In this personal narrative, the speaker recounts her experience with stage 4 endometriosis and how functional medicine initially managed her symptoms using progesterone, low‑dose naltrexone, fish oil, and turmeric. Despite symptom control, surgical removal was eventually required, prompting her to seek surgeons who employ a non‑scarring technique to reduce recurrence risk. Post‑surgery, she adopted a strict anti‑inflammatory diet—eliminating gluten (already avoided) and dairy—which she credits with enabling conception of her first child within a year. She emphasizes that inflammation often spans multiple organ systems, noting that bowel tissue can become fused to reproductive organs, and argues that addressing root causes through diet and lifestyle is essential alongside surgical intervention.
Chapters
Should I share mine? My 6 major? Yes, please. I had 6 major, I'll say, hidden variables. So I'll kind of start with structural. I know you guys have talked a lot about probably on the show about endometriosis. I definitely had endometriosis. I had stage 4 and I guess maybe to functional medicine's credit, because I was practicing functional medicine and I was on progesterone and low dose naltrexone and fish oil and turmeric, I didn't have the horrible periods. I had gotten them under control, but some of the damage had been done. And so I did need to have surgery. So this is where I did need conventional medicine. But I did seek out some surgeons out of state who had a non-scarring— maybe you know more about this, but like a non-scarring technique because I didn't want the endometriosis to come back. And because I didn't want it to come back, I needed to abide by anti-inflammatory diet, right? I needed to get gluten and dairy out of my life. I'd had gluten out of my life a long time, but I needed to get dairy out. It was almost a year exactly that I was able to conceive my first son after being dairy-free. So that was kind of a, a major structural issue for me. And we, I talk about this in the book and I, you talked about this on the podcast when I interviewed you that, you know, you, I, I'm not a surgeon, but you are. So, you know, you're opening up, um, patients to do surgery and you are noticing that like half the time their bowels are fused to their reproductive, um, organs, right? So when one, we'll say, you know, body system is inflamed, that doesn't mean the others aren't. They likely all are. And so, getting again to that root cause of the problem is not just doing the surgery, but it's also changing the diet, minimizing the inflammation so it doesn't come back. Yeah. So that was a huge part of, part of my story.
