Uncovering the Power of Functional Medicine: A Journey of Autoimmune Recovery and Mental Health Triumph

Welcome to Advancing with Amy, the podcast that brings you inspiring stories of triumph and resilience in the face of mental health challenges. In today's episode, we have the privilege of hearing from Melissa, a functional medicine practitioner and founder of Sagebrush Wellness. Join us as Melissa shares her own journey of overcoming advanced multiple sclerosis and the mental health issues that come along with it.  And how she is now dedicated to helping others on their path to recovery. Get ready to be inspired and informed as we delve into the world of holistic health and wellbeing. 

All right. We're here with Melissa today.

Melissa, give me a little information about yourself. Tell us who you are.  I'm so grateful to be here with you today, Amy, I'm a functional medicine practitioner. I've been working in the field of functional medicine with a specialty in autoimmune and complex illnesses for  Eight years now, I've been very specialized in this space.

So have loved the journey, loved the research, loved all the pieces of how I get to serve people. Yeah. How'd you get into that? It  was a result of my own journey.  I  was diagnosed with advanced multiple sclerosis when I was 33.  And I should have been in the wheelchair, but I've got a very stubborn bone.

Yay. I was like, I'm 33. I don't want to be in a wheelchair yet. So I should have been, but I wasn't. And at the time of my diagnosis, I had three little boys. I had two businesses. I was running and growing and literally kind of the world dropped away.  And  because most of my, the gals in my family  had MS or have MS.

And my grandma, grandma passed away with it. My mom was quite sick with it. I knew what the journey looked like. Right. So, like my world kind of imploded.  Mm hmm. But as I kept Moving forward, I knew I didn't want to end up taking drugs for it because I knew I didn't know much, but I didn't know that they weren't going to help my body overall.

So even though I didn't know what to do, I just knew I didn't want that. So I didn't do anything, literally. Oh, okay. And then, um,  as my journey progressed, I met a practitioner that does much what I do today and helped me really work on what was going on in my body. It took me about two and a half years to completely recover and here I am. 

That's amazing.  How did that journey affect your mental health?  Oh my goodness.  Ah.  Wow.  Big question.  Well, I love it though, because this is a part that, um,  is ignored by even a lot of people in my,  in my vein of working with autoimmune, because part of my journey was intense depression.  Wow. Especially when I was really, really sick.

I mean, so much fear,  um, anxiety that would go, you know, just shoot up and fear that would literally leave my body shaking  or frozen, like not being able to move for a minute. And, sometimes more than a minute. And really being able to acknowledge that was something that I was not able to do until I started getting better.

I didn't have anybody in my world that could help me with that.  But  the reality of having An incurable, and if you can't see me, but I'm air quoting, incurable or a dis ease process that you're not supposed to be able to do anything about, you know, just buckle up, honey, it's gonna get worse, just get ready, you know? 

That is huge, especially on,  on a young person. Yeah. It's like doom and gloom. Yeah. It's in front of them.  Yeah. Had you seen, the mental health issues with your mom and grandma as they struggled with that? A little bit. Yes, but they hid them so well. They didn't talk about them. And then I didn't either.

Like I passed it off as, you know, cause I honestly didn't know what to do with it.  Right. I'd never been taught how to see and how to recognize what was going on. I didn't know how to ask for help.  So I was kind of stuck. I didn't have to be, but I didn't know any better. Right. And so did self care, when you started to take care of yourself physically, did that self care help mentally? 

It did and thank goodness the practitioner that I was working with, just really suggested that I start working with a trauma informed, therapist. That's great. That changed so much for me. It helped me and it helped coincide with the work that I was doing with my practitioner to really kind of, you know, advance in the body, advance in the mind, advance in the spirit so that it was all at once.

I bounced back and forth and I really did some like NET, Neuro Emotional Technique work, somatic work,  that was a piece of it too, because just doing the talk therapy and just going through it that way,  that was amazing.  But I needed to give my body a way to release it. And my actual tissues and cells.

Yeah.  So, do you invite your, do you call them patients, clients? Clients, yes. Clients. Do you invite them or offer to them to do the same kind of things? Because then they're not setting back where your mom and grandma were and just suffering. Exactly. Like, we have a specialized trauma informed counselor on our team. 

She works with individuals at this level. She's been on a, um, in her local area. She's been on the stat team, like the one that she's the one that people call when they have somebody, in a really bad space. Yeah, that's great that you have that. Yeah, full time for over 15 years. So. How many clients do you work with on a regular basis? 

It ebbs and flows, but active clients, we have right around 50, 60, we're currently working on adding in another practitioner. So that will double the, the size of  how many clients we can serve at once. And we'll just keep doing that as the load increases because we want to serve as many people as we possibly can.

Okay. And you don't just see people with MS. You see people with any kind of, autoimmune, yes. Yeah, because, 

like there really isn't  a, a dis ease, and I use that on purpose, dis ease process that we can't successfully help our clients  move forward on simply because the body never does anything without a reason. And so when we find those reasons, no matter what the diagnosis is or the name is that it's been given, we can always help the body move forward.

Thank you.  That's terrific. I wish I had known you about a year and a half ago. I found out that I had Graves disease and then turn around and it turned into thyroid cancer and had my thyroid removed. So  I went through that process and I didn't have anybody like you. So that would have been great.  I'm glad you're out there.

Oh, yeah, we actually I'm working with a young lady right now that.  You know, she,  she and I are working on that very thing, but her nodules are actually decreasing. They're barely noticeable now. So we're just keeping track of the measurements, making sure that her body's still going in the right direction.

So we don't get stopped and we miss it, but her body is able to, is really doing well with the, the reduction of the nodules. That's wonderful. Yeah. So tell me, how do people find you? Do you have a website or? Yes. So you can find us at sagebrushwellness. com or autoimmunerecovery.  org. Okay. Great. I think I've looked at the sagebrush one.

I hadn't heard of the other one. So I'll have to check that out. Yeah, we're just rebranding, renaming. We're going global. So  yes, the autoimmune recovery, is our new name, our new platform, everything that we're building because  there aren't very many voices out there  saying, okay, I hear you that you got this really big, scary diagnosis, but guess what? 

You can change that for yourself. Your body can recover and here's how to do it. Yeah. How, how do you do it? Is it a special diet? Is it just self care? There's so many different pieces.  So I really love that question, and I'll be as, um,  kind of simple as I can because we go really, really deep.  Um, beginning with the premise that the body never does anything without a reason.

So some of those reasons can be things like food sensitivities. They can be things like mold toxicity. They can be things like heavy metal toxicity. They can be things like arsenic in the body. They can be cellular dysfunction. They can be  a whole host of other things. And we do a lot of deep testing to be sure that we're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to guess at what's going on in the body.

We like to test simply because we need to know exactly what your body is dealing with. So just kind of bringing up an example of the young lady that we're working with right now, who's, um, we're working with her with thyroid nodules, right?

So a lot of what we found for her was started out to be food sensitivities,  really started dealing with that, but then understanding that her body's had some very marked toxicities going on. So started moving that when we started moving that, it started showing up, like we did some testing and whatnot,  that she had a marked parasite, issue going on.

So very gently taking care of that. And it's like, as we peel the layers back of what's going on with the body and the body just keeps getting better and better and better. Oh, wow. We go deep, we go deep. And like there are a lot of people in functional medicine that won't even touch parasites. So we find a lot of people coming to us that that's one of their sticking points or mold toxicity.

We do a lot of work with that because again, not many people are trained in this arena and know how to do it well. Even for little people for kiddos.  So when we understand what is driving the imbalance in the body and what is driving the disease,  then we can use food, literally as medicine, we use food based.

And, supplements and then some nutraceuticals if needed. We do a lot of hormone work,  not with identical replacement hormones though. We use the body's own ability to produce your own hormones. We use a lot of like binders and really  Supporting the body when it comes to parasites. That's very delicate.

We have to be careful with that. Same with mycotoxins or mold being very delicate with that, but self care is a huge piece of this because  in this journey, our intention is to teach.  Each client, what's going on in their body, teach them how to take care of that,  so that when they are ready and they're ready to go out on their own, they have the tools they need to not just get well and yes, celebrate, yay,  but. 

To stay well, because life's going to happen. Things are going to come up and their body's going to go, you know, and we want them to have the tools that they need to get back on track. And if they do those things and they're still stuck, we're literally a phone call away.  Right. You know, you made me kind of think when you said life happens, the stress and anxiety of life and everybody's rushing around and doing so many things at once nowadays.

Do you think that contributes to that? It does. The other piece of this is we live in kind of a toxic world, whether it's stress toxicity or it's water or something in our home, what we're putting on our skin, a situation that we're in our work, not being able to stand up and speak our own truth.

These are all huge pieces of what can translate into dis ease in the body. Yeah, that makes sense.  

 Parts of it are grounded in Chinese tradition.  Oh, cool.  Parts of it are grounded in, some of the our  Vedic principles.  Like when I say we use food as medicine, we literally do that. That is as old as  Socrates,  so, you know, but when we talk about functional medicine as a.  arm of medicine, if you will.

That's fairly new. Okay. I thought so, but I've got a lot of friends that have been talking about it lately. It seems to be a new thing so that everybody's trying to get ahold of it now.  So I love that because  we're,

how do I say,  We're actually being successful with helping people recover and it's something that the medical world is still trying to get their head around. And it's just, I think it's that our,  how do I say,  there are reasons and we can know why our body isn't doing well.  I like that.  

 Does anybody see you online  it's all online. Oh, wonderful. So anyone across the country could come to you. Yes, we have people across the country. We have people all over the globe, actually. Oh, amazing. Today I'm meeting with a young lady from Germany. 

Tomorrow I'm meeting with a young lady from Switzerland. We have a nice nucleus of Individuals from Canada who work with us and the UK,,  we've worked with folks in Australia, folks in India,  you know, it's, it's really, we have no borders.  That's incredible. And it sounds so rewarding.  It is.  I'm totally hooked in case you didn't know.

I love it. It's great. I can feel the energy. And is there anything you'd like to leave our listeners with today?  Yes.  Lean into the knowing. Yes, the knowing  that your body has got your back.  I like that. Well,  that's beautiful  I've really enjoyed talking with you and I've learned a ton, so thank you very much. Thank you so much. I hope you have a great day today. You as well. Enjoy your day.  Thanks. Bye bye. Bye.

 Thank you for tuning in to the Eye-opening episode with Melissa from Sagebrush Wellness. If you are inspired by Melissa's journey and the impactful work she is doing to help individuals with autoimmune and complex illness,  then take the next step.  Visit autoimmunerecovery. org to learn more and get involved. 

Your support not only empowers Melissa to continue her life changing mission, but it also encourages us to bring more incredible guests like Melissa onto the show. Help us keep the conversation going by donating to our podcast on Patreon. Together, let's advance, Warriors, and make a difference in the world of mental health and wellness.

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