We know that trauma, if left untreated, can lead to a host of physical ailments, including autoimmune diseases (www.acestoohigh.com). In this week’s episode, Alyssa shares about her own battle with being recently diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. She and her guest, Dr. Kylie, discuss a functional medicine approach to diagnosing and treating many physical ailments including chronic fatigue, sleep difficulties, autoimmune diseases, thyroid issues, and much more. 

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Dr. Kylie’s website: www.drkylieburton.com 

 

Transcript:

 

Alyssa Scolari: [00:00:23]

Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast, a podcast for trauma survivors, by trauma survivors. I am your host, Alyssa Scolari and I am so excited about today’s guest. We have Dr. Kylie Burtonwith us. Dr. Kylie is a functional medicine specialist who turns normal labs into answers, healing, and hope.

And I am very happy to have you here with us. Thank you so much. How are you?

Kylie Burton: [00:01:17]

Thanks for having me, Alyssa. I’m doing great. It’s a sunny, bright Tuesday in a cold Utah atmosphere right now, but we got the sunshine, so it’s good.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:01:29]

Yeah, it’s cold. over here in Jersey today too. I’m like, it was so nice. And now it’s a little cold, but spring is coming, so it’s like hard to be in a funk because spring is coming, the pandemic is hopefully ending. Yes. So I am so excited to have you on today because I, as many of the listeners know, I am a big fan of functional medicine.

And over the last, I want to say like three to four months. Functional medicine has truly changed my quality of life after being told by doctor after doctor, that they have no clue why I feel the way that I feel. Yes, we don’t know what’s wrong with you. So I was like, as soon as I started to really go on my journey and realize like the mind body connection and how much of my trauma was playing a role in my symptoms and et cetera, I was like, I need to have somebody on to talk about this.

So I am really excited to dive into this today. And I guess my first question for you would be. I guess first you can elaborate a little bit more on kind of like who you are and what you do in the field. And what is functional medicine?

Kylie Burton: [00:02:52]

Yeah. So I specialize in helping people like you who have been tossed from doctor to doctor, to doctor, to specialist, to specialist. Nobody can figure out what’s wrong with them. They have all these normal labs yet, they feel like crap. Sometimes they have great days. Sometimes they have terrible days.

We’ll get into that. But the biggest key for me was I had to create a mindset shift for myself. I was an assistant for a chiropractor. What now? Maybe 10 years, eight years ago, maybe 10 years. And there was, when I got hired on, I had no idea what chiropractic was. I had no idea what functional medicine was and he just dabbled in it, but it was enough to introduce me to the concept of the why.

Functional medicine is personalized medicine. It’s all about finding the why to how you feel, whether you have a diagnosis or you don’t, and then resolving that why. So you can feel like a million bucks again, you can be the mom you want to be. The grandma you want to be. The dad, the uncle, the aunt, or better yet you can even get pregnant without paying 20,000, $40,000 for some IVF treatment.

So it’s really cool stuff, but my mindset shift had to change when I was in school, I had this patient come in from the community, and I was saying a lot of people compared to my colleagues, but she’d come in. She was a mess, terrible, terrible, terrible migraines for days on end. She had one at the time.

So we had to find a black blanket to cover the window, just to make sure we can remove as much light as possible. She had MRI scans, CT scans, blood work, every lab test under the sun, you name it and it all would come back normal and we’ll get into this normal labs concept because, but for her, it was like, okay, if I look at her the same way, everybody else looks at her, I’m going to get the same results.

And that wasn’t okay with me. So I said to myself, how can I take these documents that we have all of these blood work, all of the lab tests, all of the imaging, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars sitting right here in our hands that were normal. They weren’t providing any answers and here she was barely functioning.

Been that way for years. So I figured out a way to train myself and I learned all of this post med school, which is what happens in life. You know, your real toolkit that you need happens outside of the school, the classroom. So that’s how it went for me. And it’s been really fun. I went from a brick and mortar practice to a completely virtual practice.

I was using Zoom before Zoom was cool and it was really helpful because now boundaries are no limit. Like I’ve got patients all over the world. So if you’re like “I have normal labs and yet I don’t feel like myself.” We’re going to get into that. And we’re going to get into specifically auto immune diseases and those people who have good days and bad days, even though they might not have a diagnosis.

So that’s my background. That’s why I love functional medicine and any patient in the world…I’ve heard a thousand stories and every time I’m like, “Oh my gosh, how are you even alive? Like, how are you even functioning?” And it’s just, you all have their own unique story and nothing scares me anymore.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:06:12]

Yeah. I just love the concept because, and one of the things that I love that you had said, you didn’t say on the podcast, but you said this and yeah. I can’t remember if it was on your website or something that you had written, you said, “okay, well, let’s get one thing straight here. One of the things I’m not trying to do is bash Western medicine, which is obviously not the goal, but I do think it’s fair to acknowledge that Western medicine has its limitations.”

And I think that what you’re doing. Sounds like what functional medicine does is it’s, we’re going to stop putting a band aid on this and we are going to rip out the core and figure out what is the actual issue.

Kylie Burton: [00:06:58]

Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about two things you mentioned: the first, functional medicine is powerful when it’s done right. And there are a lot of individuals in the healthcare industry who are coaches, naturopathic doctors, like the whole gamut who will call themselves functional medicine and functional medicine requires more than one weekend seminar.

And that’s what we’re finding a lot is that people are, “Oh yeah, I practice functional medicine. Well, I just attended, you know, one IFM conference or one XYZ conference.” Functional medicine, it’s tough. It gets very detailed and it’s time consuming. It’s literally taking the science, the biochemistry, the physiology, the biology, it’s literally taking the science and applying it to our bodies.

I always joke around and say, you know, if I would’ve known, I was talking about the Krebs cycle from high school biology every single day in my career. I might’ve paid a little bit more attention in high school biology, but that’s literally what it is. It’s not easy and it’s not a one size fits all process.

So just be careful, someone says a practice functional medicine, make sure you still do your due diligence and take a look into what they’re doing, because I’ve seen most of the people that I see have already tried functional medicine from somewhere else. So just be careful with that too.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:08:18]

That’s a very important point.

Kylie Burton: [00:08:21]

It can be, you know, pretty, pretty pricey too.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:08:25]

Oh yeah.

Kylie Burton: [00:08:27]

So that’s functional medicine. People we’re not perfect. And the profession isn’t perfect. Same with Western medicine. Now, I like to say it as a toolkit, right? All of us, medical practitioners, doctors, coaches, whatever it is, we all want to go into this business to help people that’s the goal is to help people.

The problem is we get into medical school and our toolkit is very limited. They teach us that unless, you have multiple symptoms that fit underneath an umbrella. AKA a diagnosis. I don’t know what to do with you, because unless I can give you a diagnosis, now I can reach into my toolkit of pharmaceuticals and tell you what pill to take or what injection to receive, or like Humira for RA or Lyrica for fibromyalgia or, yeah, I mean, you name it Metformin for diabetes, like whatever it is inside their toolkit, that’s what they were given during medical school. Now, the thing is. It’s not your doctor’s fault. It’s not your doctor’s fault. It’s not the listener’s doctor’s fault. It’s not whoever’s out there trying to blame their doctor. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the schooling. The schooling is what has failed us. The system is what has failed us because the toolkit is so limited unless they go out and they learn all this additional stuff on their own to expand their toolkit.

Now it’s like, You go into your doctor and instead of them saying to you, okay, you have diabetes, go see a dietician. Now they can help coach you in the right ways versus going off to see another doctor or another aspect to look at it is, we have all these specialists, right? Endometriosis specialist, GI specialists, ENT specialists.

When in reality, our body is one incredible machine with multiple systems working together as one. So you fine tuning and saying, Oh, it’s my hormones. It might be your hormones, but all of your other systems are playing a role on your hormones too. It’s not just your thyroid. Your thyroid is just one gland in a system that’s being affected by all the other systems in your body.

Makes sense?

Alyssa Scolari: [00:10:42]

Right. It makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is the way in which we do have so many specialists, because we’re almost taking away from the body as one whole organism, where it’s like you affect one part of the system, the other part is affected and I agree. It’s not necessarily the fault of the doctors because that’s the toolkit that they were given.

Like I went to, I was recently diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called HS. I’m not sure have you heard of it? Hidradenitis suppurativa.

Kylie Burton: [00:11:13]

No,

Alyssa Scolari: [00:11:14]

So it’s like, Oh, it’s excruciatingly painful. It’s an auto-immune disease that results in cysts on your body.

Kylie Burton: [00:11:23]

Like on the external or the internal part.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:11:26]

External and internal. It can be in your armpits. It can be in your groin, on your buttocks, even on your like outer/inner Labia, scrotum. And it’s an auto-immune disease and they have no idea what causes it. Like there’s not a whole lot known about it. And I went to a dermatologist who was supposed to specialize in this autoimmune disease.

And her response was like, okay, we’re going to put you on Humira. And I was like, hell no, we’re not putting me on

Kylie Burton: [00:11:57]

Take this injection for the rest of your life and we’ll quote, manage your symptoms.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:12:03]

Right. And then I went to the functional medicine specialist and it was like, Oh, okay.

Kylie Burton: [00:12:09]

I get it now.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:12:11]

Yeah, yeah.

Kylie Burton: [00:12:13]

So when it comes to autoimmune disease, any autoimmune disease, I mean, what we’re learning more and more is depending on the resource that you can go to, there’s eighty to a hundred different diagnoses that are auto-immune right now. The insurance codes, the amount of diagnoses that you can bill insurances continues to grow.

And the reason why it continues to grow is because we have more people showing more weird symptoms that we haven’t found an umbrella to clump all those symptoms underneath yet. So now we have to create new umbrellas to clump all the stuff underneath, and the coding is just getting more and more. The amounts of diagnoses they’re just getting more and more. And this is specifically with auto-immune diseases. For example, like in five or ten years, I would imagine that endometriosis or even PCOS, common hormonal issues are going to be on the autoimmune spectrum because of the more we learn about them, the more they fall under this component this umbrella.

So when it comes to autoimmune, whether you have a diagnosis or you’re one of those people that you have great days and you have bad days, that would be these auto-immune or think about MS. Multiple Sclerosis people have MS flares, right? There is a commercial that teaches us that if you have an MS flare, you can go in and get this injection.

Well what’s happening during these flares, what causes these flares? So let’s dive into my three step process to stopping auto-immune disease in its tracks. Now, I want to preface that and say, we’re not curing immune disease. We’re going to put, Alyssa, what you’re experiencing, in your history. If I’ve got a 39 year old mom who has MS, which is the truth.

We’re about halfway through her process right now. And she’s feeling like a million bucks and I’m real excited for it because in the summertime, when it’s the heat and she can’t go outside, she couldn’t go outside. If it was above 72 degrees have caused this and flare for her this summer is going to be a different story.

She’s going to be able to go enjoy the summer activities with her teenage kids. And it would be the first time in awhile that she’s been able to do that because we figured out the process of her auto immune. We kicked it to the curb and now it’s going to be in her history in just a few more months, and anybody can do this.

So you just have to know how to do it and what’s causing your auto-immune cases. So my first step that I like to take a look at what I encourage people to take a look at is the first step is you have to identify the trigger. What triggered the onset of the autoimmune disease? What triggered the Hashimoto’s, the Rheumatoid Arthritis, the Psoriasis, whatever it is out there.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:15:03]

Right now, potentially the PCOS, the endometriosis.

Kylie Burton: [00:15:08]

Yeah. The list goes on and on and on, auto-immune period. Right? Identify the trigger. Now there are multiple types of triggers. And one of the triggers that everybody likes to blame on is food. Is it organic, is it GMO, is it clean, like whatever they want to call healthy eating food can be a trigger. So eliminating the food sensitivity culprits, that’s a great place to start.

It’s not a great place to end. I don’t know about you Alyssa, but I like food and part of me enjoying food and enjoying life is to be able to eat things on holidays and birthdays and not being so strict throughout my day, that I can’t enjoy the social interactions that we associate with food.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:15:53]

Yes. And it can’t be an end point, especially for all of those who are in recovery from an eating disorder and are trying to establish some sense of intuitive eating in their lives.

Kylie Burton: [00:16:05]

Yeah. And functional medicine. I just did a podcast on this. It’s coming out in a few weeks on my podcast, but I literally, we had an honest discussion about food because so many times I have people coming in, they’re trying to lose weight and they’re eating like 1200 calories a day and they’re exhausted and they can’t get to the gym.

Well, no freaking duh. You’re not feeding your body anything.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:16:29]

Your metabolism shut down. Your body’s storing fat and you’re not going to lose a pound.

Kylie Burton: [00:16:35]

But their personal trainer put them on this. And I could just go on a rant about all of this though.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:16:41]

You and me both.

Kylie Burton: [00:16:43]

So then we’ve got the eliminators, the elimination diets, right? Huge, big deal in functional medicine. In fact, I would say functional medicine is probably the culprit to this food madness that we’ve been having.

Right. Because we teach, you know, you can’t have dairy, gluten, soy, peanut butter, eggs. Like what the heck are you supposed to eat? Then if you’re eliminating all this stuff, I’ve had people eliminate fruits and vegetables from the gardens because their food sensitivity test came back positive for regular vegetables and our gut needs variety.

So yes, food can be a trigger, but don’t just say I can’t eat XYZ for the rest of my life. Remove them. Put your body through some work and I’ll teach you what that work needs to be. So you can enjoy food again, because food is supposed to be enjoyed. It’s part of life, life isn’t to just survive it’s to enjoy life, right?

So there’s a trigger, there’s a culprit, but more often than not, what I find, especially in auto-immune cases is some type of hidden infection. And this infection is low grade. So it’s not going to come up positive on a test. So if you were to go to your doctor’s and if you were to get an Epstein-Barr virus test model, the number one trigger for Hashimoto’s, it will probably come back negative.

You want it to be negative because if it’s positive, you literally can’t walk up five stairs. That’s how exhausted you are. I have a 17 year old boy who just got diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus and it came back positive and they, you know, if you’ve ever heard or you’ve gotten that diagnosis, do you know that?

They say, okay, now go home and sleep for three months. Good luck kicking it. We got nothing for you, right?

Alyssa Scolari: [00:18:25]

It’s awful. Yeah.

Kylie Burton: [00:18:28]

Yeah. So that’s this viral infection is really, really big. It’s not active enough to be positive, but it’s still there to the point that your body’s fighting it. And if your body’s constantly fighting something, you’re not going to thrive.

Whether it’s losing weight, getting pregnant, combating auto-immune disease, or even just feeling like yourself again, 90% of the time, it’s this hidden infection that’s causing you to be yourself. And that triggered the immune disease. Right.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:19:02]

How do you find the infection?

Kylie Burton: [00:19:05]

I’ll tell you that too. So along with the viral infection, we got bacterial infections, we have fungal infections like candida overgrowth, and then we have parasitic infections. So there’s multiple types of infections. Now you can identify if you have a low grade hidden infection based off of the labs you already have in your possession.

This lab, it’s called a CBC with differential, right? The CBC is like the regular standard blood test that every doctor takes as just a precursor. Let’s just figure out what’s going on, you know, but just make sure that if your doctor is taking a CBC, they check the box that says with differential. Cause I really get peeved when I’m requesting medical records, when there’s no differential.

Cause those puzzle pieces included in that lab portion are so crucial. So crucial and your insurance will pay for it. Just make sure they check the right box. So the CBC, if you have it, go grab it. If it’s on your patient portal, look it up that number one marker. The very top marker it’s called white blood cell count, WBC, that white blood cell count is going to tell you if you have a low grade hidden infection, but I can guarantee you it’s normal.

You want it to be normal. If it’s not normal, that means your labs are, you know, you have a disease, they have some disease, they can pass next to your name and give you a pill to manage it for the rest of your life. So you want normal labs. They might be normal, but they’re not ideal. They’re not optimal.

Okay. So what I’m going to tell you is the range for the white blood cell count, WBC, the optimal range. If you fall less than five or greater than eight, you have a low grade hidden infection. Makes sense. So white blood cell count needs to be between five and eight. If it’s less than five or greater than eight, we’re dealing with this low grade hidden and infection, don’t go running to your doctors to tell them that you have an infection, cause they’re going to laugh in your face.

They’re not trained to look at labs like this. So I’m teaching you how to do it. So you have the power in your own hands. Once you see that you have say your white blood cell count is 4.9 or 4.1 or 16 or nine, whatever it is now, you know that your body’s fighting something. What is that something then you’ve got to jump below a couple of several markers.

And we’re going to, get to this, we’re going, I’m going to keep it very, very basic and simple. We’re going to keep it to neutrophils, which is this marker that neutrophils are responsible for fighting bacteria. So if your neutrophil percentage is greater than 60%, you’re fighting a bacterial infection.

Then the marker right below that, it’s going to say lymphocytes. Lymphocytes, fight viruses. That’s what they do. So if your lymphocytes are greater than 30%, your body’s fighting a virus and you can look back over last 10 years of your labs, which is what I love to do. I love to just pull medical records and trace patterns because you can see, you know, as sometimes my blood work I got taken, it tells me that I haven’t a bacterial infection.

Other times my blood work says I have a viral infection, which is very common to have them both. And then at other times, my blood work has this pattern and I want to teach you the pattern because it’s auto immune pattern. Now, neutrophils, you want them to be 60%, right. Or less. That’s the ideal. Now lymphocytes, you want to have them to be 30% or less.

That’s the ideal. So if we’re thinking 60, 30, that’s a two to one ratio. Correct?

Alyssa Scolari: [00:22:53]

Yep.

Kylie Burton: [00:22:54]

Okay. Now, what if your neutrophils are like 44% and your lymphocytes are like 42%? That’s a one-to-one ratio, right? Auto immune. So if you see a one-to-one ratio between the neutrophils and the lymphocytes, you’re dealing with an auto-immune flare, when that blood work was taken, your body was in fighting mode.

Your immune system was fighting something. And typically the lymphocytes are the elevated ones. And that viral component is the trigger. When you hear about these flares or these good days or bad days, it’s really a viral component. In most cases, the virus is more active at some times, and then less active at other times when it’s more active your day suck, you have the MS flare, the Crohn’s flare, the Hashimoto’s brain fog, flare, whatever it may be, but when it’s less dormant, less active, now you feel more like yourself. Does that make sense?

Alyssa Scolari: [00:23:57]

Yeah, absolutely.

Kylie Burton: [00:23:59]

All within regular blood work that you have in your possession, that you were told as normal?

That’s how cool labs are. That’s why I love the numbers.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:24:09]

And it’s so empowering to be able to, I don’t know, that anybody can kind of look at it and now go through it and be like, Oh, this is what’s happening.

Kylie Burton: [00:24:17]

Yeah, totally makes sense. So, along with the infection, that’s a big component of the trigger. We got multiple other triggers, triggers like toxins and metals and mold, even mold in our house Mole in our environment. I live in a four season area. Springtime is mold season. I’ve had kids, teenagers, specifically who would come in and his knuckles would swell up, but only during the spring and they’d go into the rheumatologists and they’d get the blood work and his ANAs would come back normal.

It would all come back normal, but the rheumatologists wanted to diagnose him with rheumatoid arthritis anyways, cause it looks like it, feels like it, his joints hurt, but they only happened in the spring time. And it didn’t clue into me until I went to a seminar. I was talking to another practitioner about this.

And,and he, he said to me, do you live in a four season environment? I said, yeah, but it’s a desert. It’s Utah, we’re desert. And he said, well, what about the spring time when everything is frozen now on thaws? I was like, Whoa, I never thought about that. Yeah, right. And then we’d chopped down our tree as a couple, I guess it would be last summer.

Now, last, last summer, a couple of the trees in our backyard, just mold infested. And my husband’s a roofer and he says a lot of times they’ll get on the roof to reroof. They will tear off the shingles, tear off the sheet rock underneath, then tear off the wood. And then underneath the wood, they find black mold.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:25:47]

Ooooo.

Kylie Burton: [00:25:48]

So don’t just rule it out. Like mold is another trigger and it needs to be dealt with, and sometimes people have to move because that’s just the bottom line of it.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:25:57]

RIght.

Kylie Burton: [00:25:58]

So there’s your triggers for starting or instigating an autoimmune culprit, autoimmune disease. Okay. Now that’s step number one. Once you figure the triggers, got to get rid of them.

Number two. Calming the immune system down. Once you pull the triggers away. Now it’s the immune system who was the whole culprit to begin with. It’s not the thyroid, it’s not your small and large intestine. It’s not your nervous system. It’s not wherever the disease is happening. What’s happening in all autoimmune disease is it’s the immune system attacking a specific point in your body and wherever it’s attacking.

Well, that’s what your genes are there for. So, if you have Hashimoto’s running in your family, well your genes told your immune system to attack your thyroid. My family has Parkinson’s. Our genes tell us to attack the, tell the immune system to attack the nervous system. Right? So that’s how it all works.

We’re all about what’s wrong with the immune system. Why is it just given up and started to attack whatever it feels like attacking. And then once you can figure out the triggers of it. Now you’re going to call the immune system down and there’s a couple of ingredients that you can use really easily to calm that immune system down.

And one of my favorites, my all-time favorite is a vitamin D. Vitamin D is like the best supplement in the world. If you’re going to just say you have to take something, you got to take vitamin D.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:27:27]

Yes.

Kylie Burton: [00:27:28]

don’t just take it at the wimpy 2000 to 5,000 IUs per day level. That’s wimpy. You’re not going to get anything from it. More than what you would without taking it. But what I’ve seen in the research literally, research with vitamin D and auto immune, it’s huge. And I’m going to tell you my vitamin D protocol. This is what I would do, what I do with patients. And when I blast all over podcasts and social media, and because it’s that powerful, but I have had people tell me, they have found my email, strangers have reached out and said, you’re telling people these high levels of vitamin D they’re going to become toxic. You’re right. They’ll become toxic. If you stay on them for five, six, seven years. I’m talking three months. So a short time period, I’m going to say, we’re going to jack that vitamin D up. It’s going to calm your immune system down and just by this one vitamin AKA hormone. You’re going to feel way different.

Now, if you were to say, cause I’m a numbers girl, right? The vitamin D normal lab range is from a 30 to a hundred. It’s kind of big range. I guarantee you’re going to feel a lot better with your vitamin D is at closer to a hundred than it is in the thirties. Depression, you can kick it to the curb with vitamin D. Anxiety, same thing.

Auto-immune same thing. Vitamin D is that powerful when you take it at the right dosage and your number. My ideal number for vitamin D is around 80. So if you have a vitamin D status, go look at it in your labs. And if you’re less than say 70 or 60, take some vitamin D take a higher dose than normal, but,from all of the labs I’ve seen and I’ve seen thousands of peoples have labs, I have only seen a handful who are even above 50. Everybody is so depleted in vitamin D and then the prescription is 50,000 IUs of vitamin D per week. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not going to change the way you feel. It is not going to change your labs either.

It will bump them up a little bit, maybe 10, 20 points, but it’s not going to take you from 30 to 80 in three months.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:29:50]

Yeah.

Kylie Burton: [00:29:52]

25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day for a month will.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:30:01]

25,000.

Kylie Burton: [00:30:04]

25,000 IUs of vitamin D per day for a month. And then month two, back down to 20,000 and then month three, back down to 15,000 and then maintain more at a 10,000 dosage. Not going to get toxic off of this, I promise.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:30:20]

I mean, yeah, vitamin D and its short.

Kylie Burton: [00:30:23]

Its a short time period And the research I found there was a doctor who did, he was working with auto-immune specifically.

He used a bit of LIGO psoriasis. I can’t Oh, MS was the other one. Yeah. So that was big three. And he was like, you know what? I want to see what vitamin D does specifically on these three instances. So his dosage was 35,000 IUs of vitamin D for three months. That’s what he used.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:30:51]

Wow.

Kylie Burton: [00:30:52]

VItamin D was enough to put more than half of the patients in the study, their auto-immune symptoms into remission.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:31:01]

Wow.

Kylie Burton: [00:31:02]

The power of vitamin D easiest thing to take. It’s like the only thing I will always take, and I’m…

Alyssa Scolari: [00:31:09]

it really is the easiest thing to take. I know.

Kylie Burton: [00:31:13]

So vitamin D is a big one. Then we have essential fatty acids, things like Omega three, Omega six, those good healthy fats will also calm down the immune system. And then this also comes on the immune system or probiotics.

I always want to put an asterisk next to the probiotics because so many people think, well, I just need to take a probiotic and it’s going to solve my gut issues. And I’m going to take the same probiotic for the rest of my life. And it’s going to be going to be fine, right. Wrong. So probiotics are great.

Just don’t take them because you can, and don’t take the same one forever, which leads us into step number three. Step number three, once we identify the trigger and removes it, then we calm the immune system down. Now our immune system is literally our gut, so we got to rehab our gut. Don’t just take a probiotic forever. Your gut needs variety. Taking the same probiotic for over like three months. I always say is not doing much because it’s the same strains, the same quantity, switch it up. Now, the gut is also going to get harped on by many many people, because the more we learn about it, the more we realize that our gut is our second brain, it’s pretty powerful. So you gotta make sure you do the gut right. And your gut is like your fingerprint. It’s unique to you. So make sure whatever you’re doing is personalized to you. So there’s your three step kick auto immune diseases to the curb kind of thing.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:32:43]

It’s amazing. And it makes so much sense. And I, I can’t help but wonder like, vitamin D really is. It’s magical. We’re talking about triggers. Is it also possible that like chronic toxicity and chronic stress can trigger, these…can be triggers or does it have to be some type of like low grade virus or infection?

Kylie Burton: [00:33:14]

No. When we think about triggers, think about multiple. There’s usually multiple triggers. And the reason why, as we all have these cups, we’re born with our cup, quarter full or half full or whatever. And the more we have experienced life, the fuller our cup gets. And then finally, at some point, something is the trigger that makes the cup overflow.

That’s the onset of the disease.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:33:37]

Okay.

Kylie Burton: [00:33:38]

It’s a multitude, multiplicity of triggers. But the big thing is when I look back in the labs, there is that viral component. You’re going to have pregnancy trigger. A lot of moms will say, you know, I was fine for baby number one and two. And then number three, my body just gone to crap.

And I don’t know what’s wrong. Metabolic instances like PCOS and endometriosis, they can trigger it. Trauma is a big one. Trauma can trigger or be a trigger along that process. So there’s a whole lot of triggers that are possible even stress. Now I want to caveat that stress because I don’t know if you’re like me, Alyssa, but you said you work a nine to five and then you do the podcast and, you know, life is life.

Life is stressful.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:34:23]

Life is stressful.

Kylie Burton: [00:34:25]

And if you were to say to me, no, Dr. Kylie, your life is too stressful. You have to find something to eliminate, to make it less stressful. I wouldn’t laugh at you. And I’m going to say hi, you’re funny. No, I’m a doctor, a mom, an entrepreneur, and I work with the difficult patients right.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:34:41]

Right. Okay.

Kylie Burton: [00:34:43]

So I’m not changing that. And I’m not gonna change that. So I don’t expect my patients or people who I work with or who are even listening to podcasts I’m on to change that . What you can do is you can instigate things like five minutes of meditation. But for me, I’m lucky to get five minutes by myself in the shower, so you can instigate those things.

But what I do want to say as far as stress is concerned, if we can find an internal stressor. And eliminate what’s causing stress on the inside of our bodies. Now it can handle the external stressors a lot. Okay.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:35:21]

That makes a lot of sense.

Kylie Burton: [00:35:23]

Now it takes the pressures off of moms with three kids, or grandma’s like my mom’s a grandma and she’s about to have five kids and they’re five living with her, between my two brothers. So life is stressful and you’re not going to just eliminate it, but if we can help our bodies from the inside out. Feel and conquer the external stressors, then life will be a lot better.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:35:44]

Right, right. Because there’s no such thing as getting rid of stress. There’s just no such thing. Not in the world that we live in. There will always be stress.

Kylie Burton: [00:35:52]

Yeah, there’s too many outside influences.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:35:54]

Right. We have much more control over healing, the inside of ourselves than we do over kind of like what comes our way in terms of external stress.

Kylie Burton: [00:36:06]

Yeah, beautifully said.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:36:09]

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for that. The auto-immune disease world is just one that I feel is so misunderstood, but I think you did a phenomenal job of kind of summarizing just three steps to kind of like beating it because I really think it’s finding the trigger. It’s not just throwing pills for this symptom and that symptom. It’s finding the trigger.

Kylie Burton: [00:36:36]

Yeah. Once you can do that, once you can find the trigger, calm the immune system down and then rebuild the immune system, which is your gut, you’re ready to rock and roll. And I’ve seen that time and time and time again. So if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a diagnosis, or you do, just know that you don’t have to survive life.

You don’t have to survive, managing whatever it is, you can thrive and you can enjoy life.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:37:02]

It’s not a death sentence. And I truly, before discovering functional medicine, I truly felt that my HS and my auto immune disease was like a death sentence. So certainly doesn’t have to be, so thank you so much for coming on today. That was really helpful. Love talking about this topic. And so you see people from all over the world.

So if people want to find you do they just go directly to your website.

Kylie Burton: [00:37:31]

They can go to my website, but the best place to learn more is the podcasts. And the podcast is called Beyond the Diagnosis with me, Dr. Kylie. So that’s the first place to go is go check that out, learn more, dive in there. Several episodes on auto immune diseases and a whole lot more. And then the other place is you can look up and find anything you want on the website, https://drkylieburton.com. I’m also on Facebook, Dr. Kylie Burton on Facebook. Those are the podcasts and Facebook are where I’m most active. And then of course, if you want to join anything, any of the boot camps, the programs, and membership, go find them all on the website, https://drkylieburton.com.

Alyssa Scolari: [00:38:11]

And I will link all of that information in the show notes. Thank you very much for coming on today. I appreciate you making the time to, educate all of us and I appreciate the work that you do.

Kylie Burton: [00:38:22]

Thanks Alyssa.

Thanks for listening everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media.

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