Tired and Losing Hair? Check Your Ferritin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Cassie Smith (0:30)

I have people cry all the time because the problem when you're fair-toned slow is you can't literally move oxygen through your body. So imagine how tired you feel. Like they will call the office and they'll be like, I can't believe how different I feel in 48 hours. Like they're just in tears and they're like, why did nobody listen to me for years?

Chris Motley (0:48)

Welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast, where East meets West in the world of medicine. I'm Dr. Chris Motley. Let's bridge the gap between ancient practices in cutting edge medicine. Let's get started.

Guys, this is number two with Dr. Cassie Smith. And we talked about in our last podcast from her book, Fix Your Gut, Fix Your Hormones, a very interesting talk. So if you're listening right now, she even dives deeper into how women's hormonal health is not just what you see on a lab report. She digs deep about how what could be living inside your gut system, such as pathogens and your food habits, how it could create acidity and create an environment where infections could thrive does change your hormone system. But I just like talking to you and this has been so fun. You're in Nashville. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Cassie Smith (1:38)

Thanks for having me.

Chris Motley (1:40)

Okay. We did talk about where you're at, where you live and such. But for the people who didn't see the first one, we know that you have a great story about why you got into hormonal health. Can you just give us a brief recap on that?

Cassie Smith (1:54)

Yes, of course, Dr. Chris. So I got really sick whenever I was in med school. So when I was in med school, I got Graves' disease, which for people that don't know, it's where your thyroid overworks. It makes you feel terrible. It makes you feel like you drank six cups of coffee all the time. You're having palpitations, you're hot, almost like you're in menopause. It's awful.

Only you lose weight instead of gain weight, which that's the good part. But you feel terrible. And I saw traditional medicine doctors and their answer was, here's a medication. Which was great except for that it made me feel like I was dying and I hated it. And I was like, is it worse to take the medicine or is it worth to feel like you drank six cups of coffee? And I'm in med school and then I was in residency and I'm trying to put central lines in people and I'm shaking and it looks like I'm terrified and it's just that my heart's beating 130 beats per minute. And so I wanted answers as to what, how can I treat this naturally? Like, is there a diet? How do I stop my body from attacking itself? What do I do?

There were no answers. It was take the medicine. And so that kind of got me thinking about functional medicine and then I also developed PCOS, probably because my thyroid was uncontrolled for so long. I had gut issues and I started having fertility. It was just one thing after another, after another. And it was always, here's another medication, here's another medication. It was never, let's talk about your stress or your lifestyle or your gut. And so eventually I just got sick of it and I found a doctor in Dallas who did functional medicine and he's like, we need to look at your gut. And we did.

Everything changed. Shocker.

Chris Motley (3:24)

Shocker. And when people are out there listening to this, they're saying, check, check, check. And almost to the point where when they do go to their primary care, they often look at a hormone levels on their labs and saying, we are in the normal range. So we just got to wait till you get out of range before we actually do something. And I think that was one of the biggest questions that we got on the YouTube was, they were like, can you ask Dr. Smith about, when you say fertility? Because that was a big one that people asked about.