like what happened throughout your life. It's usually, I'm sure, some challenge that you've had that led you to be so passionate about this.

Yeah, it's really a series of challenges that led me here, and I talk about my passion for you know, the story, The Lorax, the Dr. Seuss book where the Lorax speaks for the trees and stands on the stump. Sometimes I feel like I'm the Lorax for sort of the long COVID myalgic encephalitis people. I'm speaking on the trees because it just, it makes me so mad when I hear doctors say there's nothing they can do for people or they don't have any answers. And, you know, this condition really just doesn't fit well into the conventional medical model. I think that conventional medical model has so many great things that help us and we need it. And yet when you have these complex conditions, it doesn't fit. My story started— now I realize it started way earlier, but really what happened, the big event for me was in medical school. I decided it was time to have a second child and I ended up having a series of miscarriages. And one of those was at 17 weeks and I hemorrhaged. I passed out, was rushed to the hospital, and that threw me physiologically into a state of high stress and also just deep grief. I'd also had 5 people die that year in my life and had had other miscarriages. And it, it was really very much a dark night of the soul where I was in bed. People around me thought I might die. My legs were like ice cold up to my knees. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I was suicidally depressed. I had severe anxiety. I just really wasn't functioning. And I had IVs in my arm and just stared at the ceiling. I had to be walked to the bathroom and it was, it was really, it was really intense to have your body break down to that level. And in that—

especially at such a young age.

Yeah, I was, I was very young. Yes. And I also have to say that I learned a lot in that experience. I was very blessed to have people come from the school. My teachers came and sat by my bedside trying to help me. And I ended up having a therapist come who was a hypnotherapist and we did some subconscious work together. And that's really what broke open and began to shift some of the deep mental, emotional stuff. I realized I'd had all this emotional baggage that I've been carrying in my life. And it was an opportunity for me to work on that. And that got me out of the suicidal thinking and the anxiety, and it got the depression out of there. And I'm then moved from what I call the bed to the couch. And I had somebody say, do you have chronic fatigue? And this is in the And it was when Time magazine said it was the yuppie flu, chronic fatigue syndrome is the yuppie flu. And I was like, get that label away from me. That's not what I have. I don't want your label. And yet I had to realize that is what I had. I was just dragging around tired, tired, tired, and, and nothing I seemed to do, no matter how much I rested, it didn't make a difference. So I took a year out of medical school. I threw everything I had at it as a, as a medical student and working with the doctors at that time. And it took me really years to get out of it, but I did finally come out of that and I got what I call 150% better. And you're gonna appreciate, and I always thought of it, it's a puzzle. I know I kind of knew one, you can recover from chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalitis, and it's a puzzle. You have to figure out your different puzzle pieces and it takes time. And so I was doing my puzzle pieces and the last piece of the puzzle for me that first time was taking all 22 of my mercury amalgams out of my mouth and detoxing from the mercury. I'm sure you can appreciate that.

Yes, I definitely can. I had a bunch of mercury fillings myself. But, but so that helped you regain some of your energy after those were out?

That was the final piece of the puzzle. And after that, I was 150% better. The pieces that I worked on before that were sort of that hormone triangle, the adrenal, the HPA, the hypothalamic pituitary axis was huge. There were other things I was working on. I probably had some chronic viral reactivation then too, that I was working on. And so there are different pieces I was working on. I didn't think I'd ever get it again. I was very, had tons of energy, was full of life, never had to, you know, energy budget or worry about that ceiling until I hit perimenopause. And then I had an injury and I kept going and I ended up getting frozen shoulder, was in severe pain. Couldn't sleep at night. And I really quickly went down that slide, which is when I learned a second truth about this condition is that you can relapse and you can relapse way faster than you think because your body has that set up. You know, you're set up for these different conditions and relapse is possible. And I was shocked at how quickly I went down that slide. And it was terrifying because before I was a medical student, I wasn't used to making money. Nobody was dependent on me for making money. This time I had a clinic, I had overhead, I had employees. My husband's business was struggling at that time. I was the one financially responsible for us all. And for me to stay home and be in bed would've equaled bankruptcy. So that wasn't an option. I continued to work even though I was really in rough shape. And I honestly thought all my patients would go away because I was struggling so much, but the opposite happened. My practice filled with drogue. I didn't even know it until I went out to try to get schedule a vacation. And my patient, my front desk said, did you know you're booked out for like 5 months? And I'm like, no, I didn't know that. But the thing that was amazing was because I couldn't sleep, I was up at 3 o'clock in the morning in PubMed and I was, I was just typing in what causes this? What is chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalitis? What is it? And I kept going down these paths. And I would order obscure books and read articles and try things out on myself. And then because I had all these patients who were coming to me out of the blue with the same kinds of symptoms, I was able to try things on them. And I got to see what worked on who and what didn't work. And I began to develop that this pattern kind of emerged where there are these 5 root causes that I can put people into that lead to being more likely to have the myalgic encephalitis and turn that on in their bodies. And you may have 1, 2, 3, or all 5 of them. And so like each time I've had this experience, I've learned a ton. And I finally, I came out of that one as well at 150% better. And again, no energy budgeting or anything. And then when the pandemic hit, I anticipated we would have a wave of a huge burst of myalgic encephalitis. And I talked about this in the spring of 2020. I said, we're gonna have a second pandemic here, people. It's called chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalitis, watch out. And I didn't know it was gonna be called long COVID. I didn't get it until later in the, I got long COVID kind of later in like 2022, late 2022. And that did trigger me to get sick again. And I had some classic setups for it. So I got to experience what I theoretically was thinking was gonna happen. I got to experience it in my body. And it's been interesting to see how, what's the same and what's different when you have long COVID. I still call it myalgic encephalitis. It's the same thing, but it's triggered by the COVID SARS, which has its own unique personality, shall we say?

Yeah. And now is chronic fatigue pretty much the same thing as myalgic encephalitis?

It is. And I say both because chronic fatigue syndrome is what we have called it in this country for a very long time. The rest of the world has called it myalgic encephalitis. There's a big move to try to call it that here in the States as well. So you see it in the papers, in the literature papers, CFS/ME, because we're trying to make that change over to it being myalgic encephalitis. It's really a much better explanation of what's happening because the, the myalgic means inflam— it means, you know, muscular inflammation, pain, and in the brain, basically of inflammation in the body and in the brain. And with the PET scans that we're seeing now, that's exactly what we're seeing in these people. We're seeing that they are inflamed. And I always say, you know, when you have a, when you have a condition called chronic fatigue, it just doesn't sound that serious. Everybody's tired. And if you go to your doc, I mean, and your doctors are particularly tired. And I think that it's easy for people to not take you seriously. And I jokingly say, nobody brings you lasagna if you say that you have chronic fatigue syndrome. But if you say I have myalgic encephalitis, they're like, oh my gosh, what's that? Do you need lasagna?

So true. Sounds a lot more severe. Now, can Do men and women get this alike or some more than others?

Men and women definitely get it. I do have male patients. It's more likely that women will get it. It's just, and we think that that's due to a couple of different things. One, hormonally, the way estrogen works in the body, it makes it more likely that we're gonna get it. I also think that there are maybe some cultural reasons why women get it more. This is just my personal theory is that I think that women are— we're built to reproduce. We're built to keep going so that the species continues, right? Even though we may be feeling tired or we may be feeling stressed or whatever, we just keep going. You know, the kid's sick at night, you're up all night with a sick kid. You still get up the next day and feed the child. Right. And it's, I think it's really easy to keep putting these symptoms that you're having, kind of just sweep them under the rug. And to push through. And I think that that's really easier for women and it drives us into the state of dysregulation.

Yes. Makes sense. Now regarding the long COVID, what exactly is that? Is that a result of a vaccine? Is that just a result of actually getting sick with the virus? Or, or how do you define long COVID?

Uh, it's such a good question. And I think our understanding of this has developed over the past few years. You know, in the beginning we were really just kind of theorizing and guessing based on our experience, but the— you can get it from a vaccine or you can get it from just getting the infection. And this is in peer-reviewed literature. So this is not some out-there concept. You can go into PubMed where it's peer-reviewed literature. And we now know that there are people who are getting Long COVID from the vaccine. Not everybody who gets the vaccine will get Long COVID. Not everybody who gets COVID will get long COVID. There are just some people who that, that will happen to them.

How long is long COVID?

Honey, you don't wanna know. It depends on the person. It really does. And it depends on, so it can go, some people just have it for a few months and it can kind of go away with some mild treatment or just a lot of rest. The majority of people, at least the people that I see, the people that are written up in the studies, the people that we have research on, the people that my colleagues see who are really focused on this patient population like I am, we see people who are struggling with this for years. Well, coming to me who got COVID in, you know, 2020, 2021, and they've been sick ever since then. And I have people with myalgic encephalitis who have had that for 10 or 15 years. They got COVID and their myalgic encephalitis, long COVID got way worse. So they've been sick for 15, 20 years. So you can have this for a very long time, which is why I think it's so important to understand that it's really important to take action on this condition if you have it, because you don't want it to drag on. And the sooner that you start to realize and acknowledge that you have it and you start to get effective treatments, the better off you are.

Now, how do people know, like, what's the difference? You mentioned everybody feels tired. How do you know you actually have brain inflammation? What are some of the symptoms?

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question because there isn't a test to prove that you have Long COVID or myalgic encephalitis, which is partly why it doesn't work in the conventional model. Their model is you take a test, we see if you have this, we diagnose you, we give you a treatment, we give you the test again to see if it's helped. And there just isn't that model. And so you really need to go off of a— we go off a history and we, you know, rule in or rule out whether you have this condition based on what symptoms you have. So it's things like you're not better with rest. Now that said, you may feel better after you sleep and have energy at some point in the day, but it's sort of— have to— people who have the kind of mild to medium Long COVID or myalgic encephalitis, you may have a few hours of the day where you feel pretty good. Maybe the morning you might wake up and be like, finally, I'm done. I don't have it anymore. But then by the time afternoon runs around, you just have to nap. No option. Like you have to lie down. So it's this fatigue that gets you and begins to impact your life. And I think that's one of the things to think about, like how much are you managing your life based on your energy level? I call it energy budgeting. When you feel like you're negotiating either consciously or unconsciously about how much you're going to do because you know that you might pay for it if you do too much. When you are an ener— what I call an energy normal, you can go out and you can push yourself for work or for fun and you pay for it by you sleep a little bit more, but then you bounce back, right? People who have these conditions, they don't have that bounce back ability. Instead they pay for it. And if you go to work and then you go out and go out for a drink with some friends after work, or you go to a birthday party for kids on Saturday and you miss your nap window, you pay for it. I have a lot of patients who are still, when they first came to see me, they were working and they would work all week and then they would spend all weekend resting just so that they could go back to work on Monday. That's not normal.

You're right. Yeah, you're right. Now you mentioned earlier there are 5 root causes why somebody would get this. Uh, so, so tell us about that.

Yeah. So the root causes are ones that you're gonna be familiar with, with your work with people. Some of the, some of these root causes are gonna sound familiar with your work with the periodontal disease and the chronic patients that you see as well. So the first one I, I look at, and I call it the gateway root cause, which is the hormone triangle. It's that adrenal gland, ovary, ovary or testes for men, and, um, thyroid. And that triangle is like a symphony and it works together and it works together well when everything's in tune. If one of them becomes out of tune, the whole orchestra tries to shift, kind of rebalance the body back. So this is a classic thing and that adrenal really drives a lot of this. And I say this because in this culture, we are all on the stress— pretty much all of us are on the stress express where we're just go, go, go 24/7. And it seems to just be getting more and more intense. I had a friend in high school who used to say, as time felt like it was speeding up, that the hamsters on the inside of the wheel of the planet Earth were running faster and faster.

Yes, I can relate, definitely.

I know a lot of us professionals can relate to that. It takes real conscious effort to sort of calm ourselves down, which is helpful, but that is a gateway root cause. And when your hormones get dysregulated, when your hypothalamic pituitary axis, your stress response is not functioning normally, it's easy to get tired. And it's also easy then for your body is under this constant state of stress and you get opened up to becoming more vulnerable to some of the other root causes. The second root cause is looking at chronic infections, and those could be bacterial, they could be fungal, they could be viral. A lot of people with Long COVID, they may have the SARS-CoV-2 protein that is still— they may still have a viral particle, or they may still have a spike protein that's being produced. A lot of people have reactivated latent infections like Epstein-Barr virus, HHV-6, cytomegalovirus, these get reactivated in the body and they absolutely drain you of your energy. Another thing is looking at, you know, bacteria and fungus and things like that. So any of those will, as you well know, drain your energy dry.

Yeah, exactly. So like talking about cavitations or root canals that are infested and, uh, yeah, gum disease like you saw, that's exactly, exactly.

Yeah. And you know, and I, and I wonder about those, you know, you talk about those being there, but it just seems like if you— well, we'll talk about this later because I just think there's a huge setup for those to get worse in some of the people who have long COVID, right? Because the body's so exhausted dealing with this long COVID infection that it seems like you'd be vulnerable to getting something like that that maybe was just low level or wasn't that reactive to having it flourish. Just seems like something that could be a lot.

Yeah, we see that as well.

Yeah.

Especially, you know, people get tired and they don't want to really take care of themselves so much. I think Right.

That's the other thing too. Exactly. Right. It's like, oh, you know, flossing all the time. Oh, I'm just going to go to bed. Right.

Yeah.

The third is looking at mitochondrial function. So how well does that mitochondria work? One of the hallmarks you asked about, how do you know if you have long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalitis? They've— the definition of it has changed, but they've recently made it so that this thing called post-exertional malaise, which means that if you do more than you usually do, you are more tired than you should be from it. So some people get post-exertional malaise immediately after they overdo something. For one of my patients, this was if she did the dishes and the laundry, she would be in bed for 2 weeks with fibromyalgia pain and fatigue. Yeah. Other people, it is— I had a trainer who worked with me when she first came in and she could walk for 45 minutes. I'm like, great, what happens if you do more than that? She's like, oh no. If I do that, I am exhausted for the next 3 days. So that to me is post-exertional malaise. We've seen this really bizarre thing with long COVID where it's delayed. I never used to see it so delayed in myalgic encephalitis, but in long COVID people, the post-exertional malaise will show up days later, which is bizarre. And I had the same thing. It makes it a little more challenging to figure out what is your window that's safe for you to exercise in or to do activity in because if you pay for it 3 or 4 days later, that's a lot of math.

Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. But that, yeah. But at that, if you get post-exertional malaise, it's definitely a mitochondria issue. That's a hallmark sign that you have mitochondrial dysfunction. And one of the other ways that I assess in clinic, if somebody has mitochondrial dysfunction and how severe it is, is I do a mitochondrial challenge where I give 'em some, what I call mitochondrial food. To see if that shifts their energy. If that doesn't work, then it lets me know that A, it's not as big of a deal as I thought, or B, their mitochondria are too gummed up to be able to accept that energy. Like, like if you take D-ribose, which is the sugar that drives energy production system in the mitochondria and it doesn't work, then it may be that your mitochondria have other things in them, which takes me to the next root cause, which is looking at toxic overload. So mycotoxins from mold, heavy metals, glyphosates, all those other kinds of toxins from pesticides and herbicides, all of those things block up our cellular function. And many things like those heavy metals that I had, I found out later when I was geeking out of the mitochondria that the mitochondria has this inner membrane in it and it just, it attracts positively charged molecules. So those, that mercury and that lead that was in my body just gets sucked, got sucked right into that inner membrane and made the mitochondria not be able to function very well. That's the other, that's the one, that's the, um, and then that's the fourth one. Then the fifth one is looking at limbic amygdala insula and emotional dysregulation that connects with that long vagus nerve in the body.

Fascinating. There's just so, so many layers to it. Is it underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed?

Way, way, way underdiagnosed. Yeah. Way underdiagnosed. I think there are many people, some of you listening right now, maybe walking around with long COVID and/or myalgic encephalitis and are not being diagnosed by your practitioner.

Yeah. Yeah. So usually people go in, they're probably gonna get some kind of medication, my guess is. Like, what is the conventional treatment for this?

Well, unfortunately, a lot of people go in and say, hey, I'm tired. And this still happens today. And again, it's usually women. So they go into their doctor and they say, I'm feeling really tired. And so they run labs and they check for anemia, like iron levels are fine. They check your white blood cells and your red blood cells and they're all normal within the normal range. They may not be normal if I look them, but they're within the normal range. And they basically frequently get told, your labs are all normal. You look great. You're low. You've got really low blood pressure. Congratulations.

You feel horrible, but it's okay. You look good. Yeah.

You know, and I've literally had people come in. I mean, still to this day, we're like, honey, it's just age, you know, and they're 37, you know, it's like, or, oh honey, it's because you have 2 kids. Of course you're tired. And I just feel like it's so easy to get— I mean, again, it makes me mad. It's just, you know, they so easily get dismissed. And I just say that nobody knows your body better than you do. If you know there's something wrong with you, there probably is. You know, if you know you don't have the energy, the vitality, your brain is foggy, then yeah, there's something going on with you for sure.

Yeah. So, so you've gone through this, you've treated yourself. How do you approach this now? It sounds like there could be so many things going on. Where do you start?

Yeah, I know when I talk about it, it sounds like such a big ball of yarn all knotted up. And how do you, and where do you start? Like, where do you start pulling from? And What I, what I do is I really start with listening to which of the root causes do I think is the root under the root? Like if we were to address one of these, which is the one that feels like it's the one that would have the most impact? Is it working on that limbic emotional subconscious level? Is it working on the viral overload? Is it working on the toxins? If people have all 5 of the root causes, then we're gonna go through it in different layers. Some of them you can do together, but some you may wanna wait. For instance, if I think somebody has, and, and I know practitioners all have their own way of doing this, and I'll also say that I do not have a set rule, you know, because I think it's what I think what's important is to realize that each person is very individual and how their body responds to treatment. Some of my patients are so sensitive, we just have to do little tiny things like at a time to be sure that we don't overwhelm, overwhelm their system. And other people can handle treating more of these things at once. But that said, just a, just an example, if somebody has a high viral load and I think that they also have some heavy metals in there, but it feels like the viral load is a bigger deal, we'll work on the viral load first and get their body to have more energy so that when we start doing a detoxification process, they have more energy to actually detoxify and to release those toxins. Now it may be that you would reverse that for somebody who clearly toxicity was like the big deal, like, right? Like I've had some people who were worked in, who were gardeners and who were just dousing themselves in toxicity or were in the military and got a high level of toxic exposure at burn pits or something like that. That would, might be a different scenario. And then I'm also looking at health foundations because you have to have your health foundations in place for your body to function normally. And you need to get your body out of this stress response. You need to get out of sympathetic mode and into parasympathetic mode where your body can heal and activate that natural healing response. And addressing the health foundation so that you're sleeping, you're digesting, you're moving, you're doing all those things is so important. So we, I also am listening for which health foundation, if we worked on this, would make a huge impact. I had this one patient who was in her young, early 30s who's on disability, and she had a list of about 10 different diagnoses, including Long COVID and POTS, autonomic dysfunction. She had like 3 TBIs, PTSD. I mean, just this whole laundry list of things. And it was really hard for her to concentrate enough to even get her labs done. So we, at first, we just worked on her digestion and getting her eating good food, getting her blood sugar normalized so that she could actually focus enough to get the labs done. And then we worked on her viruses.

Yeah. It's like peeling an onion.

Yeah.

So I have patients that I see in the practice with post-COVID and, uh, one of them in particular has a lingering neuralgia-like pain, upper right in the jaw. And it comes and goes. And he just said it's like, he feels like it's tight. It's gnawing at him. It's I can't see a dental reason. He feels it's a dental reason. He's actually asked me to take out the teeth that are there. So I, you know, at this point I like, okay, well you have to go to an orofacial pain specialist. I don't know, like, do you see things like that happening? And he did get COVID and ever since he's had this issue.

Yeah, that's classic. And what I would say is classic about this, and I was talking about this even before COVID hit, before the pandemic. There are, if you have a viral infection, a latent viral infection that's gotten activated, those viruses love to live in your nerves. Think about chickenpox. We get chickenpox as children and that virus goes latent. And then it comes out as herpes zoster when we are really stressed out, especially when we're older and our immune system is a little bit less active. And it comes out through the nerves, through that dermatome pattern. Same thing happens with different viruses. And what I used to, what I, I tell people, and one of the things I'm asking for is, do you get nerve tingling? Do you get nerve pain? Do you have symptoms that come and go? I had a patient who would feel like, and not just one, I've had multiple patients who feel like they've got this weird feeling on their skin, like there are bugs crawling on it and they look and there's nothing there. Or this sort of this weird itching or these shock-like pains, like this sort of, it feels like a shock is going through your body. I felt like when I got COVID, it was bizarre. It really feel like it landed in my mitochondria. I felt that overnight and then it really landed in my vagus nerve and I could feel it. And it was like this vibration in my vagus nerve, like this insane kind of like all the time. And it really triggered a stress response in my brain that I had to work very hard to not believe that it was a crisis. So what I can say is this is classic and I would be, I bet that that is either the COVID virus or even more likely, given just where it is, that the COVID virus turned on a latent virus and it's probably one of the herpes family. It's probably CMV or HHV-6, and he should just get, you could run a panel on him and look for latent viral infections.

Okay. That's, that's great advice. Thank you. You know what's interesting, actually, shortly thereafter he did come in with a breakout on the roof of the mouth of the herpes virus.

There you go.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm glad.

I'm glad. I'm sure he's going to be maybe somewhat relieved to hear that it's not the teeth.

He might be able to keep his teeth, but you know, I understand that. It's so interesting. It's so interesting when you're trying to figure out what's causing what, right? You know, I, yeah.

Yeah. Excellent. Now you mentioned you work with the subconscious brain. How do you do that?

Yeah. So the subconscious mind, you know, when you, it's so much of what we are is subconscious and the subconscious brain. I mean, the whole body holds this is part of the subconscious. It's not just up here in our head, but when we think about the subconscious mind in the head, in the brain, I always think of, imagine a pie and only 5% of that is conscious thought, which is like the tiniest piece of pie that you've ever been given.

Crumbs, basically.

And that's all we have for conscious thought. The rest is subconscious. And when you start thinking about that, the subconscious mind holds every emotional experience we've had. And some of that, um, in, since in utero, everything we've seen visually, everything we've heard. And we also know that we inherit patterns that land in our subconscious body. So, you know, it really, it, I know it's really important to work on this. And, and then that subconscious mind connects to the vagus nerve, which is the one nerve that leaves the brain and goes down into the body and connects with all the other organs in the body. And that vagus nerve sends information from the brain down to the body and also picks up information from your stomach and your liver and your spleen and your lungs and your heart and sends it back up to the brain. And it's always surveying if we're safe or we're not safe in that limbic brain piece. So the way, how do I access it? It depends on the patient sitting in front of me. So I, for the people who want to do the work, I love doing deep subconscious work with them. I'm trained in a couple of different things, something called Psych-K, something called Parts Work, you know, Inner Child. There's lots of different ways of getting in there. For other people, we're working on that subconscious mind in other ways. Some of the remedies that I use, because I'm a naturopathic physician, my toolkit is deep and wide. And so some of the remedies work on this physical, mental, emotional, and energetic level, and they begin to shift that subconscious mind through the side door, through the back door. And so that may be energetic medicine like homeopathic medicine, or it may be through plant stem cell plant stem cell therapies like gemmotherapies, or it may be using smell. You can smell things and it, you know, you smell something, it makes you think of grandma, right? It's like, that's very triggered to that limbic brain. So sometimes using essential oils and things like that can really impact how, how we are.

Amazing. You talk about empowered self-care.

Mm-hmm.

What exactly is that for you? And why do you think it's essential?

Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm going to answer this in a way I don't think I ever have in, in a podcast before, because when I was in, I always had this idea as a kid, I was just one of those people that kind of saw the suffering in the world and felt like it was important to do something about it. And when I went to college, I wanted to try to figure out how can I help the world? And I studied political sociology and thought about going into law or education. I wanted to try, how can I help? You know, how can I help? I see there's a problem. How can I help? And realized that those systems weren't for me. I was so mad at the education system. My 5-year-old came out and I just wanted to blow it up. And when I did stuff in law or politics, I pretty much just wanted to scream there too. I wasn't very patient with the process. I just was like, the people that enjoy it, they enjoy the game. I didn't enjoy the game. I just wanted things to be fair and people to be nice to each other.

Yeah, makes sense. I'm with you on that.

And when I started thinking about when I had the epiphany that I really wanted to be a physician, it all came together. That made a lot of sense. And what I feel like the importance of being empowered is that you, you own your own body. You own that this is your body. It's your responsibility to take care of it. It's a gift to be here. And that you also are in control of what happens to it medically in the sense that You use us, you use us who are trained in our, in our practice, in our medicine, in our work, and you use us to help you so that you can get to the next level of health. And I really believe that we are, that we have this innate ability to heal in ourselves. I believe the body wants to be well. And a lot of the signs and symptoms, symptoms of sickness are really the body trying to rectify a problem. And that we as professionals can begin to see that and help you help guide you so that you can understand what your obstacle to cure is so that you can clear the way. But ultimately it's your body. Like it's your body. And, you know, none of us have— I don't believe I have the magic wand. I believe that I have the ability to offer you hope and guidance in terms of healing, but the actual healing power is inside of each one of us. It's really about activating that.

I agree with you with that. You know, when you say that, because, you know, I always tell patients as well, like, the body always wants to heal.

Yeah.

We have to give it the right environment and we are in charge of where we take it. Not the doctor. It's like each individual person for themselves.

Right. Right. Yeah. And I, and I think that this medical system, the medical system that we all know is broken and that we're in the, right now it's breaking down so that we can recreate something new that's better in in, in the debris. You know, I know that it, it's a very disempowering system. You know, it's set up, it's lopsided. It's set up where the doctor has the power, the person in the white coat has the power, the pill has the power, the diagnosis has the power. Like none of these should have so much power over you. And it's really about activating that so that you can feel strong.

Yeah, absolutely. I know we have a variety of people listening to our podcast from regular consumers to dentists to doctors. And I definitely recommend everyone to jump on your summit. You're going to learn a lot. So we're going to put the link down in the show notes. And if there's anybody listening, you can go to Dr. Jenny Tufekjian's website. We're going to put them also in the show notes. You also have a quiz. Tell us about that.

Yeah, the quiz allows you to go through it and to get some ideas about what your root cause might be. I created that quiz looking at that algorithm I use in my brain. When somebody's sitting in front of me where I'm thinking, is this hormone triangle? Is this viral? Is this toxic overload? Which one is it? And you can take that to get some, get some—

Amazing. Dr. Jenny, any last words of wisdom you wanna say?

Two things I wanna say. One is I absolutely loved your interview in the summit. So I recommend anyone listening to listen to your, come to the summit and listen to your, to Dr. Sanda Moldovan's interview because it is such an underappreciated place where people get their energy drained is through these infections in your mouth. And I just think it's, it's so, we just need more people to understand that as a place to look. So I would say that. And then the second thing I would say is if you're struggling with fatigue, if you're tired, it's really important that you pay attention to that and get the support and guidance you need. So you can have the energy to be the fullest expression of yourself that you can be right now. And I'd also say if you've been struggling with sickness for a long time, never give up hope. Just don't give up hope. Just keep knocking on doors. There is a way that your body can experience more energy and healing is possible. You just need to keep knocking on the doors until the thing that works for your body is there.

That's great advice. And with that, thank you everyone for listening to our show today and leave us a comment, uh, either on Instagram @DrSandaMoldovan or on my YouTube channel. And if there's anything else that's interesting for you and you'd like to hear about, let me know. Thank you so much, Dr. Jenny. It was great show.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please make sure you check out the show notes for any links mentioned in the show. If you like today's show, please invite your friends to listen as well. That would mean a lot to me. Do you have a question you'd you'd like me to answer, message me on Instagram @drsandamoldovanovan. This is Dr. Sanda Moldovan, and remember, your mouth is the gateway to your health, so take care of it in the most natural and best way possible.