Medical Gaslighting. What it is and How to Avoid it!

Meet Claudine Francois, a Board-Certified Functional Medicine & Holistic Health Practitioner, and an accomplished entrepreneur. In this empowering talk, Claudine will show you how to forge a powerful collaboration with your body to unlock Inner Vitality & Resilience, paving the way for greatness in every aspect of your life. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Collaborate with your body to harness Inner Vitality & Resilience 

• Embrace imperfections and grow fearlessly 

• Live life "on purpose" for greatness and fulfillment 

Claudine Francois, a Board-Certified Functional Medicine & Holistic Health Practitioner, is a trailblazer in guiding high-achieving women to transcend burnout and embrace vibrant living. As a former CFO of a multinational company, Claudine intimately understands the toll of stress and its effects on health. Her transformative journey through functional medicine and lifestyle shifts led her to become a dedicated advocate for women's well-being. Claudine's expertise lies in uncovering the root causes of chronic issues that often elude traditional medicine. Through sophisticated functional lab tests and a holistic approach, she crafts personalized protocols that empower her clients to reclaim energy, clarity, and vitality. Join Claudine on a journey to rediscover your Inner Radiance, where wellness and success intertwine harmoniously. 

Join us for a transformative and empowering session that will leave you inspired to embrace collaboration, amplify your health, and create greatness in every aspect of your life.

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Email: claudine@ingoodcleantaste.com

 Author: The Holistic Health Show
Guest Speaker: Claudine Francois
Category: Health and Wellness
Transcript
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Transcript

​ [00:00:15] Amy: Hello everyone. And welcome back to another fantastic episode of the Holistic Health Show. I'm really excited to introduce Claudine Francois to you today. Claudine is a board certified functional medicine practitioner. And today we're going to talk about medical gaslighting, what it is. and how to avoid it.

[00:00:36] Amy: Now, this sounds like a big topic, Claudine. , I'm really keen to hear what you have to say. I have some ideas myself that I want to throw at you, but can you just tell us a little bit about you? I'd love to know where you are and how you got involved in what you do.

[00:00:52] Claudine Francois: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's so fun to talk with you today. I am in California, in the middle of California, probably an area that very few people travel to. But I ended up here through a roundabout, you know, I came here from London, was in France before, but I'm in California now.

[00:01:09] Claudine Francois: And how did I, end up being in functional medicine? Well, I think with a lot of people who are in functional medicine, it's because we had our own health issues and they just could not get resolved. by the traditional medicine model. So I first noticed the point where it became unbearable is when I started having these chronic [00:01:30] migraines.

[00:01:30] Claudine Francois: And at the time I was working in corporate America, I actually spent 25 years in accounting and corporate accounting, which is very deadline driven. It's a very male dominated industry. And you know, it was always like a go, go, go mentality. You could sleep when you're dead. Stress is great because it helps you get things done.

[00:01:48] Claudine Francois: And I didn't realize that I was basically pounding my body down to the point where it was starting to malfunction, right? Just like if you take your car and you just run it without getting an oil change ever, you don't give it any downtime. It's. Things are going to start falling apart, and that's what I was doing.

[00:02:05] Claudine Francois: So I'm having migraines. What do I do? I go to my doctor. I'm like, I have these migraines. , I work from 7 p. m. every day. And then, and I have these two little kids at home. And on Saturdays, I'm on the couch with a migraine. I literally can't move. I can't keep anything down, not even water.

[00:02:22] Claudine Francois: And I can't play with my kids, whom I never see during the week because they're asleep when I get home, or I barely get to see them before they go to bed. And I don't see them. Before I leave

[00:02:31] Claudine Francois: What do they do? They try to give me medicine, right? They try to give me prescriptions and when I have the migraines, I can't keep anything down not even water So I can't keep the medicine down.

[00:02:41] Claudine Francois: So they're like, oh, let's take some anti nausea medicine. Okay, I'll try that and I can't keep that down either and so then they say oh, we'll put it in the other end

[00:02:51] Amy: Oh.

[00:02:52] Claudine Francois: And at that point, I'm like, yeah, it's clever, right?

[00:02:56] Amy: Yeah. 

[00:02:57] .

[00:02:57] Claudine Francois: At that point, I'm thinking to myself, why don't we figure [00:03:00] out why I'm getting the migraines?

[00:03:02] Claudine Francois: Like, would that not be a better way to go about this rather than band aiding all my problems? So that's what started me down this path. And knowing what I know now, I realized that there were signs a lot earlier. I mean, I had chronic acne for years, like the cystic kind that ends up on your chin, You know, those big bulbous It's super embarrassing, super uncomfortable, super painful.

[00:03:25] Claudine Francois: I had all kinds of treatments. I'd been going to a dermatologist and having shots and to the point where they would have to take my blood to make sure they weren't killing me. Those kind of, that kind of medication. So there had been signs that I had been ignoring because, you know, growing up in a traditional medical model, you just think I have a problem, I go to the doctor, they fix it.

[00:03:44] Amy: And you don't connect the dots either between all these seemingly separate symptoms.

[00:03:49] Claudine Francois: Exactly.

[00:03:50] Claudine Francois: I ended up going to a functional medicine practitioner who ran tests, actually showed me what was going on in my body, you know, showing me that I had what's called a calcium shell, which basically meant that I had been so stressed out and traumatized that my body had literally created this calcium shell around my cells, which was preventing nutrients from getting in my cells.

[00:04:13] Claudine Francois: It was preventing thyroid hormone from getting in my cells, which is why no matter how much I worked out, I couldn't lose weight.

[00:04:19] Claudine Francois: And it was raising my blood pressure, which was causing the migraines, you know, because I had too much blood going through a host of issues, like blood sugar handling issues.

[00:04:28] Claudine Francois: There are all kinds of things because [00:04:30] when you go to a functional medicine practitioner, they're looking at your body holistically.

[00:04:33] Amy: Yeah.

[00:04:34] Claudine Francois: Right? They're not just looking at the one problem you're giving them. Yeah, they start, they see all of it and they try to figure out, okay, what's causing all of this? And then they backtrack.

[00:04:44] Claudine Francois: And I went from there, and at the time I had left corporate, I had started my own CFO consulting business. Because, you know, when you know accounting, you know accounting and everyone, nobody wants to do their own accounting, right?

[00:04:55] Amy: Yeah, I hear that.

[00:04:58] Claudine Francois: Yeah. And it was good, but it wasn't, it still wasn't like the thing that, that lit me up, that got me excited.

[00:05:05] Claudine Francois: So I eventually went into health coaching because I had told my story to a certain business coach and she was like, you're a health coach. And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm an accountant. I'm not a health coach. But when I started to realize was I have a very strategic mind. 

[00:05:18] Claudine Francois: You have to, you have to basically be able to take puzzle pieces and put them together. And instead of doing that for a business, I was then able to do that for health. And that's what led me to functional medicine. 

[00:05:29] Claudine Francois: Cause I knew there was another way. I knew there was a way to forgive the pun, but look under the hood, you know, to see what is actually happening in someone's biochemistry. What is, what are the chemical imbalances or maybe. gut issues, hormone issues, like all the different things that can go awry in our body when we don't provide the right environment.

[00:05:52] Claudine Francois: What is not working properly that we can resolve so that person can start to heal and feel better. And that's when I felt like [00:06:00] I really hit my stride and found my place because that completely lights me up. I just, I got someone's GI map today, which is a stool sample.

[00:06:09] Claudine Francois: I have never been so excited about poop in my life, right? Like why is poop so exciting?

[00:06:14] Amy: I hear, I hear quite a few functional medicine practitioners who say this and You know, but it tells you so much. There's so much in there, you 

[00:06:23] Claudine Francois: It's so true.

[00:06:24] Amy: you can derive from. And it, it, as a, you know, as a client or a patient, I've, I've given stool samples before and it's not exactly comfortable, but you learn a lot.

[00:06:36] Amy: You learn a lot about yourself and , you start to get to the root cause , of all these symptoms that you're having. And like I said, sometimes they're so varied that they don't seem connected. And I mean, Who would link acne and migraines,

[00:06:49] Claudine Francois: exactly. I'll give you even a better example. I had a client recently who she had just had cysts removed from her back. And she has fibromyalgia, and she has interstitial cystitis, so she has multiple things happening. And we looked at, we just had one test that we were looking at and it was telling us her mineral balances.

[00:07:09] Claudine Francois: And she was really low in iodine, which we, if, if she'd come to me a year before, she might not have had. to have those cysts removed because the, the cysts were related to low iodine. And then both the fibromyalgia and the interstitial, I'm sorry, the ulcerative colitis, I think I gave you the wrong one, were both inflammatory issues.

[00:07:27] Claudine Francois: And what happens with the body is [00:07:30] when you, like, if you think of the body, this is a silly thing to describe it as, but if it's like a whack a mole, Like, you know that little game where the little moles pop up, and you start hitting one symptom, you, you see the little mole pop up, and you start , throwing the hammer down, and you, you push that one down, and you're like, I'm gonna cover that up with a med, right, or I'm gonna cover Cover that up with surgery, but you haven't fixed where these moles are coming from so they more keep popping up and more and you're just Finally you're just whacking everything as much as you can with that's what how some people end up on Multiple prescriptions is because you know, they haven't resolved the underlying issue But a lot of those have to do with inflammation a lot of them have underlying causes.

[00:08:08] Claudine Francois: So, like the fibromyalgia, fibromyalgia is correlated with low magnesium and her magnesium was so low that it explained, okay, why did her, even though she already had a, a, a predisposition, right? A genetic predisposition towards fibromyalgia, something had to kick it off,

[00:08:25] Claudine Francois: right? There had to be a trigger to say, Oh yeah, we, you could have fibromyalgia, but we're going to have fibromyalgia.

[00:08:32] Claudine Francois: And the same thing with the ulcer of colitis, which is, you know, gut related, inflammation related. So, , until you resolve all of these things that are happening, there are just going to be more things that happen because your body's trying to get attention. It's like, it's like the warning light on the car.

[00:08:48] Claudine Francois: I mean, I use the car analogy a lot, just because everybody knows, right?

[00:08:52] Claudine Francois: The warning lights pop up, if you just keep ignoring them,

[00:08:55] Claudine Francois: It's not going to fix itself, right? 

[00:08:56] Claudine Francois: But I do think a lot of people just think, oh, [00:09:00] what is this? This is random, it's going to go away, or it's not a big deal.

[00:09:03] Amy: it's normal. It's normal. I'm getting old. Oh, my mother has it. My sister has it. My grandfather, my great great uncle, you know? It's normal for me. It's in my family. I can't help it. I hear that so often and it drives me mad. , my blood pressure raises when people say this to me because I'm like, no, it's not normal and I am no stranger and anyone who listens to my podcast on the regular knows I'm no stranger to my own illness and disease.

[00:09:34] Amy: I have autoimmune diseases and some of them I can pinpoint in my life. It's the exact moment they were triggered., I didn't know at the time, but looking back, I know exactly why and when I was diagnosed with Graves disease, 100%. You know? And it's like, it's not normal. Yes, this has happened to me, and sure, there are different ways that you can, you can, you're told to manage this, but , it's not the end all be all either.

[00:10:01] Amy: And just because somebody in your family has it doesn't mean you're, you have to, you live with that thing that I'm going to get this eventually. Yeah.

[00:10:10] Claudine Francois: because I love, I love what you said about some people think it's just about getting older because a common one is you start having joint pain. What is joint pain? Joint pain is usually one of two things. It's usually inflammation because we're eating inflammatory foods or we're very stressed out, which is inflammatory.

[00:10:28] Claudine Francois: Or what I see a [00:10:30] lot of, I keep mentioning this high calcium number because calcium is a very sharp mineral. And when your body is stressed, it pulls the calcium out of the bones and it ends up in your soft tissue. So for some people that's joint pain. For some people that is gallbladder stones or kidney stones.

[00:10:46] Claudine Francois: I mean, it could be for some people that gives them high blood pressure because it ends up calcifying the arteries. But a doctor doesn't think to look at calcium when they're giving someone high blood pressure meds. They just say, Oh, I'm going to give you a potassium based supplement to counteract this high sodium that's causing your blood pressure and tell the body it doesn't actually want to do what it wants to do.

[00:11:04] Amy: And I, whenever I hear high blood pressure, I always go back to this example. And again, you know, I apologize listeners for repeating myself, but I really want to just drill this in. So I was a paramedic in Canada and you know, you'd get people in the ambulance and off, you know, oftentimes it's an emergency, it's an accident.

[00:11:21] Amy: It, you know, could not be helped. And a lot of times I just, and this is how I kind of moved into more of the holistic health side of things was because I was seeing these patients. And, you know, when you go to the hospital, you're supposed to take all your medications with you. I'm not joking when I, they had bags of medication coming with them.

[00:11:43] Amy: For, I mean, for everything. But a month later, they'd be back in the ambulance with the same thing, because they did not change anything about their lifestyle. They just take these medications. And you know what? They're taking medication A for high blood pressure, But they're taking medication [00:12:00] B because they're on medication A, so they need to regulate something that medication A is doing to their body.

[00:12:06] Amy: And I hope you're following me here, and I, I do believe that there are times in life when you have to take medication, and I believe you still do need Western Health medicine. And it helped me, but you need to change your lifestyle. So these patients who are coming back, coming back, they're not changing anything.

[00:12:24] Amy: And the next time you see them, they're on another medication. Cause that trip to the hospital last time gave them another script, a new script. And you know, when I was diagnosed with Graves disease, I was very near Thoroid storm, which is very dangerous. And so I started the Thoroid medication, but I also knew.

[00:12:40] Amy: Something has to change. I don't want to be on this forever because the thoroid medication gave me a whole variety of other symptoms and they were much less life threatening than what I had presented with when I showed up at the hospital unable to breathe, feeling like I was having a heart attack 

[00:12:56] Amy: and severely underweight.

[00:12:58] Amy: You know, it got that bad before I realized there's actually something going on . I, I made all the changes that I needed to come off the medication, you know, and I had a lovely endocrinologist who was happy to work with me on that and so I don't take the medication now, I'm in remission from Graves disease, and I just really want to encourage people, and I'm sure that you're doing the same, is that you've got to make some lifestyle modifications on top of all of this.

[00:13:26] Amy: You've got to find out the why. Why is this happening, and what changes do I [00:13:30] need to make?

[00:13:30] Claudine Francois: That is such a great testament to how you can take matters into your own hands. And you're so lucky that you found an endocrinologist who

[00:13:38] Amy: I know. 

[00:13:39] Amy: I'm 

[00:13:39] Claudine Francois: you on 

[00:13:40] Claudine Francois: that. 

[00:13:40] Amy: of how lucky I was, yeah.

[00:13:42] Claudine Francois: So I have a very close relative who's been on thyroid meds for 20 years. Mm hmm.

[00:13:46] Claudine Francois: And it's interesting with thyroid specifically, how You know, there's so many different components of the thyroid. It's like, first of all, is the thyroid making enough hormone? Oftentimes for a lot of people, maybe not for graves, but a lot of times for people, it is, yes, the thyroid is making the hormone, but it's not getting to where it needs to go either because it's not converting.

[00:14:07] Claudine Francois: Or because there's something preventing it from getting in the cells. Do we not have what's called a sodium potassium pump that has the right, like the right mineral balances to let it get in the cell? Do we have calcium that's preventing it from getting in the cell? Like what else is happening? Do we have cortisol?

[00:14:22] Claudine Francois: Are you stressed out so much that basically the thyroid stops functioning? And it's like until you figure out the why. Anything else that you do is just not, it's not a viable solution.

[00:14:34] Amy: And sometimes not even a fix, you know, because a lot of times doctors throw things at you as trial and error. It's not how I want to manage my health,

[00:14:42] Claudine Francois: I was just talking to a friend today. His wife's thyroid was unmanageable from Western medicine's perspective, and they took it out.

[00:14:49] Claudine Francois: So now she has to be on thyroid meds her whole life. And they don't really, she never really feels great either.

[00:14:55] Amy: Yeah, so I was given those options, you know, we, they said we'd try the [00:15:00] medication. I was allergic to the first medication they gave me and they gave me the next one and said, you know, if this doesn't work, you're either gonna have to have surgery or radiation. And I said, well, I don't want either of those, like, A, I don't need any parts of my body removed and B, I don't want any radiation near me.

[00:15:17] Amy: And, you know, we were at a stage, my husband and I, where we wanted to start having a family. So you can't do that when you're on thyroid medication. And you can't do that, Safely undergoing radiation, 

[00:15:30] Amy: and I just, I remember saying to her, you know, I'm, I'm gonna do everything in my power, on my end, outside of what, I will do what you tell me. But I want you to work with me when I say it's time to reduce my medication.

[00:15:41] Amy: We will sit down, we will talk, you're not just gonna tell me my blood work looks fine. I went, I printed off every one of those sheets that I went through every single day. One of those, you know, the markers with her and the results. And we talked about it and I, I'd brought in my little book and I'd compare.

[00:15:56] Amy: I made sure I was very informed. And every time I showed up, it was lower. It was lower. It was lower. And in this case, it meant better, better, better until. I was on the lowest dose. This was not six months later. She said, the minimum you're going to be on this before we adjust is 18 months. I said, that's not happening. And so before six months was up, I was on the lowest dose, and I said to her, I'm ready to go lower. I know that you don't prescribe lower, but will you continue to monitor me if I cut these tablets in half? And take an [00:16:30] even lower dose. I said, maybe it's placebo effect at that point. I don't know. But I'm ready to go.

[00:16:35] Amy: And she said, yes. And I was so lucky that, you know, this worked for me, right? This was what worked for me. And then I was off them.

[00:16:41] Amy: You know, and that's what we need more of. People to be, A, the patients to be more informed and take it in their own hands and understand. But the doctors need to enable that, 

[00:16:50] Claudine Francois: and I hope that it will get there because I feel like there, at least from my perspective, there's this swell of desire from people in general to want to have a more holistic health perspective to get more information from their doctors. Because what I am seeing, you talked about blood work. So I do these free lab consults, right?

[00:17:08] Claudine Francois: Where I have people send me their lab reviews or their labs. that are quote unquote normal,

[00:17:13] Claudine Francois: And we do a whole review. And the first thing I explained to them is, , there's this this range on the lab report, right? What is this range? Because this is what the doctors are using to tell you you are normal.

[00:17:23] Claudine Francois: And the range is basically the average of all the sick people who've taken this test.

[00:17:28] Claudine Francois: Right? It is the average of all these people who've taken the test. Most of them are sick because otherwise they wouldn't be taking the test. And the reason why the range is so wide is because the doctors are, you know, they're great at emergencies, 

[00:17:39] Claudine Francois: that's actually what the western medical field is designed for. It's designed for when you have a catastrophic emergency, we are, we got all the tools. Right? You break your arm. You have cancer. You have something that's like needs to be handled right now. We got this. And so they're waiting for you to get to the point in that, that lab range where you are [00:18:00] diagnosable.

[00:18:00] Claudine Francois: Now, if the ideal range is like way over on the other side and you have this little window, that's the ideal range. And if you're somewhere between the end of the ideal range and the beginning of the diagnosable range, you could be feeling like crap, but you're quote unquote normal. So that's what I call the window of opportunity.

[00:18:18] Claudine Francois: Where we can actually reverse the symptoms and help people feel better. So when I do these free lab reviews, I'm looking at that, that ideal window of these quote unquote normal labs, and I'm showing them this is trending towards, this is trending towards diabetes. This is trending towards hypothyroidism.

[00:18:36] Claudine Francois: I can see there's, there are inflammation markers going on. You might need to do a gut health workout because there's all kinds of indications that there's some, some kind of infection. You know, it could be, I don't know what it could be because I don't have that GI, but could it be leaky gut? Could it be parasites?

[00:18:53] Claudine Francois: You know, could there be some kind of microbiome or good bacteria versus bad bacterial imbalance? We won't be able to see it that directly, but the labs give us clues.

[00:19:03] Claudine Francois: It's kind of like, everything is pieces of a puzzle, and we're putting the, like one, normal doctors will just take a piece of the puzzle.

[00:19:09] Claudine Francois: They're like, this is my piece. 

[00:19:11] Claudine Francois: I handle this piece. I do not care about any of those other pieces. That's this doctor, and this doctor, and this doctor.

[00:19:17] Amy: Well, and you know what's interesting? So, my husband and I, we went to the doctor yesterday for a, when I had a few things that I wanted to talk about. But we weren't allowed to talk about all these few things because the appointment was only allowed to talk [00:19:30] about this thing. And when you're in the appointment, if you want to talk about X in an appointment, that's all you're allowed to talk about.

[00:19:36] Amy: You're not allowed to talk about anything else. So I was like, how is this a holistic approach? It's not. I mean, he's not a holistic doctor, but I thought how are you diagnosing a patient when you're not allowed to talk about a bunch of different things in the same appointment?

[00:19:52] Claudine Francois: It is really interesting because I've often had clients say to me, I had no idea these two things were related.

[00:19:58] Amy: Yeah, and how are you gonna know?

[00:20:00] Claudine Francois: Right, unless you start to connect the dots. You start to put the puzzle pieces together, you see the whole picture, and then you can see, oh, this tree is related to that tree. 

[00:20:08] Amy: A lot of work, like, so, I mean, someone like you, you know, if, if somebody's out there seeing a functional medicine practitioner, great, because you're doing that work. When I was doing the work, and I, I take my husband's health into my own hands, sometimes at his frustration, but, I mean, he, he's better for it.

[00:20:24] Amy: It, I took time off work to do this, to make sure I was informed, to learn, to educate myself. I mean, who can, how many people can do that? Or how many people want to do that? You know, I'm very interested in it. I'm very keen to know more and discover more. And I'm lucky enough to have space, or at the time, have space where I could take days.

[00:20:44] Amy: to look into this and to, to seek further answers, but everybody can't do that. And I think that's where functional medicine comes in, is all that work, you're getting everything you need, it's individualized health care, you're, you're being looked at holistically, but somebody's there to do it for you.

[00:20:59] Amy: [00:21:00] And, you know, who doesn't want that, right? Somebody else to do the work for us.

[00:21:03] Claudine Francois: well, yeah, especially when, cause the women, I mostly work with women and they're all very stressed out, high powered, busy, you know, they're, they've got all the balls in the air. They're doing all the things for all the people. 

[00:21:14] As you mentioned, it's just kind of like going back to accounting. 

[00:21:18] , you're going to hire a bookkeeper,

[00:21:19] Claudine Francois: Someone who's super interested in it, right?

[00:21:21] Claudine Francois: Plus they'll have a book. A lot of expertise and working with other people that they then have the knowledge and the experience to, to draw on to draw on past information, right?

[00:21:32] Amy: Yeah. Absolutely, I want to bring people back. So when I opened up the episode I mentioned we're gonna talk about medical gaslighting and how to avoid it and I know we've been talking about that, but I really want to break it down for people who are listening, you know What is medical gaslighting?

[00:21:48] Claudine Francois: that's a great question because how most people experience medical gaslighting is that they'll go and by most people, I mean, women. It's oftentimes women who go to their doctor and they say, I'm feeling really sluggish. I'm feeling really tired. I don't know what's wrong with me. I just don't have the same get up and go that I used to.

[00:22:06] Claudine Francois: I think my hormones are out of whack. Like something's just off. And the doctor will run their labs and say, Nope, you're fine, everything's good, and send them on their way. So they're basically being told what they are experiencing is not what they are experiencing. So that is what gaslighting is in general.

[00:22:22] Claudine Francois: But when it comes with a medical context, it can have serious repercussions. Because that means that a, the thing that they are [00:22:30] experiencing, those symptoms that their body is telling them, they need to pay attention to, is not being addressed.

[00:22:36] Claudine Francois: Right. And B, this has happened to several of my clients, and it's even worse is that then they go, sometimes they will go into surgeries and have things removed that did not need to be removed.

[00:22:48] Claudine Francois: And then you have what we call a vital void. You have a missing part of your body that your body then has to figure out how to compensate for. I couldn't even tell you how many people I know that I didn't realize this before I went into functional medicine. How many people are walking around without gallbladders?

[00:23:03] Claudine Francois: It's like nobody has a gallbladder anymore, only half the women have a uterus, you know, it's just like The doctor's just willy nilly pulling things out like as if it's nothing, you know If you pull a carburetor out of a car, it's not really gonna work the same, and so the the fact that this is happening so much it actually it gets my blood pressure rising Just you know, it infuriates me.

[00:23:29] Claudine Francois: I mean it's This work, it's very gratifying because I can, help these women, but it's also infuriating knowing that they went through all this to begin 

[00:23:37] Amy: Yeah. 

[00:23:37] Claudine Francois: they didn't have to go through this.

[00:23:39] Amy: And sometimes, you know, like you said, irreversible changes. You're not getting a new gallbladder. They don't replace those. Your uterus, 

[00:23:47] Claudine Francois: and they also don't tell you what to do once you don't have a gallbladder. They don't tell you, oh, well, you can't really eat a lot of fat. And by the way, you should probably have some bile salts or ox bile or some kind of bile replacement to help you when you do [00:24:00] eat some kind of fat because you're going to feel Not great, most of the time, they don't tell you, well, you have a full hysterectomy versus a partial hysterectomy.

[00:24:08] Claudine Francois: So if you have a partial hysterectomy, you still have your ovaries, you actually are technically still cycling. So you're going to still feel like you felt going through all the phases of your cycle before. You're just not having the bleed part. 

[00:24:20] Claudine Francois: So people don't even know. 

[00:24:21] Amy: which is the least of our worries, you know, of all of the symptoms during, you know, my menstrual cycle, the bleeding is not the problem, you know, yeah, it's, it's very disappointing. So what can people do, to stop being medically gaslit? 

[00:24:41] Claudine Francois: well, you touched on it a lot earlier, which is know your numbers.

[00:24:46] Claudine Francois: Really? So if it's, even if it's utilizing someone like me to help guide you, I mean, I recently had a person who she has the opposite of graves. She has Hashimoto's. . So she had been begging her doctor to run certain labs for her and he just wasn't into it.

[00:25:01] Claudine Francois: So she went to another doctor, she was having all kinds of hormone issues. , she was gaining weight. She was feeling super bloated, , she was tired all the time. She'd also had a hysterectomy. I said, what kind of hormones are you on?

[00:25:12] Claudine Francois: And she said, Oh, I'm on synthetic, you know, just regular. HRT, hormone replacement therapy. And I said, why don't you ask your doctor if you can get on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, BHRT. And she got him to run the labs that I told her to run. Cause if thyroid lab, most doctors will [00:25:30] run one marker.

[00:25:31] Claudine Francois: right, TSH. If you ask them to run a full thyroid panel, they, you might be lucky that they run four when there are really like nine markers. So she got him to run a full thyroid panel. She got on the bioidentical hormones and now she feels so much better. And she, this wasn't even an actual client of mine.

[00:25:48] Claudine Francois: This was just a woman I talked to. in a networking call, right? Like I just told her a few things and all of a sudden she's feeling amazing. So leaning on someone who has information, if you aren't able to figure it out on your own like you were, right? I mean, not that you can't figure things out. There's a lot of information out there.

[00:26:05] Claudine Francois: It's just knowing what information to trust.

[00:26:07] , was lucky. He eventually acquiesced because he was He was the right kind of doctor, right? He was a doctor that would normally handle hormones. But if someone goes to their primary doctor or let's say someone has a gut health issue and they're going to their primary and their primary doesn't know enough about gut health, then they have to go see a GI doctor.

[00:26:26] Claudine Francois: Actually, one of my clients, her GI doctor sent her to this last one where, it's just an, I don't even want to tell you how bad this surgery was, but it took her weeks and weeks and weeks 

[00:26:34] Amy: Yeah. 

[00:26:35] Claudine Francois: it, and they found nothing that they were looking for,

[00:26:37] Claudine Francois: They went to go in reverse they went to pull out cancer polyps they said that she had. And come to find out later, the surgeon actually looked at her chart wrong, and it was actually a gallbladder stone that she had, not cancer polyps, and they had to go, they had to cut from her cervix to her rectum.

[00:26:52] Claudine Francois: That's not a great place to heal. So she goes back to the GI doctor who originally sent her, I said, You need to ask him for a GI map, you know, stool [00:27:00] sample that tells us all the things.

[00:27:02] Claudine Francois: He didn't believe in them. He said leaky gut isn't real.

[00:27:07] Claudine Francois: And I said to her, okay, before 2000, a lot of doctors thought leaky gut wasn't real. And then there was a doctor who proved that it was real. And there was all this medical literature that proved that it was real. And they've done all of these scientific Things to show, it's real.

[00:27:23] Claudine Francois: So he obviously has not kept up in the last 23 years with what's happened in the medical field, , and she's in a very large urban area.

[00:27:32] Amy: Either that or he just doesn't want to believe it. , I'm going to reflect on my own experience here. When I first started having a period at the age of, I think, I was 12, I had a male doctor, he was my pediatrician, and I would faint from the pain. So this is not normal. I'm missing a week of school every month. My mom doesn't experience this, so to her this is not normal. And he says, you know what, she's a woman now, she's gonna have to learn to deal with it and toughen up.

[00:27:55] Claudine Francois: That is awful.

[00:27:56] Claudine Francois: The worst example of medical gaslighting right there. I

[00:27:59] Amy: . I don't get it.

[00:28:00] Amy: Your patient is sitting there in front of you telling you. And sometimes you're there and they can witness it. , and I know I'm reflecting a lot of my own experiences, but I want people to understand that when somebody tells you, a medical professional tells you that what you're experiencing is normal,

[00:28:16] Amy: these are not things that you need to take and believe from your doctor. You need to find someone else. Absolutely stand up for yourself.

[00:28:25] Claudine Francois: yes, please stand up for yourself because that is un, [00:28:30] I want to say it's unbelievable. Unfortunately, I've seen too 

[00:28:32] Amy: Yeah, 

[00:28:33] Amy: And you know what? Take a friend with you because, you know, you're, you're being gaslit. You probably have for years. You don't feel like you can ask questions. Take your loudest friend with you to your appointment,

[00:28:45] Claudine Francois: Absolutely.

[00:28:46] Amy: and preferably see another doctor, and I know that that's not always easy, and I really appreciate that.

[00:28:52] Amy: , so I know it's not that easy to just say, okay, Amy, yes, well, I'd love to see another doctor, but they're not available, but you've just got to reach out, you know? I don't know about you, Claudine, but, I know some functional medicine practitioners who offer services online and you can, maybe not across borders, but I'm sure within the States or within Canada, you can have those blood requisitions sent to a lab.

[00:29:15] Amy: You know, you have in home I know we have services that come in the home, take your blood and then they send it off to wherever. So I just want people to seek further, seek further options. And what do you have to say on that, Claudine?

[00:29:29] Claudine Francois: Yes. Please seek further options. There are actually functional medicine practitioners in most countries in the world. I know for a fact they're in Canada. I know for a fact they're in Australia. And if someone is in that area and wants to work with one specifically, I'm happy to connect them with someone.

[00:29:43] Claudine Francois: Because we have a network of people that I can reach out to. But yes, most of us do work online. So we can go cross borders. As a matter of fact, one of my labs is in Canada. So is one of the supplement companies we use. So there, it is a global world now, right? I mean, you, we even have [00:30:00] we even have guidance on different countries and which things you can send to

[00:30:03] Claudine Francois: different countries. Even some states like New York, there are certain samples they don't allow you to mail from New York. So they have to go to New Jersey

[00:30:11] Claudine Francois: And drop it off. So, and certain countries do the same thing. But yes, there, there are plenty of resources out there. If you're willing to look for them,

[00:30:19] Amy: How can people get in touch with you to kind of start that process or you know avail of your services?

[00:30:25] Claudine Francois: absolutely. Well, they can always go to my website, which is in good clean taste. com. And if you want, I can give you the link to the free lab review. And you can add that 

[00:30:35] Claudine Francois: to the show notes. Cause I'm happy to do that. I get, I geek out on it. Like I get excited

[00:30:40] Amy: Mm,

[00:30:41] Claudine Francois: about the free lab reviews.

[00:30:43] Claudine Francois: So like, why not? If you have labs and you want to know what they say.

[00:30:46] Amy: Yeah, wow, that's a great service. I encourage everyone to do that. Definitely. So I will share the links in the show notes and in the description of the YouTube video and the podcast episode, whether you're listening on Apple or Spotify. And Claudine, I really want to thank you for coming on today. for staying.

[00:31:02] Amy: You know, I hope I didn't take up too much of your time sharing my own stories, but I, I just really want to offer the audience things that they can kind of maybe relate to, or just a real life experience of this, these things aren't normal and you are right. You feel validated in, you know, your symptoms are real and there is help out there.

[00:31:23] Amy: You just need to find the right practitioner.

[00:31:25] Claudine Francois: And I think it's actually really important that we share our stories because you never know who it's going to [00:31:30] resonate with. Someone's going to hear that and think, Oh wow, I didn't realize that wasn't okay.

[00:31:35] Claudine Francois: I'm sure there were a lot of women out there who were told they're really debilitating periods were just normal.

[00:31:40] Amy: Yeah, unfortunately. Well, thank you so much again for joining and everyone who's listening. I hope that you found the content today valuable. Again, reach out to Claudine or myself. If you're not sure where to find the links again, they're in the description, they're in the show notes, and you can always comment on the YouTube video.

[00:31:59] Amy: If you're watching the video version of this episode. Thank you again, Claudine.

[00:32:05] Claudine Francois: Thank you so much for having me. It was so wonderful chatting with you.

[00:32:07]