Recently, I interviewed Dr. Christine Smith, and we talked about exploring the biochemistry of injury and how this relates to thyroid health. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here [1].
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am super excited to chat with Dr. Christine Smith, as we are going to be discussing three types of injuries that can play a role in the autoimmune thyroid experience, be it you have Graves’ or Hashimoto’s or probably even a non-autoimmune thyroid condition.
Let me go ahead and dive into Dr. Christine’s bio: Dr. Christine Smith is a functional medicine practitioner and doctor of chiropractic with a background in cognitive neuroscience. She specializes in holistic injury recovery and optimization to help active people come back stronger, recover hidden injuries, and prevent reinjury. She does this by teaching clients how to use recovery time as a gift to restructure lifestyle priorities and become their own health authority through education rather than medication. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Christine.
Dr. Christine Smith:
Absolutely, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Eric:
I’m excited to chat with you about these injuries. When talking about injuries, I think a lot of people will think of just physical injuries, but I think this is going beyond that, and that’s why we’re talking about three different types of injuries.
Before we talk about this, can you get more into your background? How did you decide to focus on helping people with different types of injuries?
Dr. Christine:
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that’s a deeper question than average. It came through a journey of my own experience and of understanding the power of the mind and healing, and the power of energy and understanding the frequency that your body is putting out.
In chiropractic, we talk a lot about the tone of the nervous system. I consider it like an instrument, and that’s how I talk to clients when I do body work. It’s like tuning an instrument, making sure there are no sharp points or flat points, bringing everything back to harmony, and understanding the mind/body connection.
That’s how I got the specialization in cognitive neuroscience. I had my own experience with a lot of stress and anxiety, and my chemistry was off. No one had talked to me about diet and lifestyle. I was really confused, following the conventional methods, and it was getting worse. I saw this body worker who did some touch therapy and reset my nervous system. After that, I had this shift in my perception of the world. For the first time in 20 years, my system had exited fight or flight.
It was this whole new way of being. You can almost feel it in your cells when something like that happens. It’s like you have been at a loud concert, and you walk out, and it’s silent. You have this shift. Understanding those things made me realize there are different kinds of injuries.
Also, in chiropractic philosophy, we talk about thoughts, traumas, and toxins. These are the things that stress your body. Thoughts are general stressful thoughts. Now, it’s really different than when we were being chased by tigers. Now that tiger is a bill or an exam or a work project or an upset partner or friend. Those things are ongoing and chronic and go over time.
We have this big stressor over time that is coming from our own mind. It literally changes the chemistry of the body. A divorce or losing your home, that is a mental injury. It creates a really similar cascade biochemically as breaking your leg or tweaking your shoulder or hurting your lower back at the gym.
There is also a chemical component. All the toxins that we deal with in our environment and all the things we can be exposed to, all of these add up to what’s called allostatic load, which is the overall capacity for your body. If you have a bunch of mental stress going on, you won’t have as much capacity to get injured or heal quickly or deal with a chemical exposure. If you just had a big chemical exposure, you will have no emotional resiliency to deal with the stressors in your life.
That is how I explain things to people and why I got into understanding things through injury. If I can help people understand the cascade that happens in your body with a cellular injury, this is how we prevent disease. If we can catch it early and allow the cell time to heal and recover, just like if you tweak your back at the gym, you won’t deadlift the next day. It’s the concept of giving the body to recover. Each of these injuries requires different kinds of recovery. Depending on what’s going on with your life and which one is most prevalent for you, that tends to change my approach to care.
That is how all of this came into being: understanding how physiology works and then going through my own experiences in my life, where trying to approach things from a single point of view just wasn’t working. We have to take into consideration all of these other modalities that exist and understand that all of our chemistry on a personal, custom level is different, and what’s going on in our life is different. You can have two people who just went through the same intense mental stress experience at work, but one of them is also dealing with a mold exposure at home. A different one also just hurt their shoulder. They are going to have different responses and different capacities for dealing with it.
That’s a good summary of an answer to that question. Let me know if I can expand.
Dr. Eric:
I think you did great. Obviously, the shoulder injury would be an example of a physical injury. The exposure to mold would be more of that cellular injury.
Dr. Christine:
A chemical injury.
Dr. Eric:
Same thing with stress and other types of trauma as well.
Dr. Christine:
Stress and trauma, I consider them mental injuries. It’s happening on a biochemical level. All of these are happening on a biochemical level.
If we really break it down and get a little nerdy for a second. When I was studying biology, I realized that in order to understand biology, I had to understand chemistry. In order to understand chemistry, I had to understand physics. To understand physics, you have to understand quantum physics, which leads you back to energy and frequency. Really everything is frequency. All of it comes down to that.
If you understand chemistry in the way molecules and atoms work, they work with electrons in certain fields that are called valence shells. Depending on the organization of those energetic particles, that’s how you get matter or sound waves or the visual light spectrum or anything tangible versus not tangible.
Energy and frequency are what make up matter and the state of that matter. If we have thoughts, that is frequency and energy coming for our neurological system that is being turned into chemistry. If we have a physical injury, that is two pieces of matter interacting to change matter because of the force of the frequency they interacted with. If we are dealing with chemistry, that is a certain chemical organized into a certain pattern that emits energy that affects other molecules.
This is why frequency medicine or things like meditation can affect a physical injury. When you start diving into this world, you understand that our modalities of care are so far beyond a pill. I think that’s really important for people to understand. If you’re just looking for a pill to fix your ill, it usually doesn’t always work out the best.
I will find when I am working with people in care, if they have been through some kind of mental injury and are coming in with physical ailments like gut, because gut is tied to everything, if I start giving them a bunch of nutrition and supplements and capsules, and they are still in a mentally injured state, their cells are in a cellular danger response. They’re almost stiffer. The membranes change when our cells are in that energetic frequency state of a cellular danger protective response. We can’t absorb nutrition correctly because our nervous system isn’t in the right state to send the correct signals to the cells to absorb and utilize it.
For that client, I start with physical body work to get their nervous system tuned and toned, so it’s sending the right frequency signals to their cells, so they can absorb nutrition in order to heal. If I just give that patient nutrition, they might get better, but we usually hit a plateau.
If I can get my clients working with their mental game, and their mental stress, which I find is a huge component of pretty much any autoimmune condition, and it’s very well dived into the book When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté. It’s this concept of a mental injury that is creating a chemical cascade can actually contribute to your autoimmune reaction because if your mental state is that you are in a state of defense against your environment or the universe, your immune system responds and goes, “I should be on defense, too.”
If we can help people understand you have to address your mental state and bring you back into a state of feeling safe in your environment, and then we have to address your nutrition or toxin component, what’s floating around in your system, then we can address the physical component of how all of those affect that. That is the key to healing.
Dr. Eric:
Awesome. Just to summarize those three different types of injury: There is physical injury, mental injury, and biochemical injury, which is not exactly the same as mental injury.
Dr. Christine:
Yeah, that’s how I think of it and how I explain it to clients, so we can understand we are always addressing the chemistry, the mental output that is affecting the chemistry, and the physical impact from the environment.
Dr. Eric:
How does this relate to inflammation? With inflammation, if you have physical trauma, you can get inflammation. If you want to talk about the difference between acute and chronic inflammation. With biochemical injury, you can also get inflammation. I’m also thinking that with mental injury, you could also get inflammation. If I’m wrong, correct me. If you could elaborate on that.
Dr. Christine:
You are so right. Step two of everything we were just talking about. Everything we were just discussing is the insult, the activity that instigates a response in your body. Inflammation is the response. It’s a healthy response. We’re supposed to have it. It’s how our cells repair themselves and rebuild.
Chronic inflammation is a dysfunctional response. We can absolutely get this from a mental injury.
Let’s use a real-life example. Let’s say that your dog passed away. Then you went through a breakup or a divorce. It’s all adding up. You’re mentally stressed. Then you get into a fender bender. You get that nasty whiplash. “Ugh, I’m fine, whatever.” You’re dealing with the car, with insurance, with the divorce. All of a sudden, you get hit with some virus. Now you’re sick and dealing with it. Or even a mold exposure in your home. You get some kind of environmental insult. We’ve had emotional, physical, and now chemical.
All of a sudden, your health just tanks. You don’t understand what’s going on. You’re feeling bloated and have brain fog and can’t sleep and have headaches and are feeling sluggish. “What is wrong with me?” This is happening over the course of time.
Before that, you probably had some other stressors. Maybe you were in school or had a huge project at work that was on your system. Or you go through societal stresses that have been happening over the last few years. Those accumulate into this as well.
This is how we hit that wall of our injuries. All of this comes back to inflammation because that’s how our body responds. We have that original stressor of- Grief really is what those situations are. Grief is an emotional injury, and that can come in many forms.
When we have this emotional stressor, we put out an inflammation response. In that inflammation response, part of what happens is just our normal immune response: our tissues become more permeable. This is how our immune cells move through the tissues to repair the site that needs it or respond with healthy, acute inflammation. When this happens, we can also get some gut permeability. Let’s say we are really stressed out. Now we’re eating things that maybe aren’t totally great for us because they’re comfort foods. Our gut’s permeable, and it’s leaking through while also feeding our bad gut bacteria.
The other part of an emotional injury that people often don’t realize is there are dysbiotic Gram-negative—meaning they put out nasty chemicals—bacteria in our gut that feed and grow when your stress hormones are present. They actually have receptors for things like cortisol. That is Yersinia, E. coli, and stuff like that. When you’re stressed out, you grow bad bacteria in your gut. And your gut’s leaky. And now you’re maybe eating a bunch of gluten, which acts like a rake on the soft tissue of our gut and creates holes and irritates the gut lining. Then this stuff starts leaking through. Then it starts going into our blood stream. Now we have what’s called a subclinical level of endotoxemia, meaning we are accidentally poisoning ourselves in small amounts from the inside out.
Our immune system freaks out appropriately because all this stuff is in the bloodstream that’s not supposed to be there. Now we have a hyperinflammation response. In this, our body is trying to take care of these things, but we get a secondary injury from the immune response. When you have bad guys on the battlefield, you go take care of them, but the battle damages the battlefield. Now our immune system responds by trying to clean up the battlefield. It sends a whole bunch of neutrophils and acute responders, and that’s part of the Th17 pathway.
All of these responders come, and they are trying to heal the area. In doing so, and still fighting off the bad guys, they’re releasing this chemistry to protect us that is accidentally creating more damage to the area. We get another immune response of more acute responders coming to the area to repair it while also accidentally damaging it at the same time. We get stuck in this cycle of chronic inflammation. Our immune system is trying to repair us, but it is accidentally damaging us in an effort to protect us from our environmental exposures. That is how we get stuck in a state of chronic inflammation.
If we can’t move out of inflammation and into the stage of what’s called proliferation, where I call it assimilation, meaning building stuff and repairing it. Then we move into remodeling, which is like testing it out and stressing it in a good way and making sure the tissues are strong. If we can’t enter into that stage, we stay in that inflammatory stage, which is essentially a breakdown stage. Whatever area this is happening in, that organ is going to start to break down.
This is why different people can have completely different responses to a very similar exposure. What is your Achilles heel? What are your genetics? I don’t consider genetics fate. I consider them blueprints that we have tendencies towards. We have an environmental exposure activate them, including stress. Stress will activate dormant genetics. With these, this is how we get the outcome of whatever is happening to our body, which might be a thyroid condition or gut condition or anxiety.
When I had my stresses, I had no idea it was coming from my gut. I had no gut symptoms. My gut symptoms showed up in my brain. Your gut symptoms might show up in your thyroid. Someone else’s gut symptoms might show up in their liver, and they have problems detoxing. If you have genetics where you have problems detoxing, and you get this environmental exposure, it will be a much bigger burden on you than this person who has different detox genetics. That is why some people are super affected by mold, and others aren’t.
That is how inflammation plays into this whole game. It’s a piece of everything. It depends on if our body can make it through a healthy injury cycle with that cell, or if that cell gets stuck in a state of inflammation and breakdown.
Dr. Eric:
You gave a lot of good information there. I like what you said about the absence of gut symptoms doesn’t rule out a gut problem. I’ve come across many people over the years with no gas, bloating, pain, and regular bowel movements, and still, it is possible to have a leaky gut in that situation. It’s still possible to have dysbiosis in that situation.
You also mentioned the Th17, which is associated with autoimmunity. If someone is stuck in that chronic inflammatory cycle, that can set the stage for different autoimmune conditions, not just Graves’ and Hashimoto’s, but MS or RA.
The example you gave, a lot of practitioners might just focus on the gut if they realize that the person has a leaky gut, but if they’re not addressing that mental injury, let alone the physical injury, because you gave an example where someone had all three, a lot of times, as functional medicine practitioners, we’re just focusing on that cellular component, that biochemical injury component. As you mentioned, you really need to take a whole-body approach.
Dr. Christine:
Absolutely. Just in a short way of saying it: If your mind is in a state of feeling like it’s under attack, or another way of saying it is a victim mindset, your cells are going to be in a danger response, which means they are not going to be in a healing response. They have to be in one or the other. They can’t do both at the same time. That is why getting your mental game corrected I think is just as important as any medication. Your brain is the most powerful drug you will ever have.
Dr. Eric:
When it comes to addressing that, especially the mental injury, is it more than just blocking out time for mind/body medicine, assuming there is at least a component of that? In preparation for this episode, I listened to some of your other interviews, and you’ve spoken about meditation. I’m guilty of using it broadly, too. I heard you talk about different types of meditation. I also wanted you to talk about that. It’s a two-part question: What do you do in general, maybe besides meditation? Also, if you could elaborate on your definition of what meditation is.
Dr. Christine:
That’s a great question. One of the easiest ways to define meditation that also identifies the purpose behind it, which I think people talk about these different ways to do it and what it looks like. It’s time for your body to feel safe and enter a creative state, and a building state, and a repair state. We have to make that time to feel safe.
That can come in a variety of different forms. It can be a walking meditation. It can be a sport you like doing. It can be sitting on a cushion. It can be doing it in a group. It can come in a variety of forms. All of them have different benefits.
If you’re an antsy person who cannot sit there for 15 minutes. “This is a waste of my life.” We should work on that perspective because it’s self-care. You’re going to the gym for your brain. When you sit down, and you have that anxiety, that is the point of meditation, is facing it and sitting with it and realizing that it’s not you; it is separate from you. It is usually the energy of society putting these burdens on you that make you think that self-care is a waste of your time.
If you can start to sit there and be curious about it, then you start to see these mental patterns you get caught in. No wonder you’re stressed out all the time. “I think self-care for 15 minutes is a waste of my life. Okay, how can I shift my perspective on this?”
When you start to become conscious about your own thinking patterns, you can shift your perspective. That perspective is what has to shift for you to feel safe. You can really do this in any environment. That is the whole idea of Victor Frankel’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote that from a concentration camp. It’s this book about the experience of your perception in whatever you’re in. There is a lot of different approaches to it.
I really love Joe Dispenza’s work. He is leading the forefront on research in meditation and how you can literally change your entire gut microbiome in seven days as a novice meditator with no other changes in your life. Just from meditation. Pretty darn cool. They’re even showing that in the blood of advanced meditators, they produce proteins that prevent viruses to enter cells. All of this research is being peer-reviewed and going through all the things to get published. It’s pretty phenomenal research.
The idea is when you go into meditation, and enter this state of safety, you completely change the chemistry you’re putting out. Maybe you’re doing that on a walk. Walking meditation can be really powerful because you are practicing this state with your eyes open in your active waking life. You can go meditate for 20 minutes and feel really great in the morning. “Ah, this is so nice.” You open your eyes and go back to your old patterns immediately. Then the rest of the day, you’re in that stressed state.
Your meditation is not totally gonna matter. It’s nice. It’s a Band-Aid. You have to practice it in your life. That’s the idea. It’s just like you go get fit at the gym, so you can do activities in your life. You don’t get super fit to sit on the couch. We get fit in our mind, so we can apply it to our life. When you realize you are slipping back into your old patterns, that is when you mentally snap the rubber band on your wrist. “This is what I told myself I wanted to feel today this morning.” You choose your emotions throughout the day.
That is another component of meditation: setting time aside to practice how you want to feel, so it’s familiar to you, so you can activate those neural pathways through the rest of your day. It’s this choice of how you want to feel in your life.
I had gotten into that work for many years. I slipped out of it. This happens to everybody. It’s a lifelong practice of coming back to yourself. That’s another way I describe it to people. it’s simply coming back to you and who you choose that to be. Shaking off the energy of everything else and everyone else. Figuring out your own true core center. Sometimes, when you really dive deep into it, you realize that you doesn’t exist. We’re all just part of this energetic field. Essentially, little pieces of the universe experiencing itself. That’s when you dive into the more existential component of that meaning for life.
The way I really got into this is I was that person in my own form that we were talking about earlier: huge emotional stressor, huge societal stressor, then a toxin exposure, and then someone going too hard on my gut with supplements and my gut getting messed up. All of a sudden, my health just shut down.
I didn’t know about the mold exposure until later. I found it and realized it was the gasoline on the fire, which is usually what an environmental exposure is. Whatever fire is going on in your body, it pours gas on that fire and explodes it all.
I became allergic to food and supplements. I was a functional medicine practitioner who couldn’t use supplements. That was a very frustrating time. In that, what can I do? My brain also wasn’t working at that time.
I think the mental component of illness is something that isn’t always discussed, along with the concept of an identity crisis. When you’re a very active person, all of a sudden, something shifts dramatically in your life, and you can’t do the things that make you feel like yourself. That in itself is a mental injury and needs to be talked more about in health care, as well as the identity crisis of illness.
In that, I was like, “Okay, what can I do? I can’t exercise. I can’t eat healthy foods. I have been to all the other routes.” I turned to meditation. I went really deep into it. I realized that because of the accumulated effect of things that happened, I was in a state of not trusting the universe. I was in a state of defense on a mental game level, even though it was subconscious. When I took time with my subconscious and see my thought patterns that were coming up, I was able to realize the mental state I was in and work on it.
There is meditation where you are very focused on a certain thing, and you’re going inward and paying it really close attention. There is mindfulness. You take a raisin and feel every single indent of the raisin. It’s taking time to be in peaceful presence with whatever you’re doing.
There is meditation like Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work. I find it’s very much an expansion, going outward. It’s going so far outward with your energy that you forget that you as an individual exist. You connect with this greater field of energy in this place of complete peace. When you enter that state of peace, and they’re still coming to understand how all of this works. I don’t know if we’ll ever fully understand it. This is energy far beyond us that is really complex, and what created us in the first place. It’s going back to that state of oneness and sitting there and almost charging yourself with this healthy frequency from the universe and letting that imbue all the cells in your body, so they resonate at a healthier frequency.
That might have been a bit of a long-winded and complex answer. This is why I love it so much. When I finally realized that and did this work, my immune system calmed down. I was able to eat food again and use supplements again. It took me a couple months. Nothing else had worked. I was at the point where I’d lost a bunch of weight, and my hair was falling out. It was not great. That is what turned everything around for me and got me back to the point where I could use functional medicine to do the rest of the cleanup I needed to do.
I still go in and out of my practice. I try really hard to have a super good practice. It’s amazing because I know how good it is for me, but I still find days where I resist it. That resistance is my old patterns. It’s like we can almost get addicted to our emotions of anxiety because they’re familiar. The unknown is scary.
That is the idea of meditation. It’s like sitting in this unknown place and becoming comfortable with the unknown and not trying to predict anything in the future, so in your own life, you can be comfortable without being in anxiety. If you fall out of your practice, you’re probably being affected by your old patterns.
The #1 thing you need to do is go back and sit with yourself, so you can figure out what’s pulling you out and what you’re trying to protect. That’s really where they all come from. Your patterns are just trying to protect you. It’s time to go inward and feel safe and understand your own mind and patterns without the influence of anybody else.
Dr. Eric:
That’s really interesting. Usually when someone has food sensitivities to supplements, it’s usually coming from the gut. In your case, you didn’t focus on the gut, but you focused on the mental injury, which in turn helped with the gut, if I’m understanding correctly.
Dr. Christine:
That is correct. I didn’t have the option to focus on the gut. I couldn’t. That is where I gained a whole other level of respect for it. Understanding the capacity of the mental state to heal the body. Your body is amazing, and there are so many stories of people doing absolutely unreal things.
There is a woman in one of the Joe Dispenza workshops who through meditation—and this is a single case, but this happened—regrew her ablated thyroid. Proven by imaging.
Your body is capable of amazing stuff if you give It incredibly clear instructions. But you have to be very clear on what you want. You have to give instructions in energy, not words. Your body doesn’t understand words. If you just sit there and affirm all day, that’s not going to work. You have to work with the subconscious.
There are different tools for that. Sometimes, you need help. I do a modality with clients called PSYCH-K. it’s a way to use neurological postures to imprint a subconscious belief in a way that your subconscious mind understands, and your body can respond. Your subconscious mind is 95% of the mind; it’s what runs the body. If your 5% up here is saying you’re healthy, but you’re not feeling it energetically, your body won’t respond to that. Energy and the feeling of it is the most important piece, which is hard and takes practice.
Dr. Eric:
You said that it was called PSYCH-K?
Dr. Christine:
That’s one of many modalities. Bruce Lipton really likes it. He is another person who is mildly similar to Joe Dispenza; he has a book called The Biology of Belief. And Dr. Joe has a book called Becoming Supernatural. Both books are great places to explore these concepts.
Dr. Eric:
He has a number of different books. I went on Audible and saw that he has at least four or five.
Dr. Christine:
Yeah, Dr. Joe has four. I think he’s working on another one. Dr. Lipton also has a couple.
Dr. Eric:
Do you do any testing in your practice? Before I pressed the record, I think I heard you say that you either did AK (applied kinesiologies). I don’t know if you still do a lot of muscle testing in your practice, or if you do more functional medicine testing, or a combination of both.
Dr. Christine:
All of the above. Why would I not use a tool that’s present to me? I love lab testing. I think it’s incredibly important. I think it can miss things. I think understanding your tools is probably the hardest part of being a functional medicine practitioner. There are a lot of trainings where people can go through and understand functional medicine concepts, which is just lifestyle concepts. If you don’t understand physiology, the labs, and the supplements, you’re at a loss.
There are a ton of labs I use. It depends on the case. Ideally, I’d love to see all the labs all the time. You have to do what’s realistic for people. Depending on what comes up in a case, I will prioritize labs in a different order.
I also like actionable labs. There are a lot of labs you can do that tell you what’s wrong, but they don’t tell you how to fix it. I really like labs that show me what’s going on with you nutritionally. I also really like things that show me inflammation levels. You can see those on a classic blood lab with CRP and ESR. I consider things like cholesterol and homocysteine as inflammatory markers, which I think is a little non-traditional. It tells me that the system is off. I consider homocysteine a much more important cardiovascular/inflammation marker than cholesterol. If you have high cholesterol, it’s telling me your body is trying to repair something. What is your body trying to repair? I need to find that thing.
I prefer functional tests. I’ll run food sensitivity tests. Even though they change, and there are arguments about them, I want to know the #1 immediate thing I can do that is free for you to get your inflammation down. Rather than me putting more supplements into your mouth, it is me helping you take poison out of your mouth. Things your body is reacting to poorly, which is not always something you’d expect.
Sometimes, it’s foods you don’t expect, like eggs. I love eggs. Eggs are great. They have great nutritional quality. I find a lot of the time in inflammatory responses in autoimmune people, they have a sensitivity to eggs along with classic ones like gluten, dairy, and sugar. I’ll see what the immediate thing we can change in your life is to start getting inflammation down while making up the rest of your plan.
I also love to run gut tests. There are labs that are run, like classic gut tests that look at infections that might kill you. I’ll make sure you’re not having some horrible infection. I like to look at the subtle things. Do you have any parasites that are lingering that we need to take care of? Those can get missed on those labs. I’ll come back to why I like muscle testing here.
I also like looking at the gut biome and understanding the distribution of your gut bacteria, getting really specific on what probiotics are right for you. Or if your gut is even ready for a probiotic. That’s a mistake people make. They think probiotics are the answer, and they will take a bunch of them. They’ll wonder why they’re bloated.
If you take probiotics too early before your gut lining is ready, you can actually cause more inflammation. People forget that they have inflammatory effects. They are a killing agent that knock out bad bacteria and take their place. Understanding the order of operations of things is where the labs can come in. How inflamed are you? Do I need to work on your gut lining first? Are you ready for a probiotic?
I’ll run other labs like autoimmune or hormones. Sometimes I will look at neurotransmitters, but I often find that’s tied back to gut.
It depends on what’s going on with the client. I think functional lab testing is valuable. I had a client the other day who is struggling with some cognitive decline. Their neurologist was like, “Let’s put you on this Alzheimer’s medication.” I asked if I could run some functional tests first. I ran a toxin screen and a gut panel. He had an amoeba and high levels of lead and mycotoxins. Okay, let’s work on getting these out of the system first and see if the cognition improves. Then you can decide what to do with the conventional route. He might not even need the medication. He might have brain fog because he has a bunch of infections and lead he is dealing with. We are going to address those first. That’s an example.
Muscle testing is highly undervalued. I know it’s argued in different communities, which I understand because it is more of a subjective method. It’s working with the electrical neurological system of the body. It’s a way to essentially ask the body questions simply by learning how to speak its language. Lab testing is like translating the body’s language into something we can read. Muscle testing is translating our language into something the body can read.
It’s using a strong muscle as an indicator because your muscles should be able to be strong. Now, if you are holding your arm out, and someone is pushing down on it, and then you step on a tack, you’re not going to be focused on your arm. You will be focused on the tack. The arm will go weak. That is the concept of muscle testing in a simplified way. Stress a piece of the body, see if the strength of the body changes.
This can be done in a number of different ways. You can do direct wiring testing. If I have you put your shoulders out, and I push down on your elbow while you turn your head to one side, and that arm goes weak, it lets me know that your C5 nerve is disrupted, and I should probably address that segment of your neck. That’s a direct way to look at it.
If we are doing it with nutrition, if I have you put your arm out, and it’s strong, and then I push upward on your stomach, and it goes weak, that tells me that your stomach has slid above your diaphragm a little bit, and we might need to pull it down. That is the idea of a hiatal hernia. I can’t tell you how many hiatal hernias that are non-surgical. People have had reflux and GERD for 10 years, and I pulled their stomach down, and it’s gone. Nobody does this work anymore. I don’t understand why.
Touching your organ, if you are trying to heal an organ, touch that organ. Massage it. Love it. It’s the concept of where attention goes, energy flows, and blood follows. Give that organ love and attention with physical touch. Physical touch has also been lost from care. When you are working with someone, you are also close to them. You are physically present. That kind of energy, that kind of space-holding also has its own healing component.
Then you can get more complex and subtle with muscle testing. You can use it to address energetic fields. If you can use that indicator muscle and bring a supplement into someone’s field, or you can have them put it in their mouth, you can see if that supplement weakens a body or strengthens it before they even have to swallow it. That’s cool. With sensitive clients, I love this. It’s a way to get very specific on what supplements their body responds to versus not, instead of a guessing game of trying something and seeing how it goes. We can get specific that these things will be okay for their system.
You can even do it with mental thoughts, which is how PSYCH-K works. If you bring up that stressor mental thought to your system, your body will respond in a way that’s weaker because it’s a stressor to your system. Then you can go through thinking patterns and subconscious thoughts and figure out which ones the body is strong to and which ones the body is weak to. Then you can figure out what the actual thing is that’s stressing out your system.
I was just working with a client the other day who is working on fertility. We are helping her brain get on board with this. We went through a couple statements of, “My body is healthy enough to become pregnant.” It was strong to that. We finally got to, “I’m not too old to become pregnant. I’m young enough to become pregnant.” That’s what her mind was weak to. That’s what we worked on.
If you can help the subconscious mind get over these little hiccups that it has, then that’s a component of healing for the body. That’s how you can heal a physical ailment, chemical ailment, or mental ailment. I won’t even say “ailment,” but a thing you’re working on, a stress point.
That’s where muscle testing is quite beautiful. Labs, we check every couple months because they’re expensive. Muscle testing, we can check all the time throughout our appointment. Different practitioners have different approaches. But I have a kit with vials that have been energetically imprinted with the resonance of certain enzymes in the body. We can literally sit there, and I can muscle test through an entire blood panel through the energetic vial kit in our office, which is great for when people are financially restricted.
Again, it’s a subjective measure, which is when I love to back it up with labs. It’s pretty cool when you do muscle testing and go through everything subjectively. Then you run the lab, and it’s all the same stuff.
For the skeptics out there, I understand. I come from a research background. I worked in many research labs. I’m all about data and numbers. When I was learning this, I remember saying to a friend, “I don’t feel ethical using something that I can’t always fully explain to my client.” They say, “If you have something that works, and you’re not using it because you can’t explain it, that’s unethical. You’re depriving your client.” Ooh, touché. Okay. With that, I became more open-minded. Now I have seen it work over and over again.
That is ultimately what made me go to chiropractic school instead of going to school to become a neurologist. I worked in this integrative practice where he was essentially using muscle testing components for functional medicine. I watched people who had been sick for years get better in three months. I needed to understand what he was doing. That led me to chiropractic school, as he was a chiropractor.
Chiropractic school doesn’t always cover this stuff. That was stuff I learned outside of it. The concept in chiropractic school is the mental component that goes with all of this, which is constant vitalism instead of pathology. Our conventional model works in pathology, which Is let me find what’s wrong and shut it down. Chiropractic and muscle testing and these kinds of concepts work more in the realm of vitalism, which is let me figure out what’s right with your body and how to support it.
Dr. Eric:
I don’t practice AK, but a number of years ago, I went to a conference where they were pretty much teaching that. An instructor said that when it comes to muscle testing supplements, it’s a lot more accurate if you do put it in the mouth. I wanted to get your opinion. A lot of practitioners will just have their patients hold the bottle and then do the muscle testing, probably because it’s a lot more convenient. You’re not using up supplements that way. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Christine:
In the very traditional AK training, you should put the supplement in your mouth, or have it touching the skin in some way. I have small vials that have supplements in them, so I will have that person hold that vial. Sometimes, we’ll take the supplements out if I am not getting a clear read.
I have seen enough practitioners who are incredibly successful at helping people in what they do that don’t put it in the mouth where it still works. To me, that all comes back to the concept of the energetics and frequency, and everything in the world has its own bio field, including that supplement in your hand. You’re testing the bio field. As long as it’s not being blocked by some kind of material, I think you’re usually in the realm of it working.
It’s always best and most accurate to put it in the mouth. I have seen both of them work though.
Dr. Eric:
Very cool. You covered a lot of information here. Is there anything else you’d like to chat about? Anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?
Dr. Christine:
I love your audience. I love thyroid. I think it’s a really cool organ. I know when you’re going through a health issue, it’s really easy to be angry at your body. If there is one thing that I really want people to work on, it’s this concept of seeing your body as your best friend that just got injured.
If your best friend just twisted their ankle during a marathon, you wouldn’t be mad at them for running slower. You’d be encouraging them and helping them and giving them water. It’s this idea of seeing your body as this friend that’s going through a hard time.
All of a sudden, your energy shifts from being mad at your body from not working to, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. How can I support you?” That energetic shift is how we start to create the biochemical shift.
I find the thyroid intriguing because I consider it the sentinel of the body. It’s this very sensitive organ that is essentially your fuel manager. If something is off with your energy and your fuel, it’s a check engine light. It’s an indicator of go look at the rest of the body and see what might be irritating this very sensitive organ. Versus throwing pills at the organ and thinking it’s working now.
We have to remove the irritant and the instigator, which is where it all comes back to gut and infection and environmental and mental stress. You could have done all the things and the detoxes. “My house is completely free of any environmental toxin. I do everything cleanly.” You still live in this mental state of being judgmental and feeling under attack by everybody and resentful toward other people in your life. That’s just as toxic as any cleaner or hormone-disrupting BPA chemical. It’s working with that component and understanding your thyroid is this indicator.
That’s where the deeper work can really start. I’m a huge fan of retreats and making time for yourself to go and do a deep dive with yourself. It’s really hard to do those deep dives into your day-to-day lives. Taking some time for yourself, even if it’s two days, to go on a yoga retreat or health and wellness retreat or an energetic deepening spiritual awareness retreat. There are tons of these. Take some time to explore that side of yourself if you never have. The thyroid is very telling.
Also, if you’re working on your thyroid and doing all the medications, and it’s doing okay, but you’re still exhausted and can’t figure out why, check out your mitochondria. It’s what the thyroid works on. The signal from the thyroid goes to the mitochondria to produce energy. If the signal is going out, but the factory can’t receive it and produce the outcome, that’s the thing that needs to be checked out.
Understanding that your body is this beautiful, dynamic system. All of these little symptoms or things you might be dealing with are just indicators. That’s how your body speaks to you. Starting to have this relationship with your body, “If you’re talking to me, something’s wrong. How can I love you?” Shifting into that relationship instead of being mad at your body for its illness. I think that’s the last thing I make sure people get from this.
Dr. Eric:
Wonderful, thank you. How can people find out more about you, Dr. Christine?
Dr. Christine:
I provide a ton of free education online. They can go to my social media, @DrChristineSmith. I have a YouTube as well, where there is a bunch of free education. Depth Wellness is my channel. That’s also my practice.
If you want to learn more about services, or explore other things, because I try to provide things at every level for people. If you want education, go check out those resources. If you want a deeper dive, I have some online courses and guided meditations I created for my clients. I use those as packages for people. Sometimes people just want the meditative component.
There are online courses I do. I will run another group course in February. It’s five weeks where I guide people through not just how to cleanse your body, but how to cleanse your mind and environment at the same time. Understand the physiology behind how this works. Create a new relationship with your body. I call that one Reclaim Vitality. There are other options. That website is DepthWellness.com. That will have links to everything else that you can check out. Reach out any time.
Dr. Eric:
Appreciate you taking the time to discuss the different injuries. I learned a lot. I’m sure the listeners did as well. Thank you.
Dr. Christine:
Thank you. Thanks for having your podcast. I think it’s important for people to have resources to learn about themselves.