Uninhibited Podcast Shownotes

Episode: Dr. Kristin Part 2

Welcome to Uninhibited, a podcast with the mission to discuss taboo, multicultural, multi-generational, and multi-layered topics that matter to women. 

Our host, Dr. Makunda Abdul Mbacke, is an Ivy-League trained OBGYN, practicing medicine in rural America. She is a mother, career professional, part of Generation X, and so much more.

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:48 - Dr. Makunda is back this week to finish a two-part interview with Dr. Kristin Ryman, who is a family doctor living in Allentown, PA. She’s a married mother of four and three-time survivor of Lyme disease. 

1:50 - Dr. Kristin made the decision to live and fight her Lyme disease, she felt like her body made the choice for her and her spirit and brain had to catch up for a few months. She experienced improvement in her being due to making the choice to live, even though the pain was 10 out of 10 every time she stood up, the suffering had all disappeared. Over the next couple of years she focused on making choices that brought her joy and not suffering. 

5:50 - Dr. Kristin went back to work despite not wanting to be a doctor anymore or wanting to work in the clinic because much of what she had learned during her experience with Lyme was that some of the tools of her craft that she was trained to use could make people sick and make people with Lyme disease even sicker.

7:48 - Dr. Kristin explains that being a doctor comes with many rewards but she believes many doctors are surprised when they start their first job, she describes the struggle of only getting around 7 mins to develop relationships with her patients, the pain of dealing with insurance companies to get paid and the amount of paperwork that she has to complete at home for insurance companies even though they often still won't pay for her services.

9:37 - Once Dr. Kristin went back into the workforce, she worked at the clinic temporarily, where she resolved that she wanted to heal the relationships that were broken due to resentment over her leaving work when she was sick. 

11:05 - Dr. Kristin eventually left the clinic to start her own practice in her living room where she could practice in the most non toxic, loving and supportive place she could imagine in the world. She felt her house would help support her as she learned to be a doctor again.

11:35 - Dr. Makunda asks if she was at that time doing more integrative medicine. Dr. Kristin explained that she created a very focused Lyme consulting practice. During her recovery, she got in contact with all the Lyme support groups in her area, a lot of the famous Lyme doctors in her area who told her once she got well to call them because they had a list of people who could not get in to see a doctor who had a background in Lyme.

13.55 - Dr. Makunda asks Dr. Kristin to share her success stories working with patients in her new practice. Dr. Kristin shares that people who were plagued by Lyme’s many symptoms of dysfunction did improve. She also shared that she is still learning all the ways our immune system can break down and allow a Lyme infection to become so severe and prevent recovery. She spends an hour with each patient, troubleshooting and determining their treatment.  

14:50 - Dr. Makunda asked Dr. Kristin what her treatment plans look like and how she makes a diagnosis, especially with many patients believing they have Lyme despite their test results. Dr. Kristin explained that it is heavily dependant on the person, their story and the tools they have to help their treatment plan. Her preference is to avoid testing because the current testing available is limited and misleading and a waste of time and money. The better tests are considered experimental and thus not often covered by insurance companies and they are still not 100% accurate.

16:35 - Dr. Kristin discusses starting her patients with an elimination diet because it can remove many symptoms allowing her to focus on the symptoms that are left. This method makest is easier to make a clinical diagnosis based on what symptoms are present and which symptoms went away.

17:00 - Dr. Kirstin describes the elimination diet she uses to heal the gut. She starts with the Institute for Functional Medicine's basic elimination diet. It takes out the top ten allergens or potential secondary allergens, these are the foods that can create inflammation if inflammation is already present.

17:16 - Dr. Kristin describes foods that create inflammation in everyone and that the level of irritants is different for everyone. Gluten can create micro-tears in the gut lining, which can lead to inflammation, this often leads to leaky gut. Other foods can act like allergens because they can slip into your bloodstream, not fully digestion and therefore look like foreign invaders to your immune system and that leads to a feedback loop that leads your immune system back at the gut again and again until the gut is healed by removing all those things for a period of time or it will continue to attack itself.

18:40 - Dr. Makunda asks if Dr. Kristin began her healing with an elimination diet. Dr. Kristin did not because she did not know about the elimination diet until around a year into her illness. During the year leading up to her discovery of the elimination diet, she was doing a lot of spiritual work, looking at old wounds and unforgiveness, she was healing relationships with her friends in the clinic, basically, people who were disappointed by her absence and the people she imagined were disappointed about her absence. She was taking herbs and biofilm busters because Lyme creates a lot of Biofilm to live in, taking homeopathic, regular acupuncture and yoga. Dr. Kristin explained that she went to a Functional Medicine Conference where she learned about the elimination diet.

22:25 - Dr. Kristin discussed how the landscape has changed in terms of allergies and obesity where we have gone from one kid with a peanut allergy and one kid who is obese at school to more and more people with obesity and allergies. She believes this is due to us soaking in toxins from our environment but bodies that can only process so many toxins each day.

26:00 - Dr. Makunda and Dr. Kristin discuss our current environment and sources of toxins including BPA in water bottles, Teflon on frying pans, cell phones, and cell phone towers. But, the majority of the medical community not addressing these toxins citing a lack of scientific evidence. Dr. Kristin answers these calls for evidence by helping people take a look back at what our ancestors dealt with and compare it with the toxins in our current environment.

30:00 - Dr. Kristine said “The gluten we eat today is genetically modified and has 40 times the content that our ancestors may have stumbled across. Also, organic wheat can be spread with roundup that is very toxic to the gut.” 

31:50 - Dr. Kristin’s children challenged her to try gluten again by saying, “Mom, you always say any gut can heal from any food.” So, a couple of Thanksgiving’s ago she added gluten back in for a test by baking and eating a couple of pies. She did not get gassy or bloated but she did feel a tingle in her hands and feet. This was just an experiment, she has not eaten gluten since, and she doesn’t believe anyone should be eating gluten.

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