Isabelle Amigues, MD, is a rheumatologist based in Denver, Colorado. She honed her expertise by studying in Paris, as well as at Columbia University in New York City. At age 40, she was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. A timely meeting with a non-traditionally trained practitioner taught her a different approach to disease, where she experienced the power of meditation, visualization, energy healing, and love. Her journey through cancer inspired her to learn more about these alternative techniques, and she now blends Western medicine and Eastern techniques into her practice at UnabridgedMD.
Dr Ritamarie
Joints, muscles, rheumatology is something that I don't know that is addressed as much in functional medicine as it should be or could be. People are in pain. People are struggling with pain. And a lot of times they're just given steroids. They're just given drugs. So we're here today to talk about a different solution.
We're here with Dr. Isabelle Amigues. She's a rheumatologist, and she's based in Denver, Colorado. She honed her expertise by studying in Paris as well as Columbia University in New York. At age 40, she was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer.
A timely meeting with a non-traditionally trained practitioner taught her a different approach to disease, and she experienced the power of meditation, visualization, energy healing and love. And her journey through cancer inspired her to learn more about these alternative techniques. And now she blends Western medicine and Eastern techniques into her practice at Unabridged MD.
Welcome today. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today.
Isabelle Amigues, MD (01:43)
Thank you so much for having me Dr. Ritamarie. Such a pleasure.
Dr Ritamarie (01:47)
You are so welcome. And it's a breath of fresh air when we can speak with medical doctors who have, like I said, seen the light, seen the light that what you learned in medical school was not the only solution to health problems, right? Like in medical school, you learned a lot about disease diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and then of course, drug approaches or surgical approaches to it.
And in a more Eastern philosophy, a more integrated philosophy, there's a lot more tools in your toolbox, right? And I wanted to talk to you more about that.
I know that you use a combination of the mind-body stuff, but you also use a dietary approach that I want to talk about as well that you found so useful. So share with us a little bit about how you work with people when they're coming to you as a rheumatologist.
How do you work with people who are coming in with whatever it might be, rheumatoid arthritis or a variety of other autoimmune diseases, and things that result in pain and inflammation?
Isabelle Amigues, MD (02:52)
Yeah, so first of all, thank you so much. And I really like to share this new perspective, because the goal is to prevent anyone from having to go through what I've been going through. So that's prevention. I'm big on prevention. And the second one is to help patients to get rid of whatever conditions they have, so that they are better after.
I was sharing yesterday with one of my patients, and she has rheumatoid arthritis that's pretty severe. But most importantly, I told her, we can get you to remission. Western medicine is very powerful. And so, I fully agree with how you presented my approach, which is I think that there is more to the Western world of medicine, and nutrition is definitely a huge part of this more.
And I think it's important to realize that to me, we combine them depending on how advanced a condition may be. And advanced may not necessarily mean in time, it might mean intensity.
And so I was telling this yesterday to this patient. I was saying, the truth is that every time we have a condition, we can see something positive out of it. And the goal is to get you to remission and at the same time, not lose the opportunity of learning what there is to learn from that experience. Right?
And you mentioned steroids.
Steroids are not great, because you don't want to have it long term. But the truth is that a rheumatologist can put anyone in remission at this point. It's different than a cure. It's remission. That is no more symptoms and no more inflammation in the body. And I think it's very powerful. Our Western medicine is very powerful. The issue is that if you don't change what's at the root cause of causing those issues, you may actually just develop something else, or you're going to flare again and so on. And so I'm on this belief that when something happens to us, we have to stop and look and learn. And when you mentioned my story saying that I had met a non-traditional practitioner? I'm going to call her a talk therapist. She's not a talk therapist.
But this is exactly what it did. And what she told me was don't see the cancer as an enemy, but see it as a friend who's here to teach you something. And that was a big light bulb moment of hold on. I've been looking at diseases this whole time as something that I need to get rid of for my patients. What if we could learn from them? And if you learn from someone, and if you're not in a fighting mode,
your chances of having peace are so much better, right?
Dr Ritamarie (05:06)
I want to stop you there, because peace, right? We talk a lot in medicine about the warrior model, right? Fighting disease, battling, winning the battle. And peace is something we all really strive for. I wish we had that in the whole world at large, more of that, right? So it's shifting perspective of creating peace in the body, not creating a battlefield.
Isabelle Amigues, MD (06:31)
Yes. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. I actually think I really like how you put it.
It's funny, because I had a TEDx talk where I say exactly this, which is the number of times you hear, he's battling cancer, he's battling depression, he lost his war on cancer, you're like, wait, hold on. It's not a war.
At the end of the day, the cancer cells, they were mine. I don't want them. I think I've done the work and yet they were mine. They had my DNA. And so fighting would have meant that I was fighting my own body when really what I wanted was to heal my body.
And so then let's go into the nutrition part.
So first, I don't like the word diet. Because I think that especially as a woman, I think I started my first diet when I was like 12, and I was super thin. It's ridiculous, right? But we live in a world where it was all diet everywhere, like this, like that. It's interesting, I'm French, I cannot hide it. And in the US, there's so many diets, right? Gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, carnivore, this, and that. And I was like, I don't understand at first. I was like what's going on? Coming from France where there's just one diet, like there's very rarely a vegetarian. But really in general it's one diet. And so I was like this is so weird. I'm not used to it and so the reason I don't like diet is that I think it tells us restrictions, and I don't think that that's the way to live life.
Our goal, and especially my goal as a rheumatologist, is for my patients to live a full life without even thinking of their condition, right? And the only time they're thinking of it is if they have to take a medication. Okay, fine, you know, not a big deal. But that's it, right? That they are able to skydive if they want, scuba dive if they want, golf, play tennis and so on. And so then, if I tell them, oh, you need to diet, you need to diet. No, that's not what it is.
What it is, is that everything you're putting through your mouth can be nutritious or can be pro-inflammatory, right? And it's funny, I had this, and it's very funny, if you think about it. Diet should be very easy to understand, but that's when you realize we don't really learn much about it in medicine, and I've done 17 years of training, and I can tell you I've had very little information on diet.
But I like nutrition, right? What's really interesting is that very often if you're talking about diet, you're talking about restriction. So people have this idea that I cannot eat this, I cannot eat that, this is not good for me, this is not good for my…, right? So I'm not going to take this, and I'm not going to take that. The issue is that then you restrict yourself instead of looking at what you can eat and that is actually nutritious.
So when I got diagnosed, I got diagnosed right before a trip to France for my midlife crisis. I was like, I'm done. I'm leaving the kids home, and I'm going, and I'm going back to my roots. And it was actually the best thing that could ever happen to me, because I got my diagnosis surrounded by my friends and my family in France.
And French people are funny, because they make fun of you. So it was very fun. It was just like, oh yeah, like Isa, you're fine. You're showing us how midlife crisis is, you're dealing with cancer. Like instead of being in a pitying way, they were just making fun of me in a very kind and loving way of you're fine. You're going to show us how it's done.
And it's very funny, at that moment, one of my friends started telling me about diet. And so nutrition. She was like, well, you eat a lot of processed food. And it's true, because I was eating easy made, already made food, right? So I was like, okay, but you know, whatever, like we didn't learn much about it in medicine. So it wasn't really what was on top of my mind. Then I take my flight back, and I stayed there for four days.
I take my flight back. It's funny, this is the moment where you're very vulnerable, and you meet really important people in your life. So this was on my mind, midlife crisis, going back to my midlife crisis, and now dealing with having to deal with this cancer, and I met a steward. It's a 10 hours flight back, so you have the time to meet people.
So I meet a steward, and we talk, and he tells me that his mom has brain cancer and that he's big on nutrition. And he tells me, I'm like you're the second person who's telling me about diet, about nutrition. And yet I don't want to live restricted. And he's like, no, it's about what you can eat. Have you looked at the food shop and looked at all the things that you don't know?
And look at the product section and see all the things that you may not even know exist. And I was like, okay, so then that was the second time.
And then literally the next day, so this is in one, so two days difference, and then another one day. There's another person I saw, a Qigong practitioner, and she told me again, she's like, you need to change your diet.
And I was like, okay, that's it. Like this is the third person telling me in less than three days, I need to change my diet, right? Like you believe, or you don't believe, but at one point you have three people from totally different areas of my life telling me to change my nutrition. And that's when I actually changed my nutrition. And it's big. I think that we don't realize how huge that is. And I'm going to just share my own realization.
I changed my diet. So I started eating veggies, and I would go to the produce section and every week I would be like, okay, I'm trying something new. So I tried turnip, I tried sunchoke, and I don't like celery, still. But there's a bunch of things, like kale. I think I had not tried kale then, right? So you're going to the produce section and you're like, I'm going to try things. I'm going to try new things.
You know, it's fascinating. I was undergoing chemo. I was dealing with stage four. That's like the scariest one, metastasis to other organs. That's really scary. Yet, if you ask my friends, they will tell you that I looked better than I have ever looked before. And I really think the reason for that is the diet, like the nutrition, because I was eating all the things that were good for my body.
It's clearly not the chemo that made me feel better. So let's be clear on this, right? And so I think it's a combination of doing what you need to do with the Western medicine world, and then taking what other things are so important, right? Mental health, being surrounded with love, and nutrition, for like just mentioning some of them, right?
And the nutrition is a huge part. And so in rheumatology, we know that there are things that are pro-inflammatory, and we know there are things that are anti-inflammatory. And because you're dealing with a lot of inflammation in the rheumatology world. So when you have rheumatoid arthritis, sciatic arthritis, and so on, you're trying to decrease that inflammation. And it is really important that whatever you're putting through your body is just as important as a medication.
And so I tell my patient not to do 100%, because I think that that's too restrictive, but to aim for 80%. There are weeks where you're going to aim for 90%. Some other weeks are going to be like 75%. But overall aim for 80% of nutritious food, if that makes sense.
Dr Ritamarie (14:43)
Wow. So that's a big awakening, right? And three people in a row coming across with it. And I don't like the word diet either, because again, it feels restrictive. I'm on a diet. Food plan, eating plan, something like that. Food choices. But I think what you're hitting at is the food part is so important. We're not saying, what herbs should I take to cure rheumatoid arthritis? What supplements? Although those can be an important part of your healing process.
But what we're looking at is how are you feeding the body? And if we're just putting in ultra processed foods, it doesn't really have any real ingredients. Then how does the body know how to rebuild? How does the body know how to control that inflammation, right? And again, which you mentioned in your process was it's not really getting at the root cause.
And yes, there are times we need medication to subside the symptoms. But when you get the symptoms under control, if you haven't addressed the root causes, then it's just going to come back, and it may not come back in the same place. It may come back elsewhere, which we see a lot in cancer.
We see that a lot in autoimmune disease. Another autoimmune disease pops up, even though the symptoms of whatever it is, rheumatoid arthritis or whatever, seem to be under control. You haven't really put the autoimmune process in remission. You've just pulled the battery out of the smoke detector that's telling you that there's a problem, and it pops out elsewhere.
And so I like the idea of not making it feel restrictive, like what you can't have. And I always start with what can you have, and how can we add a lot more of that, because then that's going to displace the Fritos, the Cheetos, and the other junk stuff that you might be having, because there's just no room. There's just so much you can eat. So if you set a goal for this is how much good, whole, fresh food we're going to eat in a day, there's not a whole lot of room left for the other stuff.
So tell me a little bit more about your approach. What kind of conditions do people come in to see you with, and where do you start?
You mentioned a lot of tools, right? You mentioned the diet, the food, you mentioned the mindset, you mentioned the energy. So where does it start?
Isabelle Amigues, MD (17:17)
I think you start where the patient starts. And I think we have to listen to our patients. They tell us where they want to start. And then it's about adding a little bit to it. The most important thing is to be kind to ourselves.
It's really interesting, this relationship we have with food, because on one hand, we feel guilty about maybe eating the Cheetos and all this. And it's not about that. It's the question of, do you really want the Cheetos? Is this really one time where you really want the Cheetos, or are you just governed by this need for high sugar, high salt that you're so used to and like the bag is open in front of you. It's really hard.
I always think if I'm going to eat one chip, I know I will not start, and I will not stop. So I have to basically give everything away and have only the one chip that’s left, right?
I think we start with kindness, kindness, understanding, realizing that the world is made for us to eat unhealthy food, because that's how they make money. It's all about money in the food world, right? And the more we eat Cheetos, the more the Cheetos company makes money, right?
And I think it's about understanding what's the goal, how can we improve our patients' lives?
I didn't stop sugar right away, because I like chocolate a lot, and that gave me a lot of happiness, right? And so it depends on what the patients are coming with. If I have a patient that's already having a very healthy lifestyle, then we have to work on something else. It might be stress, it might be guilt. Or, it's just that they really have a very inflammatory arthritis, and we need to take care of that, right?
There are some patients that will come and will say, I don't have a healthy relationship with food. And I think that moment where they say that, you have to say, okay, what do you mean by that? What's happening? And realizing very often, it's either because their whole family, none of them eat healthy. And if they don't make the burgers and the pasta, their family is kind of not angry, but almost, right?
If I start making kale, my kids usually are not very happy. And they know that if I'm making kale, there's not much for them. I can make pasta, but they better eat the pasta, because I don't want to eat the pasta.
I think that the other thing that I see often is this guilt. They are going to be really good with their diet. And then they eat something and then they just can't stop, because they feel so guilty. And it's kind of like this idea of, let me hide the evidence that I just had a cake with a ton of sugar, and you're like, no, like enjoy that, enjoy it. Just enjoy it, because you're at 80%.
I will say the food is important. I think even more important is loving ourselves
and this kindness towards ourselves. I think sometimes I feel like food is a hot topic that I don't necessarily address right away. I start talking about it, and I don't necessarily address it right there, because again, the goal is not to guilt our patients.
The whole goal is for them to realize that a better life is available to them and that they are empowered. And they have tools that they can use, and it's not just medication. And so it depends, right?
It's the stress level in their life. It's saying no, right? What better than a condition to say no when people are constantly asking things, right? Like, you need to do this, you need to do that. Can you take care of the grandkids? Can you take care of the kids? Can you take care …? Can you do the food? Can you do this, can you do that?
And what better way to say, “No, my arthritis is flaring up, I can't help you right now.” And so, right? And so then you're like, okay, hold on. Like, if I remove that, I'm removing your ability to say no.
So let's work on you being healthy and knowing how to say no, right? Because saying no is also saying yes to a better you, so much better for you. I think no is also a full sentence, And it doesn't have to be explained, and there is no reason to be guilty. But it's really hard, especially as women. It's actually very interesting. I think for men also, but my world is rheumatology. There's a lot of women, and it's especially hard for women, for sure.
Dr Ritamarie (22:26)
Well, that's a great perspective. And I think we're going to end with that, because I think it's so important for us as health practitioners to not be bombarding a person with what they need to do or stop doing, but also really looking more deeply as to what's going to happen if we take away their excuse for saying no, and teaching them how to be empowered to say no. I think it's important.
Isabelle Amigues, MD (22:52)
I wouldn't even say it's an excuse, because I'm so big on the word. And it's funny, because I'm French. But I think their ability to say no, because I think it's not an excuse, it's an ability. We can't take away their ability to say no. We have to enable them to say no without the need for this ability. And at the end of the day, my goal, how I see it, is to restore a balance in my patients so that they are feeling even better after this than they were before this, right? Like you're not coming back to where you were, you're actually going to a better place.
Dr Ritamarie (23:34)
Yes, I love it. So I appreciate your time here. I know you have a lot of things to do in a busy life and a busy practice. And I really appreciate this perspective to give our practitioners, this perspective of working with people where they're at, meeting them where they're at, really understanding the reason behind their condition, whether it be the root cause imbalances in their body, or the mental and emotional overload that they're dealing with.
And so key takeaways for me are working with people where they're at, working with their ability to say no to everything out there and say yes to themselves and their healing and their beauty and to be kind and loving to themselves, right? And treat food as what it is. It's signals. It's a message to the body to either function well or dysfunction.
So thank you so much for being here, and we'll have your links to your website, so people can go deeper and find out more about what you do. It'll be in the show notes.
And to all of you listening, as health practitioners, we owe it to our patients to help them to be the best that they can be, and to be kind enough to them to be the best that they can be, and to make food choices and lifestyle choices that builds the body and makes it stronger and more resilient.
So keep on doing what you're doing and check out our website and until next time, shine on.
What’s Inside This Episode? Why some people don’t respond to “perfect protocols” and what may…
What’s Inside This Episode? The sobering statistics that sparked these teens’ mission and why the…
What’s Inside This Episode? The distinction between the “disease team” and the “health team” and…
What’s Inside This Episode? What metabolic health really means and where it goes wrong The…
What’s Inside This Episode? Why fasting equals liberation The shocking connection between hydration, mucoid plaque,…
What’s Inside This Episode? How blind trust in the healthcare system can lead to missed…
This website uses cookies.