Episode 87: The Blood Work that You Already Have Might Hold Clues, with Dr. Kylie Burton

Hey beautiful, it's Dr. Tabatha. I want to share something with you that I believe God is doing right now in women's health. We're in the middle of a massive movement and most people don't even know it. Every single day, 6,000 women in the U.S. enter menopause. That's over 2 million women a year, and by 2030, that's more than 1.2 billion women worldwide. So here's the thing, most of these women feel exhausted, bloated, anxious, disconnected from themselves, and the medical system is Doctors are handing out prescriptions and quick fixes, and no one is helping women heal from the root cause of their issues. That's where Fast to Faith coaches come in. As a certified coach, you'll be equipped to help midlife women balance their hormones, heal their gut, regain their energy, and reconnect their faith, the foundation that so many of us have been missing. And from a business standpoint, woo, this is one of the most lucrative untapped opportunities in the entire health coaching world. The global health coaching industry is expected to reach over $33 billion by 2023, and midlife women are the fastest-growing, highest-spending demographic in that space. Most importantly, these women stay with their coaches. They invest deeply because they are desperate for lasting transformation— body, mind, and spirit. So if you've been feeling that pull and that whisper that you're meant to do more, This is it. Now is the time to rise, to serve, and build a purpose-driven business that not only changes other women's lives but transforms your own in the process. Because when you help one woman heal, you help her family, her marriage, her faith, and her future. That's the ripple effect that we're creating with Fast to Faith. So join me, click the link to come watch this webinar. It might be the one thing that really moves the needle for you in this Next season. I can't wait to see you in there. Hi, I'm Dr. Tabatha, the Functional Gynecologist. I'm a board-certified OB-GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey, and I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, Then you've come to the right place. I want to be your functional gynecologist. So welcome. Hi ladies, welcome back. So this is going to be a really good episode. Today we're talking to Dr. Kylie Burton about 3 steps to stopping autoimmune disease. But on a bigger picture, she's really going to talk about, like, how we can interpret lab values and look for patterns in a different way than maybe your conventional medicine doctor is looking at them. So she has a lot of insight into Really pulling out more information from those basic labs than most people realize. So she's really awesome. You're going to get a lot of golden nuggets out of this. You know, I can imagine that you have had some blood work run and been told by your doctor that it's normal and you're fine, but you don't feel fine, right? So you are going to hear her talk about a few of these different patterns, and it might click with you like, hey, I think I actually have that going on. That might be a missing piece to my puzzles. So this is a really cool episode. So I hope you'll listen all the way through, share it with everybody you know. It's just really good. So the links are in my show notes if you want to connect with Dr. Kylie. Don't hesitate to reach out to her or myself. So let me just give you some background about Dr. Kylie Burton. So she's an expert in functional medicine, and she helps thousands of individuals with seemingly impossible health struggles find answers, healing, and hope, even if they've been told their labs are normal. So that right there should, you know, make you feel good. Besides helping patients, she teaches practitioners of all backgrounds how they can level up their patient results using her techniques inside of her mastermind. She's been a guest on over 50 podcasts. She hosts the podcast Beyond the Diagnosis with Dr. Kylie, and she's been featured on 5 different radio stations worldwide. On TV. She's been a guest on Good Morning Utah and Fox 26 Houston. So she is super passionate about sharing her knowledge and wisdom to as many people as she can possibly reach. So that's what I love about her. We're both on this mission to get everyone we know to reclaim their health and feel amazing. And so you're going to learn today that you There might be some missing pieces of the puzzle that aren't too far off for you to figure out and unturn. So this is a really cool episode. Stay tuned. And here we go. Well, welcome, Dr. Kylie, to the Functional Gynecologist Podcast.

Thanks for having me. I know you were on mine a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. And I will tell you that when people listen to my episode on your episode on my podcast, I was getting practitioners saying how they were like, Writing down notes as fast as they could. I love all about those hormones.

Yeah, I really don't think we get enough training in it, you know, we just don't. So thanks so much for having me. That was awesome.

Yeah, you by far get the most training because you're an OB-GYN, whereas health coaches or functional medicine docs, we get trained— we get a little dabble of everything. Yeah, you get the details.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm excited for our conversation today because we're going to talk about autoimmune. And this is near and dear to my heart because I was diagnosed with my first autoimmune disease when I was 17 or 18. I can't remember. It was after the birth of my daughter. You know, I was told I had Hashimoto's. Then I went on to develop Raynaud's. And my mom got diagnosed with Hashimoto's when she was 67. So that's pretty crazy to me.

Yeah.

I will tell you, I diagnose an autoimmune condition probably every day of the week. So I think it's a lot more common than people realize, and it's impacting their health.

Wouldn't you agree? Yeah. A lot of times people have autoimmune and they just, they never get a diagnosis, or they're like, you know, I have these flares. Sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days where I can barely function. And there's really no rhyme or reason to it.

Yeah.

I think even though we might not get that diagnosis, and I'm like you when I'm going through blood work and reading labs, I'm like, you've got autoimmune patterns going on throughout here. Let's— and, and just using that word freaks them out.

Yeah.

It's okay. Like, we can deal with this, we can treat it. And it's not just treat it, it's, hey, we don't— you don't have to just manage this stuff.

You can—

I mean, if you were to look at you, you got thick, luscious hair, clear skin. You would never know you had thyroid problem.

Yeah, but it took a lot of work. It really did.

Yeah, it does.

I want to talk about all of that because I think that is a missing piece for a lot of patients. You know, you love to push the fact that people get their labs done and then their doctor tells them their labs are normal. So what are we missing? Are we just not checking the right stuff a lot of the time?

You're probably not missing anything, right? The, the labs that we're, we're taught as clinicians, as doctors in medical school, you know this, we're, we're going off this normal range. And that, that normal range, I like to tell people, it's like the, the TSH marker that we always just assume with the thyroid. It's like trying to find your favorite restaurant Somewhere between California and New York. Finding your ideal TSH somewhere in that big of a range, it's going to be difficult. But if we can take that range and we can narrow it down and we can say, okay, now what about finding your favorite restaurant somewhere in Rhode Island or Virginia or Georgia or Oklahoma or Utah? Or I like just narrow it down that much. We got a better chance to— not only are you going to feel better, you're going to start to notice the energy coming back, the hair coming back thick and heavy, the brain fog going away, gut problems resolving, things like that. But it's a different scope when we look at these labs.

Yeah, exactly. So do you find that a lot of women are coming to you already diagnosed with an autoimmune issue, or those labs just aren't even run?

They're not right. Yeah, I'm getting a lot of people where they just say, my— I keep getting told that my labs are normal. I can barely function. Something is not right. I'm not myself, and I know that something's wrong. I need somebody to help me try to figure out what it is. And but yet all the labs are normal. Yeah, so it's very frustrating. It is.

I mean, patients are at their wit's end, you know. I get people calling me Obi-Wan Kenobi, like, you're my last hope. You know, that kind of thing. And it's sad when we're just not checking the right stuff. But you hit on something that I want you to talk about. You mentioned like autoimmune patterns. Tell me what a typical autoimmune patient presents to you like.

They usually have a bunch of symptoms that don't fit underneath an umbrella. And when they don't fit underneath that umbrella, we can't give a diagnosis. Therefore, we can't treat because we don't know what pill to stick next to that diagnosis. But when we have a bunch of these symptoms that are just hit or miss all over the place, sometimes they're gone, sometimes they're present, then we don't fit underneath a diagnosis term. And we just get told, you're fine. It's because you're a mom. Sleep some more. Take a nap when the kids are napping. I think there's a different story to it. And when I can figure out just the basic blood work— and we can get into some of these autoimmune patterns in the blood work— but if we can figure that out and identify whether it's the really bad cholesterol panel that's really telling me you got autoimmune, or if it's like the regular CBC telling me you got autoimmune, now it makes so much more sense to these moms who are really struggling but have no idea why. And then it's always great when you can go back and tell the husband, like, look, the number's right here. This isn't like I'm muscle testing. This isn't like I'm running some scan. The number's there, and numbers never lie.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I see over and over women who are just completely fatigued. Even when they do get sleep, they still are tired, or they can't make it through their workouts, or they just have brain fog or they have chronic pain that, you know, they can't seem to have any reason behind. You know, that's the biggest things that I see. So where do you even start with these patients?

I always pull their labs, and people are— the new patient process with me is, is a unique one. Um, I don't even see them until I get their labs, whether they send me their labs or I request them with medical record request form. Most people have their labs. Most people are like, I've been keeping track of this for years.

Yeah.

And here, here's my file. So they just hand it over and, and everyone's like, well, how many labs do you want? Give them all. I want them all. Anything that you have. They're like puzzle pieces. And if you're leaving out puzzle pieces— like, I saw one of your posts the other day how you, how you broke down the requirements for an actual thyroid panel. Getting only a few markers is only like— is like getting only a few puzzle pieces, and you can't complete the puzzle without all those additional markers. So I had one of them I got sent this week. Um, she had a hormone panel from ZRT, which I, I love ZRT. The only problem is that's one system. Our hormones are only one system. We need to look at all systems of the body. And I can get into more of the systems with the other blood work. So we take their regular CBC, metabolic panel, cholesterol panel, vitamin D, lipid, or iron panel, all those, all that good stuff that they already have, that they already have donated blood for, that they've already spent copays on, that they've already sat in doctors' offices for hours on end. Trying to get answers. We just take that, we're like, let's transform it and let's look through it in a different microscope. And now you get the answers, healing, and hope you've been searching for with just those normal labs.

I love that so much. So tell me a typical pattern that you're seeing in those labs.

So one of the easiest ones is the lovely cholesterol panel. And you, like I, we see some really ugly cholesterol panels. And a lot of them are, you know, they're in— they're young women in their 20s, maybe early 30s. And if you were to look in the mind— in the mindset of you have your cholesterol's, you know, 310, your doctor is going to put you on a statin, but you're, you're 31. Is that really going to correlate with heart disease? And Arteriosclerosis. It just, it doesn't match. The puzzle pieces just don't add up. So if you look at it and you say, okay, the cholesterol is supposed to be between 155 and 200-ish, that's— before I'm throwing these numbers out, I should caveat this and say this isn't your normal lab range. These are the condensed— I like to call them ideal. Most people will call them functional lab ranges. Where within that range you feel good. Outside of that range, well, you don't feel good, but it's not bad enough to get a diagnosis, right? So that cholesterol panel is one of those autoimmune patterns, if we can identify this right. So say your cholesterol is at 310, and then the one below it, the marker below it, will be the triglycerides. And the triglycerides are also known as, you know, bad guys. But what they need to be is they needed to be half of what the cholesterol is. So a 310, you're looking at triglycerides of around 150. And then the ideal range for HDL is between 55 and 100. But if it's half of the triglycerides, so at 150, your HDL is now 75. And that would be a typical— what we want to see as far as the pattern goes. When that pattern is off, say your cholesterol is 310 and your triglycerides are 289 and your HDL is 14, that's when I'm starting to say, um, that's an autoimmune pattern. Do I have any other patterns that are going to confirm what that cholesterol panel just told me has nothing to do with heart disease and arteriosclerosis. It's telling us your body is under duress. Your immune system is trying to fight, and it's fighting hard. At some point, it's just going to give up and start attacking whatever it wants to attack, and your genes tell it what to attack. So if in your genes they say, you know, I'm going to attack my thyroid, it's going to be Hashimoto's. In my family, it's Parkinson's. I'm going to attack the nervous system. I just— I'm working with a patient who has MS. And I hate using that phrase, who has MS, because she had MS. We— sure, her life has been completely transformed. And she's like 41 years old, just spent the summer playing with her teenagers, whereas the last summer she couldn't step out of the house if it was over 72 degrees. Because the heat would just bring in the flares.

Well, that's amazing.

She's going on 50, 60, 70-mile bike rides with her husband again. Like, it's really cool stuff. And this is what happens when you can identify, whether you have a diagnosis or not, get to these underlying problems that cause autoimmune, figure those out, get rid of them. I love vitamin D for autoimmune. It just calms the immune system down, but people don't take enough of it. And then the third step would be the immune system is our gut, so we have to rehab our gut and rebuild our immune system.

Yeah, let's talk about that a little more because, you know, you got to have the genetic propensity, you gotta have the leaky gut, and then the trigger to turn on the, the disease. So explain to my listeners what's happening in the gut that's triggering this autoimmune process?

You know, a lot of people will say leaky gut, and, and leaky gut is a piece of the puzzle, but it's a, it's a minor piece in, in my view. The number one trigger I find, and even back to the research, and the research says that a low-grade virus is The 95% cause of Hashimoto's and type 1 diabetes. It's a virus that attacks the pancreas, and it's a virus your immune system is fighting that just throws its hands up in the air and says, screw it, I'm going to attack my thyroid, your thyroid. So the, the first step in this autoimmune component is to identify those triggers. Is it leaky gut? Is it an infection? Is it a food sensitivity? Chances are it's a combination of all the above.

Yeah.

It's the, the problem we haven't is we go to Google and we say, what causes Hashimoto's? What causes migraines? What causes chronic fatigue? We're looking for one sole reason and it's wrong. It's going to lead us down a dead end because there's not just one reason for a plethora of symptoms. Especially when it's autoimmune, because autoimmune is usually a systemic problem where it's going to affect all systems of the body, all cells of the body. It's just a matter of what is it actually attacking. So the first step is to identify the trigger, and I just mentioned, um, the big one that I find is this infection standpoint, and it's a, it's a low-grade infection. It's not something that you're going to run to your doctor and say, hey, my lab test says that I have a bacterial infection. Can you test me for E. coli and H. pylori and Campylobacter and C. diff? And you're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. You're wasting your poop stool. The idea is you don't want those tests to come back positive. If they come back positive, you're like on the toilet for 30 days. amount it requires to elicit a positive test result. But if you're saying, you know, I've dealt with constipation my entire life and I've always had to take magnesium at night so I can have a bowel movement the next day, that's what we're talking about here, are these underlying low-grade type things that we've just kind of shoved underneath the rug because we've found some way to fix it. for the short term and not worried about what could be their potential long-term causes of chronic diarrhea, chronic constipation, and those other gut issues like that. So leaky gut's a big one, um, infections are a big one. I have a whole list of here things that can trigger things: food, chemicals, toxicities, stress, mold. Metabolic issues like pregnancy. You mentioned how yours came after pregnancy, as well as so many others. The things we do to have babies.

Yep, I know. And I mean, it was a perfect storm for me. Imagine how stressed I was being pregnant as a teenager, right? That— and enough isn't stressful enough. I was on birth control pills leading up to it. I had like 2 doses of antibiotics because of a strep throat. That's actually why I got pregnant, because they made my birth control pills not effective.

I had a teammate that happened to her.

Yeah, I mean, college destroying my gut. Then I had those genes, and then I got pregnant, and it all just turned on. And, you know, you know, once that autoimmune process is turned on, it's really hard to calm your immune system down and get that fire to dampen out. So let's talk about, you know, someone comes to you and they've been diagnosed with autoimmune.

Where—

what's the first thing you are telling them to do?

The first thing I always do is vitamin D, but I'll get into the vitamin D in just a minute because that's in step 2. If we can look into the labs and if I can say I love it when I can find an infection in the labs because it's like, oh bingo, here we go. We get rid of this and your body's like, okay, I can breathe again. I can actually like get my body to the grocery store and be able to unload all the groceries, not have to take a short, quick power nap beforehand or order them online now, go pick them up kind of thing. We get rid of these things and they're found in the labs. So this This one particular marker I'm going to teach the audience is the white blood cell count, and that is the very top marker on the most common lab test called the CBC. We all have it. It is the standard test every doctor takes to just rule out anything and everything under the sun. The only problem is 95% of the time it comes back normal. Ours, we're going to take this range and we're going to make it smaller. The white blood cell count, WBC, the range is less than 5 or greater than 8. So you want your count to be between 5 and 8. If it's less than 5 or greater than 8, now we have some type of infection going on. Has a big key trigger for autoimmunity. And you gave a perfect example early on where, you know, you got it at 17, your mom got it at 63. Like, why does that happen? Why do a— why does a 7-year-old get type 1 diabetes at 7? Someone else gets it at 19. Another person gets MS at 39. In my family, my grandpa got Parkinson's at 60. My aunt got Parkinson's at 35. What causes the onset of these things? And it's really how long can your body fight? How supported is your immune system? And if it's fighting, how active are these low-grade infections? So if we say, okay, the white blood cell count is 3.8. I know my body's fighting something. Now what? What is it fighting? Then you're going to see a bunch of markers on that CBC. Skip them. Get down to the neutrophil count. This big word called the neutrophil— lymphocyte, monocyte, basophil, eosinophil— those are the 5 markers that are going to tell us what type of infection you've been fighting. Neutrophils, their job is to fight bacteria. That's their job. So if they're a little bit elevated, you're going to fight a low-grade bacterial infection that's probably causing some gut problems. Chronic diarrhea, chronic constipation, basically not having a bowel movement every single day. Because we don't ever talk about the normal—

Right.

The normal patterns that should be happening. It should be daily. Maybe once or twice a day depending on your practitioner, whoever's under your care. Um, so if the neutrophils are above 60%, we got some type of bacterial infection going on. Very common. It's also a common combination with a low-grade viral infection. That's the lymphocyte marker. Lymphocytes, their job is to fight viruses. Does it matter what virus? No. Do I— can I tell you what virus you're fighting? No. Do I care? No. It's just take an antiviral herbal supplement and boost the immune system with things like vitamin D. You're fine. Low-grade virus, if that is above 30 Now we're looking at your body's fighting this low-grade virus, right? So the pattern here is the neutrophils are— we want them to be at 60% or less. The lymphocytes, we want to be at 30% or less. 60/30, 2 to 1 ratio. Making sense?

Yep.

Now say your bacterial count, that neutrophil number, is 42, and say your lymphocytes are 44. Pretty common to see where that 2 to 1 ratio now becomes a 1 to 1 ratio. 42, 44. That's an autoimmune pattern. That tells me that when you took that blood test, you're probably having a crappy day.

Yeah.

That was one of your bad days. But, and when I love it when we get, you know, the last 10, 6 years of labs and I have lots of labs, lots of patterns to follow, because you can say, okay, on one of those days you took that lab test, you were in a pretty good flare. You had some bad days that day. Whereas this, the next time you took a lab test, You probably felt pretty good. And they're like, oh my gosh, how can you tell that? It's just right here in the numbers. Yeah, just following the patterns that your blood work has been telling you all the time. You just need the right person looking at the labs.

Yeah, that's the key.

Yeah. So if you get into these patterns that we've already talked about— the cholesterol pattern, we've talked about the CBC pattern— this isn't standard blood work. This is stuff your insurance pays for. They'll cover it all. Yeah, but it's stuff that we just don't look at in the right lens.

No, conventional medicine is very much of the mindset that you need to have an outright infection or diagnosis to do anything, any intervention. So like you're saying, if you don't have outright C. diff diarrhea 10 times a day, infection with your neutrophils like crazy elevated, they're not touching you. They're not dealing with it. It's just a different way of practicing medicine because conventional medicine is trying to keep you alive and prevent really, really bad things from happening, whereas—

And manage those really bad things once they do happen.

Yes.

So we're like, okay, you have MS. All right, cool. Your immune system's fighting your nervous system. Well, we know exactly what to do. Let's look in the labs. Once we figure out the triggers, get those gone. Now we can say, hey, your immune system needs some big-time support. It's been working on overdrive for a very long time.

Yeah.

No wonders why you've felt like crap the last 15 years. And, and I love it when I get a teenager in my hands. It's like, oh, you heal so fast. It's so nice. They're, they're so young and their bodies are just building and building. And when you can get that, you can catch it fast. The faster you can catch it, the faster you can prevent this stuff, the faster you heal.

Yeah, exactly. Their bodies are so resilient and young. Oh my goodness. Yeah, like I waited I don't know, 20 years to actually do anything about my autoimmune disease. And so it was quite the battle. It was hard to get the immune system under control and heal my gut and all of that. And I want you to talk a little bit more about, you know, tackling just the viruses in general, because I feel like that's a missing piece for a lot of people as well.

Yeah, hence why we're going on 15, 17, who knows how long, many months of this. We need stuff that's high quality, that is very carefully produced and formulated to be able to fight off these things that we're helping patients fight off every single day. So the supplement that I use, it's called Vivi, V-I-V-I. It's an antiviral supplement. Um, I use that first, and then I also put people in really high doses of vitamin D. The more I learn about vitamin D, the more I know it has superpowers. And I'll have people— I preach vitamin D on my podcast all the time, and I tell them, you know, we take 2,000, 5,000 IUs per day. It's not enough. It's better than taking nothing, but you're like, here, immune system, have like one Smartie. Not the whole package of Smarties, just, just one Smartie. It's just a little bit. It's, it's not going to help our body or our immune system fight off what the things that we're having to fight off in this In this day and age, so the virus we take the herbal route. But as far as attacking an antiviral is great, but you also have to supply the immune system with what it needs to do its job. And that's the other downfall is that we're just depleted in a whole lot of things that your your minerals. I don't know if you're a fan of multi minerals or multivitamins. I'm not. They're just. They're minimal doses. Like, if you were to look at—

I had my—

I had a lady email me this past weekend and she said, you know, I've been listening to your podcast. You're telling me I need to take 25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day. So I went and grabbed my vitamin D off the shelf. I have to take 14 capsules to get to that dosage. I said, yeah, let me send you the better stuff. Let me send you some good stuff. You only need to take 5 of those. And there's a lot more to it than, than the vitamin D. So you're going to pay for what you get. We'll just stand that with vitamin D. I can tell you to take the right doses, but if you're grabbing stuff from Walmart or, or whatever's convenient, you're not going to get the same effect as something that has really been designed to literally calm the immune system down and to rebuild it. So the vitamin D that I recommend is 25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day.

Wow, that's a high dose.

It's a high dose. When people go in and get their vitamin D, I've seen 1,000 labs. You've seen this too. I rarely see a vitamin D status over 50.

Yeah.

And if it's over 50, I ask, well, what are you doing? Well, I've been following your protocol for the last 3 months. That's why your, your numbers, you know, 72, not 14 like it was 3 months ago.

Exactly. And so many of those products patients buy, they don't even absorb it. You know, I have people come to me that I'm on 5,000 every day, been on it for years. You check it and their D is like 25 or 30, and they're just not absorbing it. And it's a garbage product, and they don't have a healthy gut, you know. So it's so important to get the right quality supplements from a provider. I think that's That's like one, a huge point that you made, you know, super important. And get it checked. You know, so many people don't even get their vitamin D checked. You know, I live in the Northern Hemisphere. We're all deficient, you know, hence the reason we have so much multiple sclerosis and autoimmune disease. You know, super important.

Yeah, I, I saw some research where it's above the 35th parallel Which is basically if you were to chop California in half, draw a line all the way across, that's the majority of the US. We, for 5 months of the year, do not produce vitamin D from the sun. But even then, I get people from Florida. They're like, well, I'm out in the sun all the time. How am I at 32?

Yeah, I just had my genetics done with Sam Shea, and I have mutations in my ability to make vitamin D. So I can be in the sun. I tan great. But I don't make any D from it. You know, you put that with living in Michigan, like, I'm screwed.

You know, that's why you just have to take high doses. And we do that— 25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day for a month. I don't keep people on that for a long term. It's basically a 3-month plan. I, I call it jack up the vitamin D, chill the system out, and give it the support ingredients it needs. And then it's like Like, like in my MS patient, that was one of the biggest keys for her is to keep her vitamin D up high. And now she's at 10,000 IUs per day, not 2 or 5 that she was taking. So then the next month is month 2, would be 20,000. Month 3 would be 15,000. And if you're thinking, well, 25,000, my doctor just gave me a prescription that's 50,000, but that's 50,000 Per week, right? So there's a big difference. They're gonna— you're gonna get it one time a week. Your body needs it a lot, especially if you're less than— I mean, they ain't giving you that prescription unless you're less than 30. So you are— your vitamin D is in the tank if you're getting that prescription. Your ideal number is around 80. I like to see people around 80.

Yeah.

Up to 100. I've seen people in like the 120s and And their primary care doc's like, oh my gosh, you're gonna start taking vitamin— no, you don't. It's okay. Vitamin D is powerful. And all the research I've seen, I have yet to figure out a toxicity.

I've never seen it. I don't— I, I haven't seen it in the literature pan out either, you know. I, I just don't— I don't believe it.

I just think we're scared of it. I'm like, especially with autoimmune, like Vitamin D is your most powerful tool with autoimmune, and it's something you can simply take all day long every day— not all day long, but every day throughout the year— just to keep those symptoms at bay so you can have more good days than you can have— than you have bad days. And eventually the bad days just disappear altogether when you do this stuff right. So vitamin D is my big, you know, identify the trigger. Figure out those triggers, get rid of them. Vitamin D, calm the immune system down, and then rehab the gut. And rehabbing that gut is not just taking a probiotic for the rest of your life. There's a little bit more details to it, and your gut is specific to you, so one-size-fits-all protocol isn't going to benefit all.

Yeah, that's very true. I mean, I see so many different stool test results and gut reactions. And, you know, I just see a lot of people who don't absorb anything that they're taking in. So it's just like they're wasting all of this money on these supplements.

Yeah, they're taking duffel bags full of them and they've got an entire cupboard full of them. And, and a lot of them will say, well, I'm taking this for that and I'm taking that for this and And Google told me this, my best friend's taken that and it's helping them, so I thought I would try it. But ultimately, if you get into the labs and you figure out what your specific numbers say— are you fighting some type of infection? Are you deficient in vitamin D? I get about an email a week of people who say, I do— I've been doing my vitamin D, my anxiety and depression's gone. Um, last week I had one who said her hot flashes disappeared. So you never know till you boost this thing up, because vitamin D talks to every single cell in your body.

Yeah.

Another one says her hair stopped falling out when she got the vitamin D up high enough and then stayed at higher doses. When she dropped it down, it was starting to come back. So just monitor things with the labs, make sure your number's where it needs to be, and, and feed your body. Feed it with the good stuff. And help your immune system out. It's doing work and it's a hard job every single day. That immune system is pretty dang incredible if we really stop and think about it.

Yeah, exactly. And so we can get that immune system calmed down. Have you personally ever seen autoimmune be reversed, or, or do you like to just say that we've calmed it down, we've stopped the progression?

I like to use the term kick it to the curb. Now, with the MS patient, just because we're talking about her, could I tell— could I say that we reversed it? I don't know. Is she having any more symptoms? No. From a presentation standpoint, she's back to living her life like it was before she got the diagnosis of MS. Now, could we go in and see the MRI and if the lesions are cleared or I don't know, and only time will tell. Um, but as far as curing something, I never want to say I cure it because at any point in any time you could have another event in your life. You could have that Epstein-Barr virus or that low virus all of a sudden get really active and throw yourself back into the loop again. So it's really a prevention. Let's do the work that we need to do Now so you can get your life back, but then you've got to maintain it to not flare, though, have those flares up. Flare—

I can't— flare-ups.

Yeah, flare-ups. Like, yeah, flares. There we go. Flares again.

Exactly. I mean, I have one older lady who she knows because she gets a shingles outbreak. Like, that's her first sign that things are going awry. It's like, oh, my shingles are back. And, you know, she's on the antivirals and the immune support and the D and all these things you're talking about. And she went from having shingles outbreak every month to, gosh, I think once every 3 to 4 months. So for her, that's amazing because that's—

That was a big step.

And miserable, you know. And not to mention the autoimmune process on top of it making her tired and painful, but the shingles itself was painful. So I think you can make so much headway just with that alone. I love— that's where you're tackling things. I love it.

Yeah. And, and with autoimmune, if we think about it, you see the commercials— Humira. I've never used the shot, never want to use it, but I have patients who are like, they're 25 years old, they just got this diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, and they're told that they have to have Humira. an injection, a painful one according to the commercials, every week for the rest of their life.

Right.

To, quote, manage their joint pain. We're not, we're not managing stuff here. We're helping your body resolve and heal based off of its innate power. We're just giving it the tools it needs to and removing the triggers, removing the blocks in the way. And with this MS patient, These trial injections just blows my mind sometimes. She was going in every month for this trial injection that would literally make her bedridden for the next 3 days.

Oh my gosh.

She's 41 years old and has teenagers. She's— I mean, her life got swept completely underneath her feet. So I, as we're discussing things here, I'm saying, okay, I don't Everybody's different, especially in the case of autoimmune, but from what I've seen, this is what your life could be like. We could literally go back and you could be 32 again.

Yeah.

Well, that would be a dream. Okay, well, let's get there. The dreams can be a reality. But if you continue with that shot, I just don't know what's in it. I don't know the background of it. So go talk to your primary care doc and ask them what it would take to get off of this shot. Just find out from them. So she calls in, she calls in the nurse, and the nurse says, oh, well, you just don't come in for your next one. Really? It's that simple? Just, just don't show up for the next one? Okay. She never has come back.

Wow. Yeah.

I mean, saving time, you're saving money, you're saving energy, and you're getting your life back.

Those commercials scare the crap out of me.

Yeah.

I mean, those hardcore medications are literally suppressing your immune system from functioning. That is why you get some relief, because your immune system isn't attacking you. But now you are a setup for being intubated with COVID and getting tuberculosis and HIV and every infection under the sun. They say it all right in the commercial. Possible death. And we accept this as an okay option to manage pain. Like, that just blows my mind. There are ways to heal your body. You just have to remove the impedances. Like, I strongly believe our body was meant to be able to handle anything and to heal and to overcome, and we just get in the way. And we don't— we need to remove the crap like you're talking about— the viruses, the heavy metals, the toxins. The pesticides. I could go on all day. And once you remove those, your immune system will calm down.

Yeah. And then the other thing too, with not only the physical side of treatment, but we have to change what goes on between our ears. Oh my gosh. Because if we, we, we introduce ourselves, well, I'm this way because I have Parkinson's, or I'm this way because I have Hashimoto's. And, and we just tell our bodies, well, I have this. I have, I have, I have, I have, or I am hiding it and I'm kicking it to my history.

Yeah, I love that. I think that's so important to not be defined by your diagnosis. You know, I love— that's why I love your podcast so much, because it doesn't really matter what your diagnosis is, right?

It's Beyond the Diagnosis. That's the title of it.

Yeah, it really doesn't matter. It matters How you envision yourself, how you take care of yourself. If you want to be a healthy person who happens to be diagnosed with MS or Hashimoto's or Crohn's disease, then that's what you are. But that shouldn't be who you are, you know, that disease.

Yeah. Yeah. And I always tell people, whether you have a diagnosis or you don't, I don't care. Diagnosis is— it just tells me What your bottom, your body is presenting with. Like, for example, chronic fatigue syndrome. Okay, you're tired. Does it tell me anything else? No. Right. Just tells you that you're tired. You already knew that. Fibromyalgia. Okay, we have pain, we have some insomnia, and what's the other one? Fatigue. Fatigue. There we go. Yeah, pain, insomnia, fatigue. Okay, you have fibromyalgia, maybe Lyrica is helping, probably not. What's causing the pain? What's causing the fatigue? What's causing the insomnia? Chances are it's a plethora of causes, and all those causes are infecting all of it. But it's just a completely different mindset of, you know, stop chasing symptoms, stop chasing after a diagnosis. It's really not going to get you anywhere besides plastering this label next to your medical name on your medical record and then taking Humira for the rest of your life if you so choose.

Yeah.

But if you look past it and you say, I know that there's a reason why, and there's probably multiple reasons, which I keep reiterating, reiterating, it's not just, you know, one problem fixes migraines. This is a, a compound effect. And if we can change our mindset to stop searching after that diagnosis, after that label, and start to under— start uncovering, am I fighting an infection? What's my vitamin D status like? Am I feeding my immune system with what it needs? How much toxins am I putting inside my body all the time? I mean, your list could go on and on too.

Yeah, exactly. You should be searching for health, not for disease, essentially.

So, yeah. And the problem is, is when we have these conversations, and I mean, I love my primary cardiologist. He's been with our family for 20 years. He even comes to track meets and my brother's college track meets. And it's not ever their fault. I mean, you were grained in that system and you were brave enough to break free from that system. You literally went from a 9-to-5 solid paycheck to running your own practice. There's a lot of leaps of faith that we have to take here. And, and from the standpoint of— I have so many MDs, um, DOs, DCs NPs, all these Western medicine trained physicians are trying to escape the Western medicine world and enter the functional medicine world. But even the functional medicine world is— there's some really great ones out there, and there are some ones who say that they're functional medicine and they really shouldn't be. But they're trying to figure out— we're all in this to help people. That's why we all got into medical world. The problem was medical school. It sets us up to figure out that diagnosis. And once I know that diagnosis, now I have a treatment plan. It sets us up as practitioners to fail.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's not the doctor's fault. It's how we were trained, how we were educated.

Yeah, we, we get trained to just focus on one thing, and we are missing the forest through the trees. We're like just focused on this one tree. Meanwhile, the forest is on fire, you know? It's like, hello.

So yeah, I actually got suspended in medical school, believe it or not. I believe it. I had a patient come in from the community, and she was one of those that had every CT scan, every MRI scan, every blood work, every flipping test under the sun. All came back normal. She's in my treatment room. We have to cover the window because any little teeny bit of light is just overstimulating for her current migraine. And it's been like that for like 3 years. Mid-fifties, and I literally said to myself, "If I look at her and her labs the same way that everybody else has, I'm going to get the same results." Yeah, and that's not okay with me. So I started to do my my thing, and somebody caught wind of it, and my 25-page intake form. Got into the hands of the wrong people, and they're like, "What what is this?" I'm like, "Well, your half-page sheet's not giving me jack crap about her history. I need to know how her life has been. I need to know from the moment she was born how she got to this point, so we can go back and unravel all those onion layers." I love it.

I love that you are just. a pioneer and you're a force to be reckoned with, and now you're helping other practitioners do the same. So your podcast is for laypeople and practitioners, it's for everybody, right?

Yeah, it started off with just me wanting to educate and to teach and to help the masses because so many people find themselves with limited finances, you know this, and they're just going to Google to figure it out. Well, well, what if I could create a membership for $99 a month and instead of them having to go to Google, what if they could just shoot me over their, their question and, and they get it from a doctor's standpoint, not a Google standpoint?

Yeah.

Or, or what if I can give snippets of, you know, these labs can get complicated but they don't need to be. And that's how it's transformed into— now I've got practitioners of all backgrounds following the podcast just because of the way that the labs are read. Labs are powerful.

I love them. I love that. And, you know, I want all my women listening to realize, like, you probably have the answers that you need, right? You do.

If you have a CBC, that test is the price of gold. If you have a vitamin D lab test, that test is the price of worth silver. These are just standard lab tests. They're literally worth gold and you have them.

Yeah. So where can my listeners find you if they want to work with you?

Come join the podcast. That's the greatest place to learn more at. Well, it's Beyond the Diagnosis with Dr. Kylie. That's the podcast name. My website is DrKylieBurton.com, and there's a couple of different varieties. Pick the one that's right for you and let's get started transforming your normal labs into answers, healing, and hope.

Awesome. Yeah, I'll have all those links in my show notes. This has been so amazing. I know my listeners got a ton out of this, so thank you so much, Dr. Kylie.

Thanks for having me.

All right. Wasn't that awesome, ladies? So I hope that you got some golden nuggets from this one. You know, we need to support our immune system, we need to remove the triggers, figure out what is making our immune system overactive and causing dysfunction in these labs. And you might have some of the answers in the blood work that your doctors have already done. So search out a functional medicine practitioner. I am licensed in over half the country. I would love to work with you, so don't hesitate to reach out to me. You know, you can just email me at info@drtabatha.com or check out my website drtabatha.com or check out drkylieburton.com. That link is in my show notes as well. And figure out what's going on with you. You deserve to feel amazing. You deserve to have answers. But my favorite point of the whole episode was, you're not your diagnosis. It really does not matter what your diagnosis is when it comes down to it. So I want you to focus on figuring out how to get healthy, not figuring Figuring out what disease you have, it is important to know so that we can take care of it and attack that issue. But when it comes to autoimmune, it's such a broad range of possible diagnoses, and what it comes down to with autoimmune diagnoses is your immune system is overreacting and attacking. Your own body. And so if you can figure out why that attack is happening, that is going to be so much more powerful to return you to health, as opposed to knowing which connective tissue disorder you have, or, you know, is it really rheumatoid arthritis versus something else? That's what I'm trying to say with that explanation, is that— What matters is why is your immune system over-firing and over-exaggerating and attacking your own tissue. It's not supposed to do that. So don't hesitate to reach out to Dr. Kylie or myself. We are here for you. This is our mission in life, you know. I mean, that's what gets us up every day and gets us working as much as we are. And we just want to see you live your best, most amazing life because that's what you deserve. So go out, have a kick-ass week. Don't hesitate to shoot me your questions. I would love it if you would hit me up, give me a 5-star review, let me know what you're thinking. I appreciate you guys so much. So take care.

Bye.