Hope Comes to Visit
Hope Comes to Visit is a soulful podcast that holds space for real stories, honest conversations, and the kind of moments that remind us we’re never alone.
Hosted by author, speaker, and former TV journalist-turned-storyteller Danielle Elliott Smith, the show explores the full spectrum of the human experience — from the tender to the triumphant. Through powerful interviews and reflective storytelling, each episode offers light, connection, and presence for anyone navigating the in-between.
Whether you’re grieving, growing, beginning again, or simply craving something real, Hope Comes to Visit will meet you right where you are — with warmth, grace, and the quiet belief that even in the dark, transformation can take root.
New episodes drop every Monday, so you can begin your week with a little light, reflection, and hope.
Hope Comes to Visit
Seen at Last: Dr. Deb Muth on Women’s Health, Functional Medicine, and Finding Answers
If you’ve ever been told “it’s normal” when you knew it wasn’t—this episode is for you. I’m joined by Dr. Deb Muth—naturopathic doctor, functional medicine expert, and founder of Serenity Health Care Center—to talk about being seen at last: how to advocate for yourself, ask better questions, and get to root causes instead of living on prescriptions that never explain the “why.”
We dig into:
- Why women are diagnosed 4–5 years later than men for many conditions—and what to do about it in real time.
- The difference between normal vs. optimal labs (think vitamin D and thyroid) and how ranges can hide what you’re feeling.
- Practical advocacy: what to ask when a provider orders “a full workup,” which tests that usually aren’t included, and how to prepare.
- Hormones 101: broken sleep, irritability, brain fog—how progesterone, thyroid, and nutrient levels actually play together.
- Everyday detox & environment: simple ways to lower exposures (fresh air, air purifiers, lemon water, NAC, vitamin C) and why new homes can make you feel worse before better.
- When to get a second (and third) opinion—and why you should go outside the same hospital system.
- Dr. Deb’s personal story reversing a scary MS diagnosis by uncovering infections, mold, and toxins—and the hope that offers.
If you’re navigating symptoms that don’t add up—or you’ve stopped going to the doctor because you’re tired of being dismissed—this conversation offers language, next steps, and a reminder: you are the expert on your body.
Links
- Dr. Deb Muth: serenityhealthcarecenter.com | FB group “She Knows” | Book: Seen at Last
If this helped, share it with a friend who needs a little light, follow the show, and leave a quick review so more people can find these stories.
Thank you for listening to Hope Comes to Visit. If this conversation helps, follow the show, share it with someone who needs hope today, and leave a review - it helps others find their way to these conversations.
New episodes drop every Monday, so you can begin your week with a little light and a lot of hope.
For more stories, reflections, and ways to connect, visit www.DanielleElliottSmith.com or follow along on Instagram @daniellesmithtv and @HopeComestoVisit
He said, Well, I hate to say this to you, but you have fibromyalgia. Here's a prescription for narcotics. Here's a prescription for some antidepressants. And go home and prepare to be disabled in four years. And my youngest son had just been born, maybe a year before that. And I was like, I was flabbergasted. I was like, are you kidding me? Like, that's all you have to offer me. And I went out to the car, bawling my eyes out, calling my husband, and he's like, this isn't gonna be you.
SPEAKER_01:Hi there, friends. I'm Danielle Elliott Smith, and this is Hope Comes to Visit. Let's take a deep breath, share some truth, and look for light together. Today we're talking about women's health. It isn't niche, but it's necessary. If you've ever felt dismissed in a doctor's office, if you've ever heard it's normal when you absolutely know that it's not, today's conversation is for you. When you leave today, you're going to feel seen and heard in a way that you likely haven't in quite some time. I'm really excited to dive in with my guest today, Dr. Deborah Muth. Deborah Muth is a naturopathic doctor, functional medicine expert, and the founder of Serenity Healthcare Center. Dr. Deb, do you like prefer Dr. Deb, Dr. Deborah, or Dr. Muth? Everybody calls me Dr. Deb. That's what I thought. Okay, so I'm gonna go with Dr. Deb. Dr. Deb, thank you so much for joining me. I am so excited to have this conversation. You have a new book out. Um, but your the way you practice, the way that you see women, especially from head to toe as a whole being is extraordinary. I felt like I felt like we were friends almost just reading through your book.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for that. That that was what I was hoping that people would get the sense and the feel that um their story is not uh always unique. It's unique to them, but unfortunately, the number of women that are affected these days with stories like mine and everybody else's, there's a sisterhood that comes together with us. And I think a lot of times we feel very alone. And I was hoping that people would feel like they're not alone, but there's a group of us out there that can be sisters together and we can share. And it doesn't mean we wallow in our stories. It's that we mean we empower each other. We don't have to give up and we don't have to just say, yeah, I got this label and this is my life. It doesn't have to be that way. So that's what I was really hoping to present with the book. So I'm glad you felt that way.
SPEAKER_01:Well, what's beautiful about what you're saying there, and I think this is sort of the universal experience that I hope to create with the podcast, is that ability for people to feel seen and heard and known. And the book is called Seen at Last, right? So it's in my world, in this hope comes to visit world, I want people to hear other people's story and for it to feel like they're hearing their own story coming out of someone's mouth. And that was the experience I had reading the book. Uh, and the beauty of this podcast for me is that I get to have these experiences with people and that that hope visits me each and every time. So I hope that it that it resonates with the audience as well. But um, so we haven't had a chance to speak about experience. So I want I want you to share a little bit about your experience and then we we can chat back and forth. But this isn't just something that you do as a doctor. This was this comes from personal and lived experience as well. So let's talk a little bit about your history and and how this all came to be.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. So um, this is truly my story and the story of so many women that I hear every single day. And and I've been blessed to be in the integrative slash functional medicines uh space for over 25 years. I started out as a traditional women's health nurse practitioner and learned very quickly exactly what traditional medicine was like. And that's what led me to become a naturopath because I knew there was more out there than what conventional medicine could offer. Um, when I was 28 years old, I had some symptoms that I didn't like that I knew didn't fit. Um, I had this weird numbness and tingling and burning and pain. And that was in the 90s when fibromyalgia hit the stage and every woman got diagnosed with fibromyalgia. And I remember going in to see my doctor, and I knew I told my husband, I'm coming out with one of two diagnoses. I said, it's either going to be fibromyalgia or they're gonna tell me I have MS. And um it, I remember this day, like it was yesterday. It was a beautiful summer day. It was 100 degrees outside. I had on a fleece jacket, a long sleeve shirt, going into the doctor. I get there, they're taking my temperature, and the the MA is like, let me go get a different thermometer. Something doesn't seem right with this one. And we did that four times. And finally I said, Do you want to tell me what my temperature was? He's like, it can't be right. It's 95.4. There's no way that's possible. And I looked at him and I said, I have on a fleece jacket and a long sleeve shirt, and I'm really comfortable. So maybe there is an issue. And they completely dismissed it. And the doctor came in, spent about 10 minutes with me, and uh turned and looked at me, never addressed the body temperature at all, just assumed it was a broken thing. I couldn't have been broken there, somebody else, the machine, right? And uh he said, Well, I hate to say this to you, but you have fibromyalgia. Here's a prescription for narcotics, here's a prescription for some antidepressants, and go home and prepare to be disabled in four years. And my youngest son had just been born, maybe a year before that. And I was like, I was flabbergasted. I was like, Are you kidding me? Like, that's all you have to offer me. And I went out to the car, bawling my eyes up, calling my husband, and he's like, This isn't gonna be you. And he's always been my rock behind that. Um and luckily I had my witchcrafty friends back in the day, 25 years ago. That's what we called naturopathic people in the quacks, and I'm one of them now, which is okay. And uh I called them and I said, You guys know someone that can help me? And they were like, Absolutely, come with us. And they introduced me to this amazing world of integrated medicine and nutrition and lifestyle changes that today we know so much more freely than we ever did then. And um, they looked at me and said, You've got some thyroid issues, you've got some overgrowth of yeast issues going on. Here's a diet, here's some supplements. Literally three weeks later, all my symptoms were gone.
SPEAKER_01:See, that's amazing. So it interestingly enough, see, we haven't had a chance to talk about this. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 18. So before it hit mainstream. And the doctor at the time, I was 18 for 18 on all the pressure points. My mom was diagnosed first, leading rheumatologist in Los Angeles. And she came home and said, Oh my gosh, Danielle, we've been trying because I'd been going to doctors for years trying to figure out what was wrong. And so the fibromyalgia at the time was a, oh my gosh, we finally know what's wrong with you. Yeah. However, I did have a similar experience in terms of here's a muscle relaxant, here's a painkiller. Um, good luck. He said to me, because I said, What does this mean? And he said, So it means that you're going to never be able to do anything that's high impact. You can't wait tables, you can't take any high exercise, and you're going to be taking this medication. And so I instantly went and took a STEP class and got a job waiting tables. And but I reached a point where I could take Vicodin the way I took Tylenol within a couple of years. And I thought, well, this doesn't feel right. And I had no knowledge of addiction to medications at the time, but I did just stop taking the medications because I thought at some point I'm going to need this medication. So I probably shouldn't be able to take it this way. So I just stopped. But because I had been taking too much, I'm now allergic to Vicadin. Wow. So I but I knew it wasn't right. It was interesting to me, though, reading your book, how you were talking about how so many of the symptoms, the symptomology of fibromyalgia is typically indicative of something else because we're not paying attention to all of the external and environmental and everything else. But part of the challenge with a fibromyalgia diagnosis is everything else gets lumped underneath it. And anytime I've ever had anything else go wrong, it's been, oh, it's the fibro. If it's my stomach, if it's my head, if it's my heart, anything, it's the fibro. And so I've ultimately stopped going to doctors. And so I would like you to share with the audience because one of the things that was so I hate to use the word staggering, it's so overused in in this type of environment. But I was blown away by the statistics in terms of how misdiagnosed women are, how long it takes them versus our male counterpoints to get the appropriate diagnosis in terms of Alzheimer's, in terms of how how frequently we're diagnosed with MS when that's incorrect. Um, if you'll share a little bit of that, because I I kept turning to my fiance and saying, look at this, look at this, look at this as I was reading.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is it's staggering to think that women of today are diagnosed later than men with the same conditions. I mean, it takes us 4.6 years longer typically to get diagnosed for anything. Uh, autoimmune diseases, thyroid diseases. We're often dismissed and we're told it's anxiety, it's depression, um, you're just stressed, you're raising kids. And part of that, it's our medical system, right? I mean, I understand why in the beginning, when we were when we started researching drugs, a lot of women were left out of the research because of our menstrual cycles and our possibility of pregnancy and all of that. But what's ended up happening is today, women are just thought of as smaller versions of men. And that couldn't be further from the truth. We are so much different than men. Our biochemistry is different, our makeup is different, our genetics are different, our hormones make us different, good, bad, or indifferent. It makes us different. And so when we think that women can respond to the same things, it's it's not the case. I mean, we know that many women that have been diagnosed with cardiovascular diseases, they go into the ER with a heart attack, they'll be sent home and dismissed almost 50% more than a male will. A male will be taken uh very seriously that this could be a cardiac issue, but oftentimes women are dismissed and sent home because they present differently. Their symptoms are different. We don't present with crushing chest pain. We present with headaches and neck pain and joint pain and jaw pain. And so, unless the doctor is really knowledgeable about that, which most ER doctors are, but there are still doctors out there that will still dismiss it and just say, honey, it's okay. It's just anxiety. And honestly, after 25 years of doing this, you would think I'd have heard everything that a woman could tell me a doctor has told her. And every day I'm floored by what a male doctor or female, it doesn't matter. The women tend to be just as mean, um, say to these women that are suffering from chronic illnesses or because they have multiple system issues going on, you know, their neck hurts, their head hurts, their periods are bad. We call that a multi-system issue. If they come in and complain with more than three things, they're automatically taught that it's depression and anxiety and they should be dismissed. And we see that over and over again. And it's not getting any better. I would have hoped it would have, but it's not. It's getting worse, in my opinion, at least from what I see with my clients. And other people may see something different, but my clients, it's definitely a disservice to women, as far as I'm concerned.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and our healthcare system is is so fundamentally broken anyway, right? And it's expensive. And I found uh that it was interesting that you talked about the the tests and the panels that get done, how much they leave out. Yeah. Because I figure that if the doctor says, okay, we're gonna run some tests, I having next to no knowledge, not a doctor, uh, don't even play one on TV, don't know everything they're not including. And if I'm to say, Are you including everything? And they say yes, I have to take them at their word unless I've done a whole world of research. And sometimes I don't even know what I should be asking. So in order to give our audience the best bet at getting started, because I I imagine that it's overwhelming, right? You you mentioned in your book that that you have women who come in with binders full of information. Let's walk people through the best way to advocate for themselves. Because if I've got someone who's listening right now and they're thinking, this is me, I've been dismissed. I'm one of those people who doesn't go anymore, right? Unless I absolutely have to. I'm not going.
SPEAKER_00:Where do I start? Absolutely. I think that's a great question. Because once we empower people, they have control over not just their life, but their health. And our system is broken. And so unfortunately, you have to be your own advocate. Um, I had to become the medical detective for the women that I see. And so I'll teach you what I teach them. So, first and foremost, I always tell people go in loaded with as many questions as you possibly can. And sometimes that takes a little research, but AI has been really helpful for us these days. You can chat GPT a lot of different questions, but the biggest questions you want to know is what are the test results going to show you? Because in traditional medicine, we're very limited, unfortunately, because of insurance models and the regulations of what can be ordered and what can be covered under your insurance. And if the insurance isn't going to reimburse for the test, the doctor's not going to order it because his organization is then going to have to pay for it and they don't want to lose money. That's just the reality of the game these days. So oftentimes just even advocating for a simple vitamin D test can be a challenge because unless the doctor can prove that they think or already know that you have a vitamin D deficiency, they're not going to order it. And vitamin D is one of the biggest things that we need to know is at its height. Um, I see women every day whose endocrinologists will tell them that the vitamin D level is okay, being at 30, which is the low end of normal. But until it's at an optimal level of about 60 to 80, it's not protecting you with your immune system, which is what it needs to do. And it's not a vitamin, it's a hormone. So it is essential for every hormone production we have in our body. And so knowing just a few of those things can be extremely helpful, but nobody tells us that.
SPEAKER_01:I'm gonna bring you back for a second because I this may sound like the most simple, basic, um ignorant question. You said vitamin D is not a vitamin, it's a hormone. Correct.
SPEAKER_00:So why do we call it vitamin D?
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Okay, so I was 52 and a half years old when I learned that vitamin D was not a vitamin, it's a hormone.
SPEAKER_00:Right? It is, and it is essential, literally essential for everything in our body. And it's only been actually tested maybe about 20 years ago, it started to get tested. It didn't get covered by insurance until 10 to 12 years ago. Insurance wouldn't even cover it to be looked at. And yet we know all these things about how great vitamin D is. It's good for the immune system, it protects us against cancer, it helps us make all of our other hormones, it gives us energy, it gives us focus and concentration. And yet it's one of those things that we only test if we know you're deficient. Well, how do we know you're deficient if we never looked at it? That becomes a problem. And again, it's part of our broken system. And so I always tell patients when a doctor says they're gonna do some tests for you, ask specifically what test they're going to do and then ask them what they are hoping to find by that. So when they typically say we're gonna do the full workup on you, it usually means a complete blood count. So they can look at your white blood cell count, your red blood cell count, and the sizes. They're gonna look at a metabolic panel. So they want to see your blood glucose, your liver function, your kidney function. And they might do a lipid panel, look at your cholesterol level. To them, that's a full workup. But that isn't even a window into what's going on with your body. It is the bare minimum, as far as I'm concerned. If we want to know more, like as a 50-year-old woman, I want to know what your hormones look like. Yes, if you're postmenopausal, they're going to be on the lower side, but some may still be high, some might be low. And when you present and you say, I'm not sleeping well, I'm having broken sleep a couple of times a night, I'm more irritable, I can't think, I can't remember where I put my car keys. That is not normal. That it's not normal aging for us to go through that process. Yet that's what we tell people. That's just part of aging. It's just normal. It doesn't have to be, nor should it be. So your hormones control all of those things. When your progesterone level falls, starting about age 35, we're going to start to see that broken sleep, waking between like two and four in the morning, that tossing and turning throughout the whole night. We're a little bit more irritable than we used to be. We find all the stupid people in the world, right? They all get under our skin. That is a hormonal imbalance. That's not just us going through something. It's our hormones starting to shift. And when we have the proper balance, we'll feel better. Do doctors do that test? No, not normally. Only if you have irregular bleeding or you have pelvic pain of some kind, will they do a test for hormones? And what they'll say is, well, you can't regularly test hormones. They fluctuate a lot. And that is correct. They do. They fluctuate moment to moment, day to day. But we can get a snapshot of where you are in your cycle and we know where it's supposed to be at each phase of where you are in your cycle. And so we can correlate that to see if they're imbalanced and if one's lower than the other or higher than the other. And we can prevent disease by knowing that. But yet we don't do that test on a regular basis for that.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm going in armed with as much information as I can. I'm coming with the questions: what do I need to know about me?
SPEAKER_00:That is a great question. Know as much about you as you possibly can. Um, many times when people don't feel well, we start to disconnect from our bodies because we don't want to feel the pain. So we do all kinds of things not to feel the pain. We work so that if our brains are busy working, we're not worried about what our body's doing or feeling. Um keep a journal. I tell people, the more information you can give us, the better. Traditional doctors don't like that. It takes time, but that is where all the meat and potatoes are in somebody helping you to get diagnosed with something. For instance, if every time you eat dairy, you get nasal congestion and postnasal drip down your throat, and it lasts for a couple of hours after you have dairy, dairy's probably not a good thing for you. But will you know that unless you pay attention? You you won't. So I always tell people, as you're preparing to go in, write down everything you're feeling and then try to keep track of it at least for a week or two before you go into the doctor, of what has made your symptoms better or worse. It's worse when I eat dairy, it's worse when I eat gluten, it's better if I take a hot shower, it's better if I take a walk, um, I'm not sleeping. And this is the time frame that I'm waking up in because that tells us a lot too. If you wake between one and three in the morning, it's a liver issue. If you wake between two and four, it's a serotonin deficiency. So those little pearls, just knowing those things, can really direct you to what's going on, can make a significant difference.
SPEAKER_01:So, as a functional medicine doctor who integrates Western medicine, those little pearls, is that something you know, or is that something everybody knows?
SPEAKER_00:That is something a functional medicine doctor will know. A traditional doctor won't necessarily know that. But even seeing a traditional doctor, having all of that information helps them to figure out a little bit more about what's going on too. It is really important for them. Um, if you feel a particular way during your menstrual cycle, great thing to tell them. I feel this way during my period, I feel this way just before I get my period. Um, those things can make a huge difference. You know, I get a headache, the headache starts here, it's gone there. If you've got stomach issues, this food makes it worse, this food makes it better. It's better if I don't eat, it's better if I eat this. Those kinds of things can make a huge difference. Even with traditional medicine doctors, they will be able to put some of the pieces together for you.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things I had prior to reading your book, one of the things I had started to realize in my in my age is how disconnected each doctor is from the other. So if I talk to a hematologist, they aren't necessarily talking to the nephrologist, right? Um, and if one gives me medicine, they're not necessarily clearing it with the other. So that had started to bother me a little bit. But then in reading your book, I think the the overarching view that I received from your book gave me more of a magical look at how fantastic our system is and how amazing it is, that it all works so well together. And how do I optimize that? And how can I work with my own individual system to figure out what works best for me? How can I pay attention to environmental issues and what's going on? There was one particular case study you you mentioned in your book about a woman who had been going through uh renovating her house and started to feel very fatigued and sore, and lots of pieces of her body were hurting, only to find out that her body was reacting to the lead in the paint and the plastics in the home. And it's not even something that would have occurred to me. Is that something that many people are hypersensitive to, or is that something that her genetics plus?
SPEAKER_00:Great question. Many people are sensitive to all of these environmental things, they just don't realize that's what's causing it. Our bodies have adapted to a very toxic environment. You know, we have over 85,000 chemicals that are known to us today that are in our environment that we're exposed to on a regular basis. And these things didn't exist 20 years ago. Um, and unfortunately, if you're of Mediterranean descent, which I believe now they figure is about 45 to 50 percent of the population in the US, they carry a genetic defect called the MTHFR gene. Many people will call it the mother trucker gene, because that's how they remember it. But that gene, if you're mutated on that gene, it doesn't allow your body to detox well. So you can't eliminate all of these toxic chemicals that you're being exposed to. And oftentimes, again, we don't put two and two together, so that's where the symptoms are really important to know what's going on. If every time I'm at work within four hours, I'm getting a headache. Okay, it might be the stress at work. It might be Susie that sits next to you, but it may also be the environment that you're in, that there's something in that environment that's bothering you. The first thing we would think of would be, oh, there's an allergen in here of some kind. There's dust or there's some something like that. Right. And it could be just that simple, but it could be even bigger than that. Um, unfortunately, everything we have off-gasses. So all of our new furniture, all of our new flooring and carpeting and paint, they all have chemicals that off-gas. And that off-gassing takes 10 years, seven to 10 years for it to go through its off-gassing period. So when we think there's no way I can be sick, I have a brand new house. You probably are really sick from the brand new house because the brand new house has all brand new things in it and it's releasing all these chemicals. And you haven't been exposed to them for a long time.
SPEAKER_01:How do we protect ourselves? How do we do the best we can to sort of living in a bubble?
SPEAKER_00:And yeah, we can't do that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, uh, which, yeah, I'm pretty sure we can't, but how do we do the best we can to take care of ourselves?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I think it's important always to start with nutrition. We have to eat a solid, good, healthy diet. Whole foods, lots of colors, you know, your fruits, your vegetables, your proteins, and try not to eliminate any one food category. But when you look at the food pyramid, the major food category at the bottom is incorrect. It's an inverted food uh pyramid that we should be looking at. Fruits and vegetables first, proteins, carbohydrates, and things with gluten last. Gluten's very inflammatory for us. So it acts like morphine in the brain for a lot of people and overstimulates them. So we, if you're inflamed or have any neurological condition, you want to avoid gluten right away. Um, that's first and foremost. And then secondarily, very easy things that you can do in the home, especially a brand new home, is leave a window cracked open. It doesn't have to be high, lean like maybe a half an inch to an inch open just to get some fresh circulating air in the building is really helpful because it'll help remove those off-gassings. In some of our older homes, they're built very tight. They don't breathe. And so we need to keep that circulation. Run an air purifier in your house is really great. And then I really think it's important for all of us to detox on a regular basis because we're exposed to so many things. Using really simple things like vitamin C as a detoxifier. Um, N acetylcysteine, we call it NAC for short. That's a great uh detoxifier. Milk thistle is another one. If you like tea, you can do milk thistle tea. But I will warn you if you have a ragweed allergy, don't do it because you'll have some allergy symptoms. But just basic things like that can really be done. Starting your day off with a warm glass of lemon water is one of the best things you can do for detoxing your body. And it only has to be the size of a coffee cup. Um, put a little quarter slice of lemon in there, drink that down, start that body moving its toxins and the liver doing what it's supposed to, and it's extremely helpful.
SPEAKER_01:I love this. I it's funny, there was a period of time in my life where I couldn't be bothered with any of this. And I truly have been fascinated reading through everything that you had to say. Do you find with the women who come in to see you, the patients that you come in, is there over the course of the last couple of years, is there something that has surprised you? Is there a commonality that that was that you that you didn't expect?
SPEAKER_00:Over the last couple of years, what's really surprised me, you know, we came out of a pandemic. Um, and what that virus has done to women has been horrible. I did not expect that. Um, you know, the coronavirus has been around a long time. It it's a common cold virus. It should not have done what it did, but I am seeing very high levels of neurological diseases that I didn't see before. We're seeing a lot of people with decreased immune systems uh for no reason. Um, we're seeing cardiovascular things in people who shouldn't have them. They're young, they're healthy overall, a lot of fatigue, a lot of fibromyalgia symptoms, a lot of um, I have several patients who've had triggered MS after they were sick with the virus. Um, those kinds of things I didn't expect. And it's become harder for us to treat them than it was before the pandemic. Before we could treat them, all the things we used were great. It worked. Now it's much more effort on the patient side and on our side, and things that used to work before don't work as well as they did.
SPEAKER_01:Do you find that more and more people are moving towards functional medicine?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:What is the pivot in that shift?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's multifaceted, especially with people who are chronically ill. They're tired of being dismissed. They're tired of being told there's nothing wrong with them. They're tired of just having a drug thrown at them with no real understanding of what's causing their symptoms. They want root medicine. They want to know what's causing their symptoms. And they're looking for answers outside of our traditional system. I think the traditional system is great. If I have a heart attack, if I break my arm, I want a traditional medicine doctor to fix me. I'm not coming to see someone like me. I want an orthopedic to set my arm. I want a cardiologist to fix my heart. But unfortunately, where we are not good in traditional medicine is with the chronically ill, with the people who have all these symptoms that don't seem to make sense. We don't do a good job in our traditional medicine system with taking care of those people. We don't have a lot of options for them. And that's where people will turn to functional medicine. The other place is the anti-aging people, the people who want to live life longer, healthier. They want to be 80 years old and look and feel like they're 60. And it's not from a vanity issue. They want to truly live life and be vibrant. Those are the other people that are turning to functional medicine because there are tools in our toolbox that the traditional medicine people can't give them. People with Alzheimer's disease are turning to functional medicine. They don't have a lot of good answers for them. They have no way of figuring out what triggered it. They're coming to people like me to help them figure that out.
SPEAKER_01:That's where I am in the anti-aging category, if you will. Not from a vanity standpoint, but truly from a how can I live the best, healthiest, longest, fullest existence through my kids having kids and being out and about. I don't want to be or feel debilitated. I don't want to be in a place where I feel lost and confused and unable to move. And I I also in your book really appreciated what you were just saying the the combination of the two, the the traditional Western medicine and the functional, because I think that there is a place for both. And if I do break a boat or if I'm in uh if I'm in a car accident, I would like to be able to go to the hospital. Um so I think but I do love how you are helping, most specifically in this category, women to feel seen rather than dismissed, because there are so many who just have to keep saying, but I swear there is something wrong. But I swear you are missing something. For the individual, because functional medicine does not fall under the health insurance category. Correct. For the individual who doesn't have the ability to currently private pay for functional medicine, where do they start? Because I can see that this is definitely something that is appealing, but if they don't have the ability to private pay, but want to pursue in some way, where do they begin?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. So you can begin with a health coach or a nutritionist. That is the easiest place to start, especially if you're eating a traditional American diet. If your diet is pristine, that's a different say uh scenario. But starting with nutrition is key, and starting with those people are great. Um, soon there will be a platform that I'm creating for women and men that if they want to pursue this and they they really they don't have access to a functional medicine practitioner for whatever reason. It's locally they don't have access or they can't afford it. There will be an affordable option for them to receive functional medicine via an app that we're creating. And all the knowledge that I've had and all the luxury that I've had of treating 13,000 patients over 25 years will be built into this app. And so you will have access to that functional medicine. You will have access to my brain 24-7. And you can ask questions inside the app, and my brain will tell you all the answers that I shared today and even more pearls that we have. Um, and that that will change functional medicine as we know it for sure. That is fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:I love the accessibility because I think that this is one of the pieces that is missing, right? Um, I had a doctor a number of years ago who left traditional medicine because I've been tested for that mutated gene. As soon as you said that, because she left traditional medicine to move into the functional space. And she was going to join a group that was it was a private, it was like a subscription almost. Yeah. And it was, I want to say two or three hundred dollars a month to join their group and have access to them at all times. And it it was never something that was even vaguely possible for me at that time. And this was easily 15 plus years ago. So at the time, it was completely out of reach. So I really appreciate the opportunity for the level of accessibility that you're working to offer. And for our audience's purposes, when you have that app, we'll make sure that we can update the show notes and let people know that that you have that available. So, in addition to diet, what would you say would be the next step?
SPEAKER_00:I think the next step would be getting an evaluation of your hormones and nutrient levels. If you can get not a traditional blood test for nutrients, because we do have a way of testing vitamin B and magnesium and vitamin C, those kinds of things. Um, but they're not looking at really good levels. Um, there is an uh a platform called Rupa Health that you can go on and you can order tests for yourself. You don't have to have a doctor to order them. And you could do just a very simple basic mineral vitamin test and see what you're deficient in. By that, you can interpret it yourself. You can look at it and it'll tell you like you're low in vitamin D, you're low in vitamin B, you're too high in this. And it'll tell you in that test result exactly what supplements to take and how much. And that is a really great place to start because sometimes we're just guessing at what we think you need. But if you know what you need already and you're supplementing and optimizing that, those are some very basic things that you can do on your own. Hormones are a little bit more difficult to figure out by yourself, but once you have hormone tests, you could go to someone like myself and say, please interpret this for me and tell me what I need. And it reduces the time that you have to be with a practitioner like myself, which then is going to significantly reduce the cost for you as well.
SPEAKER_01:That's fantastic. And one of the things you said about earlier about the testing is a lot of times it's interpreted not based on optimal, but based on range. And will you reiterate that for everyone so that people can understand what that means? Because I know a lot of times people get back like you're you're you're fine, everything's normal. And it isn't necessarily normal, it's that you're running really, really close to low or really close to high. But as long as you're still within the range, you're being told you're fine.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So our healthcare lab system is set up to catch 90% of the people. So if you look at ranges, sometimes they're very wide. It could be anywhere from 10 to 100 is the normal range on a particular lab test. Vitamin D is a good example of that. Normal range goes from 30 to 100. So if you're at 29, they're gonna say you're okay. But if you're at 101, they're gonna say it's too high. Optimal range in for vitamin D is right in the middle, around 60 to 80. Another really good example your listeners will probably want to know is is thyroid function. Your TSH stands for thyroid stimulating hormone. It's what everybody measures to see if you have a thyroid disorder. Um, that range it goes from, depending on the lab, about 0.5 up to four and a half. But I've seen doctors interpret the lab and say, well, if it's not 10 or higher, I'm not gonna treat you. Okay, but the the normal range is four and a half on the high end. Why are you saying you're gonna wait until 10 to treat you? And so in that particular case, too, with thyroid, it's opposite of what makes sense to our brain. So in our brain, we would think, well, I want as much thyroid hormone as I can have because then I have better energy and better metabolism, but that's just the opposite. You want that TSH level to be a lot lower. All the TSH tells us is is your brain communicating with the thyroid? And if so, how well is it doing that? And the more it needs it, the more it's gonna kick the thyroid, the higher the TSH level becomes because it needs more thyroid hormone and it shouldn't be doing that. So an optimal range for TSH level should really be about one to two. So if you're at three and a half and you're not feeling well, most doctors are gonna say it's totally fine, but a functional medicine doctor is gonna say that's too high. And we need to look at other thyroid labs, other thyroid function tests, and the traditional doctors aren't going to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Do you see a specific functional medicine doctor or do you heal yourself?
SPEAKER_00:I do both. Um, so I know a lot about myself, but it's not good to treat just yourself. So when I got my diagnosis of MS uh three years ago, I started researching my own things and I started working on myself quite a bit, but I did pull in some experts for myself and I said, okay, I need some people with better brains than I do or bigger brains and different issues and specialties that I don't have. And so I have a doc that I see from New Zealand. I have another doc in uh California that I see. Um, and I I got the best of everything from everybody that I knew and put put it all together. I had to fix myself because I didn't have time to go see people, but um, I always am my own best guinea pig. So I never do anything for my patients that I don't try on myself first. Um, so 18 months after my diagnosis of the MS, I finally decided to see the neurologist because I wasn't going to see the neurologist, because in my world, MS is something else until proven otherwise. There's a reason your body's creating white matter. And um, so I finally said to my husband, I really want to see the neurologist. I said, I know I don't have MS, but I need to hear it from them. And I saw the traditional neurologist and gave her my whole story of everything that I had done over 18 months. And she looked at me and she said, You don't have MS. Um, and so she she gave me a new label and said, I think you have post-COVID peripheral neuropathy. And I'm like, oh brother, here we go. And and I already knew it wasn't that either. It was all the other things. I had Lyme disease, I had mold mycotoxin illness, I had viral illness. I mean, I had a lot of toxins that I wasn't cleaning out and I wasn't clearing. And once all of those things came out, all of my symptoms were gone. And what they said was impossible that you can't reverse white matter disease was possible. I don't have white matter disease in my brain anymore. And traditional medicine tells us all the time we can't do that, but functional medicine says we can, and it is true, and I'm living proof that we can do it.
SPEAKER_01:That's amazing.
SPEAKER_00:How are you feeling now? I feel amazing. I really do. I don't really have any symptoms that I had before when I started. Um, and it's interesting, my orthopedic doctor who diagnosed me with MS, I just hired a business development person and she knows him, and he diagnosed her with MS 15 years ago as well, and she doesn't have it. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. There's got to be something emotional for him around this MS and women. Because now this is like the fourth person I've heard that he had diagnosed with MS off of a brain scan.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but he So, how many women, I mean, if if you know four people, how many other women are out there that have been diagnosed by this man and are just taking medications and doing doing treatment that they shouldn't be doing? Yeah. Doesn't that do more harm than good?
SPEAKER_00:It certainly does. And I think it's easy for us to do that. You know, we're scared, we don't ask the right questions. The doctors are afraid of being sued if they don't provide something for you. And I think there's a lot of women out there that are taking immune-suppressing drugs that they don't need to be taking, that are opening them up for other problems down the road by suppressing their immune system that they don't have to be doing. And there and there are certainly people who truly do have MS and they need certain medications. But I also think that those people should be looking at what triggered it in the first place. Because our body doesn't just start attacking itself for no reason. There's a reason why it's attacking itself, and we need to figure out what that is and eliminate it so the body can actually heal.
SPEAKER_01:So if you are given a scary diagnosis, would your recommendation be to either get a second opinion and or go deep in terms of really digging into is this accurate and what can I do to potentially combat the symptoms?
SPEAKER_00:Most definitely, I would say get a second and a third opinion and don't do it in the same hospital system. So if I'm seeing the local hospital system and I'm seeing a neurologist there, and I want a second opinion from another neurologist, and they're in that same facility, they're not going to give you a different opinion. They have to give you the same opinion of the previous doctor. So you want to go outside of that system if you can for a second opinion. Ideally, outside of the town is even better because all the doctors know each other and they're not going to tell a patient that something is different than another doctor has said. So I definitely think that's important. And then I would say if it's a serious condition, then do a functional medicine evaluation. At least do a consult with somebody to say these are the potential other things that could be causing your issues, and then do a deep dive and just start really checking out every piece of it to know is this truly the right diagnosis or not? Um, it doesn't take long usually to figure out what's going on. And you can open up some different testing that can tell us pretty fast exactly what's going on.
SPEAKER_01:This is fantastic. Dr. Deb, I have so enjoyed having this conversation with you. Where can everyone find you? Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:So you can find me on my social page, uh Deb Muth. I have a women's group that we just started called She Knows Functional. Uh sorry, she knows, and it's at Facebook. So it's a free group. You can join us. We have these conversations all the time. Everybody's supporting each other there. And you can also find me at Serenity Healthcare Center.com.
SPEAKER_01:Fantastic. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you that you would like to offer?
SPEAKER_00:I would love to say this to people trust your gut. Women's intuition is amazing, and we need to trust our guts. And when you get diagnosed with something, it isn't the time to retreat. It's the time to find the rebel inside of you that rises above. Be that mama bear that you would be for your children. You have to be it for yourself, too.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. I have one final question for you. Yeah, how do you define hope?
SPEAKER_00:How? Um, hope is never giving up, is never accepting a wrong answer. Just always being in like curious and understanding that today we may not have the answer for something, but that doesn't mean that tomorrow or a week from now we won't have the answer. Things are constantly changing. So always be curious, always be looking for the answers. You are fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for being here. I really encourage people to go out and grab your book. Seen it last. I uh I enjoyed every single page and I read it very quickly. Uh, and I personally felt very seen. So thank you for being here and thank you for the book. So thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. My pleasure. And friends, thank you for joining us as always. I hope we made you feel seen during this conversation. Please do turn around and share it with anyone who you feel needs to hear this conversation as well. Review if you are up for it, and until we get to see you next time, please do take very good care of yourself.