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In this episode of The Functional Medicine Radio Show, Dr. Carri’s special guest Dr. Kelly Brogan explains how you can ease psychiatric symptoms when you heal your body first.
Dr. Brogan is a holistic women’s health psychiatrist and author of A Mind of Your Own. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Center after graduating from Cornell, and has a B.S. from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Science. She is board certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and integrative holistic medicine, and is specialized in a root-cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms.
Main Questions Asked:
- A lot of people are having mental problems and you’re going to explain to us that when you heal your body, you heal your mind.
- Can you talk about thyroid imbalances?
- Can you talk about some of the other imbalances that masquerade as mental illness that patients should know about?
- Can you talk about the importance of healthy fats in the diet?
- Can you tell us about your program – Vital Mind Reset?
Key Points made by Dr. Brogan:
- People are waking up to the limitations of the conventional model of medicine.
- Typical symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, changes in sleep, feelings of malaise and disconnection almost always these “psychiatric” symptoms are accompanied by a host of physical symptoms whether it’s gut dysfunction, skin issues, hair loss, a number of different autoimmune-related symptoms.
- I became interested in the psychiatric pretenders which are these reversible physiologic imbalances that can masquerade as psychiatric, and in the wrong hands, garner you a psychiatric diagnosis and potentially a lifetime of treatment with psychiatric medication.
- The two that I see most in my practice with the most relevance are blood sugar imbalance and thyroid dysfunction.
- There’s a simple anecdote. It’s cold turkey – the elimination of sugar while dramatically increasing natural fat intake. You can shift it in a week to 10 days. Something you’ve been doing for 40 years, you can largely heal your body in such a short period of time.
- If you look at the classic symptoms of hypothyroidism and you look at the DSM diagnostic criteria for depression, they match up almost one-to-one.
- When you heal your body, you can dramatically reduce the signal of psychiatric symptoms.
- I always start with the same interventions which are very low commitment and low risk. It’s dietary first and always. Then we look at what else we can do to heal your body.
- Some other big ones that mimic mental illness are food intolerance, micronutrient deficiency, and sex hormone imbalance.
- Depression is a symptom – not a diagnosis and not a disease. If you think of it as a disease or a diagnosis, you could really miss an opportunity to discover what that symptom is telling you about your body.
- That’s all I do for my patients is hold the space for them to discover their own potential for self-healing.
Resources Mentioned:
Book – Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again
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