Fearless Health is a podcast dedicated to optimal health & wellness launched in 2019 by Dr. Ann Marie Barter. Dr. Barter is a Chiropractor & Functional Medicine practitioner in private practice in Denver, Colorado at her clinic, Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic. The show is dedicated to all things natural health and wellness. Whether it be alternative and functional medicine, structural, spiritual, or fitness and nutrition, Dr. Barter will cover it based on her experiences in practice over the last 10 years, or with the help of special guests and curated interviews.
Transcript:
Welcome to Fearless Health podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ann-Marie Barter, and I started this podcast because I’m passionate about health and getting to the root cause of what issue or issues are for my patients. Kind of like a detective. Health is not a linear process. It’s not always one simple problem. You take a pill and get better. Sometimes you actually have to work through a progression. Right? So sometimes taking a pill, you just resolve a symptom. But we really want to get to the root cause of what’s causing that symptom. Where did it start? I’ve been practicing for over 10 years, have two practices in Denver and Longmont, Colorado, has given me great perspective and realize how individualized people truly are and how no protocol works for every single person. You can have the same condition or the same exposure, and every person will respond differently to care. I don’t want people to take this as medical advice. This does not replace medical advice from a medical professional. I do want to tell you how I got into working in alternative medicine, specifically, no one get to the root cause of what was going on with me when I was a teenager.
I remember going to my primary care and I said, Hey, I’m really having a bad period cramps, I’ve got some acne and I feel like I’m a little heavier than I should be with all the running that I’m doing in granite. I was very fit, but I felt like I should be a twig. You know, the the weight didn’t didn’t match how much I was working out. I think a lot of people can relate to that. So anyway, she did a blood work up panel on me and she came back and she said the dreaded news of your laps are normal. There’s nothing wrong with you. Now, this is still a thought today that running hormones is not a relevant test. I actually disagree with this, but she she basically said that my basic lab workup was totally normal and I was completely healthy. She gave me a different gel to put on my face and said, You know, my further options were Accutane or birth control pills. It kind of set me on my way to me that read like, you don’t have any additional options to my problem. I mean, I didn’t really want to take birth control. I felt like that was a Band-Aid and Accutane. The side effects were so severe on that. So I just felt like this was something I had to soldier along with. Well, she also told me with my hormonal cramps to welcome to womanhood.
So fast forward a couple of years, two years, and I remember waking up and I couldn’t stand straight up, and I remember going into my mother’s room said, You know, I can’t stand straight up. Do you mind if I stay home from school today? Well, this was pretty atypical for me because I really loved going to school. I was very involved in high school. I really liked it. She said, No, we’re going to go. We’re going to go consult another doctor about your stomach pain. And anyway, I went to this doctor, he brushed me immediately to the E.R. The E.R. basically was rushing me into emergency surgery. It turned out my appendix was exploding, and I had confused that with period cramps. So my period cramps were actually that severe. So two hours later, I’m in emergency surgery, getting my appendix removed. All the while, I’m being told how perfectly healthy I am. And to me, it just did not add up that I was perfectly healthy and having to have organs removed. So fast forward one more year, and I was in college at the time, and it was during finals time, so it’s highly stressful. And so I started. Breaking out into hives, high surf, dangerous, they’re actually a type one hypersensitivity reaction. And so these hives were swelling up all on my face and all around my throat, and I looked like a creature from Star Wars. I was walking around class with my hoodie on. I was really sick. And every single night I was going to the E.R. because of house were so bad they were constricting my breathing. They gave me a dose of Benadryl and sent me on my way. Well, this went on for about two weeks. Nobody talked to me about diet. Nobody talked to me about what could be causing this.
And granted, this can be life threatening. It can constrict in your throat, which the hives were swelling up on my throat that can constrict your breathing. So ultimately, that could be fatal. Obviously, that didn’t happen in my case, but nobody talked to me about how to address it. Nobody talked to me about what was going on. They just kept on telling me that I was perfectly healthy. So finally, the first time I actually got care was when I started going to alternative practitioners and they turned my life around and really helped me get to the source of the problem. Boy, it was not linear. It was not like, you just have to remove this one food and you’re better.
I feel like we get to that mentality or that thought process, like what’s causing my migraines, what’s causing my child to be added? It’s generally multiple causes of things going on. It’s not just one thing that has caused this health condition, so I really want to educate people about what’s available and so many of the topics that I want to cover and the guests that I want to chat with will be functional medicine related. It’s about creating optimal health, using lab studies that are screened generally via your primary care. Like you can get a lot for Basic Labs, even though you were told that your lab work was normal. There’s still a lot to differentiate in those labs. And what’s important to know about that is functional or your reference range is on the side are based on the standard deviation of the population. That means you’re compared to all the people running a lab in the last year. Right? You always think that those reference ranges are about being healthy, but they’re really just about being average and depending on how healthy or sick the population is.
So I’m here in Colorado. The reference range for glucose is ninety nine. On the upper end of the reference range for glucose in Georgia is can be one 20 in some of the parts of the state. In the American Diabetes Association says diabetes is one twenty six. So ultimately, I feel like that one is trendy too close. I also feel like the 90 is also trending a little bit close to that. So that elevated ED creating metabolic syndrome and creating problems for patients to lose weight. So ultimately, that blood sugar is it may be in optimal range. And so that could be potentially something that needs to be addressed, OK? But we also will run specialized lab testing to get to the root cause of what’s going on. What types of exposures have you had? Where are nutritional deficiencies? What are your hormone levels look like? What else is going on to cause X-Y-Z symptoms? Whether that’s weight gain, whether that’s fatigue, whether that’s insomnia, you have to get to the root cause versus taking a pill to get better health. So I want people to fully understand why functional blood chemistry is different and why specialty diagnostic testing is sometimes a godsend for people trying to go deeper in their quest for optimal wellness.
For example, food sensitivities, hormones, both testing environmental toxins. These things are not traditionally tested for, but ultimately, these things can wreck your health if you’re in constant mold exposure. We’ve seen turn tons of chronic pain, chronic fibromyalgia, you know, chronic problems, thinking concentration problems, memory issues, rashes, you name it. It can be at the root cause. Same thing with food sensitivities and hormones and other environmental exposures, depending on where you live. Like, a lot of us are exposed to high levels of petroleum byproducts. That’s something that’s really important to detox because even though you don’t see or smell them, they can wreak havoc in your system, causing all kinds of problems, including. Cancer. So just looking to see maybe what the problem is in impairing that down can be amazing. And a lot of these toxins, too, you’re also exposed to in the air and in the water. And sometimes it’s as simple as if some of these tests are positive, you maybe just getting the correct filters in place to figure out what’s going on, but it’s important to know what you’re treating. We’ll discuss why nutrition is important from a metabolic standpoint, and that doesn’t just mean for weight loss and why food is easily abused and what to avoid and why, for example, GMOs or glyphosate. You know any of these things to avoid.
Also, we’ll talk about if you’re having trouble sticking to a particular food regimen. I don’t even want to use the word diet like why you’re craving those carbohydrates. You know what neurotransmitters are. Play how your brain chemistry is affected by your gut. All of these things are really important because a reason that we crave sugar or carbohydrates or overeat, those come down to a lot of the neurotransmitter balances that can easily be adjusted. And then you actually have correct cravings when it comes to food and you don’t crave sugar and simple carbohydrates as much as long as your brain chemistry is correct.
I want to help people navigate the controversies surrounding health topics such as chronic Lyme disease vaccinations, bioidentical hormones and so many more topics whose waters have been muddled by opposing views in the media, competing financial interests in the marketplace and influenced by many with limited knowledge. I just want to bring a fresh look at some of these topics from seasoned experts in the field. They can really help you know where to turn to next. My guests and I want to help people advocate for themselves when they aren’t getting the answers that they seek about their health, what their choices are for natural options when they do not feel comfortable seeking pharmaceutical options, and why many traditional approaches just aren’t working for people. Those people don’t even know what other options they have or they’re taking a pharmaceutical, and they feel like maybe the problem is managed. People come in a lot for problems that have quote unquote been addressed, but they don’t want to be on, say, for example, blood pressure medication. They want to know the cause of why their blood pressure rose. Or they want to know what’s driving their cholesterol to be up or what’s causing them chronic pain or why they can’t lose weight. What is underlying with that versus taking a pharmaceutical and seen this managed in talking to patients over the years?
One thing that I’ve heard is a commonality is when patients are given a pharmaceutical, they feel like the problem is managed. So I was speaking with a patient about narcolepsy the other day, and she was telling me that he was given Adderall and he thought that the condition was manic. She thought that that’s all there was to. It was having all these other problems that were, you know, warning signals from his body. So you have to know that there are other options available and not to stop. When you just get oh, here’s this for your blood pressure, here’s this put on topically for a rash. I decided to launch this podcast for a couple of reasons. Number one, I feel like people are drowning in information. It’s starving for knowledge. I have a lot of folks come in seeking answers, and some of the advice that they’ve been given, I would say, is interesting. I want to be able to direct people and just get rid of all of this confusion around health to be able to bring in experts in the field that can speak to certain conditions.
And then so people know where to actually get help next. I want to be able to speak to people that don’t feel well, but have no idea what their options are. Especially traveling outside traditional medicine. And you certainly don’t have to give up on traditional medicine. I believe like in a collaborative approach to that. But it’s not the only answer to the problems. I mean, I think finding the root cause and I certainly work integrative a lot of the time, especially as people are getting off medications, it’s important for for there to be an integrated approach. In fact, I think people get the best care that way. But I also want to make sure that people know that maybe surgery or an antidepressant or or that is not their only option and they don’t have to function that way. And. I think the other last reason that I really wanted to watch this was I get to interview amazing and introduce amazing clinicians to the public in these people are trailblazers in their field and they’re doing awesome stuff, and it’s just incredible to be able to present these people to you and to present this knowledge that maybe has been acquired over a certain amount of time.
And sometimes you don’t know how to put that in words. So if I could put that in a podcast and have this available, I just feel really great about that. So I just love working in the alternative health field and seeing the amazing results the patients come up with the results that they never thought were possible to come up with, and that’s why we’re launching this podcast. That’s why we’re doing this is to show people the options and to help people get better control of their health and to not have them settle. If you want more information on our podcast. Please go to FearlessHealthpodcast.com and you can find more information there. And if you love what we’re doing here, please go down comment, review us five stars and tell your friends thank you.