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Dr. Jessica Drummond, DCN, CNS, PT, NBC-HWC is the founder and CEO of The Integrative Women’s Health Institute and the best-selling author of Outsmart Endometriosis. Dr. Drummond has 22 years of clinical experience as a licensed physical therapist, licensed clinical nutritionist, and board-certified health coach working with women with pelvic pain, including endometriosis, vulvodynia, and bladder pain syndrome. She brings a unique, conservative, and integrative approach to supporting women to overcome hormonal imbalances and chronic pain conditions. She is a sought-after international speaker on topics such as integrative pelvic pain management, natural fertility options, optimal hormone health, menopause, and female athlete nutrition. Her clinical coaching programs and educational programs reach thousands of clients and professional students in over 60 countries. Dr. Drummond has a BA in Biology from The University of Virginia, a Master’s in Physical Therapy from Emory University, and a Doctorate in Clinical Nutrition from Maryland University of Integrative Health.
Dr Ritamarie (00:05.986)
Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re taking a deep dive into an important and often overlooked cause of chronic pelvic pain. Endometriosis is more than just a reproductive issue. It’s a whole body condition. Are you ready to learn how to truly support your clients or yourself with this complex condition?
So let me tell you a little bit about the special guest that we have who is going to explore this. This is her area of expertise. She’s the founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute.
She’s the best-selling author of Outsmart Endometriosis. She has 22 years of clinical experience as a licensed doctor of physical therapy, a licensed clinical nutritionist, and a board certified health coach. She works with women with pelvic pain, including endometriosis, vulvodynia, and bladder pain syndrome. So we have the right expert to talk to us about endometriosis. And I think it’s a topic that’s not well understood as a cause of pelvic pain. And a lot of women are going years and even decades undiagnosed and without a proper solution. So I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jessica Drummond.
Dr Jessica Drummond (01:46.963)
Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dr Ritamarie (01:50.498)
I’m super excited, and I know that it’s not something that, unless you’re a gynecologist, right? You don’t spend a lot of time in medical training, health coach training, physical therapy training, even looking at endometriosis. And for that reason, it’s often missed, it’s misdiagnosed and it’s under diagnosed. So let’s talk a little bit about, and some of the challenges in identifying endometriosis, how it presents and how we as health practitioners, as functional health practitioners, can do the right questioning and the right evaluations to be able to help people to identify.
Dr Jessica Drummond (02:29.523)
Yes. So very often endometriosis presents around pre-puberty to early puberty. That’s when often the first signs show up. Now, not all women experience signs that early. Sometimes even we’re seeing more and more women having their endometriosis kind of underlying genetic vulnerability being triggered closer to even perimenopause.
So an old myth was that endometriosis is an estrogen driven disease and thus menopause would cure it, if you will. And that is also not true. But the symptoms in early puberty, so around middle school, would be painful periods, which is a little tricky, because it’s not always pain with the cycle. It could be pelvic pain at other times, but painful periods is a common red flag.
Dr Jessica Drummond (03:28.667)
Also, this is a systemic disease. It’s not just related to the reproductive organ. So what endometriosis is, is there are lesions of tissue that are similar to, but not exactly the same, as the tissue and cells that line the inside of the uterus. So there’s this very old theory that has kind of stuck around, which has been disproven multiple times, but it’s that kind of retrograde menstruation.
So some blood and menstrual tissue kind of leaks out of the uterus, if you will, and lands sort of somewhere outside of the uterus on the pelvis and then creates these lesions. That’s not true. The lesions actually have been found as early as in utero. So women are essentially born with this. It’s got a genetic underpinning, but there’s quite a range of how severe and debilitating it can be.
We don’t entirely know what all of the factors are that can contribute to a worsening progression of endometriosis versus endometriosis that’s less symptomatic or less widespread. But if you think of it as these lesions that are growing out tissue that’s like intra uterine tissue growing outside of the uterus, you can think of it like a benign cancer, right?
It’s these lesions that are outside and in the wrong place. Now, the other common misconception is that endometriosis can be cured by hysterectomy, but that’s false, because by definition, these lesions are occurring outside of the uterus.
Dr Jessica Drummond (05:16.847)
So hysterectomy is not a cure for endometriosis. Now there is a related condition called adenomyosis, which is a very similar kind of lesion that is present in the intrauterine wall and musculature. So think about the uterus as like a sack, but it’s very muscular to be able to push out the baby. So if the lesions are kind of inside the uterus and inside that musculature, that’s adenomyosis or adenomyosis.
Dr Jessica Drummond (05:46.609)
That can be improved with hysterectomy. And it is sometimes difficult to figure out entirely what’s going on because both of these are surgical diagnoses. We don’t have a blood test, although there is more and more work being done on things like menstrual blood, genetic markers, but we still don’t have a clear, non-surgical diagnosis. It sometimes shows up on imaging like an intravaginal ultrasound or an MRI, but not always. So it can be ruled in by imaging, but not ruled out. So if you’re dealing with a younger woman, roughly 10, 12 up through 30s, you’re looking for things like period pain and chronic fatigue is very common because it’s essentially an autoimmune inflammatory condition that has some genetic underpinnings. So it’s a complex condition in and of itself. And there are a lot of comorbidities. So bladder pain is common, bladder urgency and frequency, vulvar pain, painful sex, pain at the vulvar vestibule.
Dr Jessica Drummond (07:09.749)
Pain can be anywhere. Endometriosis lesions have been most commonly looked for and found in the abdominal pelvic region. All over the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the bowel is very common, kind of behind the bowel, behind the uterus in an area called the pouch of Douglas, but all over the abdominopelvic region is most common.
Endo is very commonly found on the diaphragm, can be found on the lungs, has been found in joints, inside the nose, on the brain, kidneys, you know, these are lesions that can be anywhere systemically. So pain is a big red flag, but so are things like migraines, chronic fatigue. And then you have this cluster of sort of pelvic pain conditions, bladder pain, vulvodynia, and general menstrual pelvic pain or non-menstrual pelvic pain.
And then you have these sort of systemic comorbidities that I’m seeing more and more in my practice. I’m not sure if we’re seeing these more, because we’re more aware of them, or because our environment is becoming more challenging. So women who have this kind of vulnerability and endometriosis is the first of the chronic conditions they’re aware of.
A couple of other chronic conditions tend to co-present. First of all, other autoimmune diseases, things like Hashimoto’s, celiac disease. And in fact, some of the autoantibodies tend to decline for at least a year after endometriosis excision surgery. So there is some benefit from an autoimmune standpoint to removing the lesions. And we did publish a study back in 2016 that looked at using gut microbiome optimization and anti-inflammatory nutrition and supplements to prolong that sort of quieting of the immune system.
This study was done specifically in vulvodynia. I followed that patient for 22 months, so the year window may not be just like an iron-clad shot. We may be able to prolong it by taking care of the whole system. So we’ve got autoimmunity. We have histamine issues such as histamine intolerance or mast cell activation syndrome. We have dysautonomia, things like POTS.
I had a young client with endometriosis, I was just talking to a couple days ago. She has a new onset POTS now in the last six months. And then hypermobility syndrome, which again is underlying genetics. We’re seeing it more, and ME/CFS, which is myalgic encephalomyelitis and leads to this chronic post-exertional malaise type of deep fatigue. So the question is, is endometriosis triggering worse conditions? Are we picking them up more?
Or this is what I believe, and I’ve talked to many of my colleagues in this space, now that people have had multiple COVID infections, there’s this cross contamination of sorts of COVID and endo that endo is a vulnerability that triggers sort of a long COVID picture.
Dr Ritamarie (10:43.702)
Interesting. Lots to unpack here, Jessica. I kept thinking of all the questions I wanted to ask of you. So, a lot of us as teenagers, I remember my periods were debilitating. They were really painful. And what did they do? They gave me birth control pills, right? Nobody suggested looking at some underlying causes for it.
But you said migraines, you said joint pains, you said it can be anywhere else in the body. So how do we even diagnose? I don’t like to use that word, because it’s more of a medical word, because we want to put people’s label on it, but how do we even, when we suspect with those symptoms, there’s a lot of people that are going to go into that bucket of suspicion. How do we decide, determine, is it an endometriosis problem or is it something else?
Dr Jessica Drummond (11:38.963)
Well, this is challenging, and it depends a little bit on what kind of available resources your client has and what her goals are. So the good thing about endometriosis is that it’s rarely fatal, but it is very quality of life damaging. So when clients have these symptoms, especially if they have the related pelvic, bladder, or vulvar pain, one of the things I’m most curious about is when did it come on? Did you have digestive issues associated with it? And has there ever been a time where your cycle has kind of flared any and all of these symptoms? Because the hormonal shifts can even flare the other painful areas, not just the pelvis.
Same thing, fatigue can often be cyclical. So while the symptoms may not be cyclical the first few years as the menstrual cycle is kind of irregular, they will be sort of cyclical most commonly later on. And so that’s a red flag. And I think just like any period pain or any of these other comorbidities, I think a functional approach is foundational no matter what diagnosis we ultimately need.
So the question is like, when do we need a diagnosis? With endometriosis, a diagnosis can be very valuable for fertility preservation. So earlier excision surgery, so there’s a very clear specific type of surgery that’s done laparoscopically for endometriosis that’s done by surgeons who really thinking of it in kind of the same way a gynecologic oncologist would look at it, trying to take the entire lesion out, like the whole thing at the root. And those surgical techniques have improved dramatically. So I started my career in this in 1999, so almost 25 years ago. And I used to commonly see patients with 16, 20 surgeries in a lifetime.
Every other year, every year they would have another surgery, because what used to happen is the surgeons would just sort of burn off the lesions. It’s kind of like a cauterization.
Excision surgery, again, is laparoscopic and robotic, and they really try to kind of pull out the entire lesion. And that does work much better in the sense that I much less commonly see patients having more than one or two surgeries in a lifetime. So finding a very skilled surgeon is important. And then having surgery relatively earlier, you know, maybe not at 12, but early 20s, if possible, the earlier the better, kind of into the reproductive window if a woman is very dedicated to her fertility goals.
At the same time, surgery is not the complete solution because this is a full body inflammatory issue. And we also have identified certain gut microbiota, certain gut microbiome strains, that may potentially be related to this or may be caused by it. There’s still a lot of chicken and egg about the optimal gut microbiome. But healthier digestion and healthier immune function and kind of on top of all of that, healthier nervous system function, because just like every other autoimmune inflammatory disease, if a person is under chronic stress, even from dealing with the disease itself, that exacerbates the situation.
So I do think it’s important to have a conversation about getting kind of acquainted and finding a good surgeon. These people exist, but they’re relatively rare. You don’t want to have your neighborhood gynecologist do this. You want someone who does a lot of these surgeries all the time.
Dr Ritamarie (16:04.856)
That’s what they do. You said they’re trying to get the whole lesion, if it’s wrapped itself around the intestine or around the ovary, it seems like there’s a big risk of getting and damaging the organ that it’s attached itself to.
Dr Jessica Drummond (16:24.149)
Absolutely. It can be risky depending on how severe the expression and how much the endo has proliferated. And often even the skilled excision surgeons will bring general surgeons in to address the bowel safety. And again, if fertility is a big goal, we have to be careful of preserving the ovaries. So sometimes women will have egg retrieval prior to doing surgery, which is a little tricky, because then they have to fill that woman up with hormones, right, which can irritate the endometriosis.
So it’s always a very complicated conversation that has to center the woman and her goals. Also, these surgeries can be very valuable just for quality of life, which is very important, even if a woman has no fertility goals whatsoever. But again, whether we’re doing surgery for pain management or fertility optimization.
Like any other surgery, there’s lots of risks. When you’re thinking about surgery, to the subconscious, there’s a lot of stress to having surgery. So we want to go into surgery with strong, resilient nutrition, sleep, support, and a plan for post-op.
Movement therapies, lymph mobility, we just want the whole system as optimized as possible. And then the person feeling really positive about their surgery, really clear about the goals of the surgery, really clear about what the plan is after. Because even though it’s laparoscopic, it’s very normal for it to take six weeks for basic surgical recovery.
And then I always tell my clients between 3 and 24 months for complete recovery. Because, there’s a lot to unpack if a person’s had a chronic inflammatory disease for usually at least a decade by the time they’ve had the surgery.
Dr Ritamarie (18:26.296)
Wow. Interesting. So there’s a lot here. First of all, you said it’s usually a surgical diagnosis. Are you saying that a laparoscopy is performed to even see if this is the issue? Is that what you’re meaning?
Dr Jessica Drummond (18:55.637)
Correct. Although to be fair, like the surgeons that I tend to work with are pretty skilled at figuring out who is likely to have endo. They rarely go into surgery and not find it.
Dr Ritamarie (19:09.548)
Right, so they’re not just randomly poking around and going, no.
Dr Jessica Drummond (19:11.909)
No, you don’t want that. You want someone who’s pretty sure. I mean, and not to say that’s not done, because it can be. People can kind of just go for an exploratory laparoscopy. I don’t recommend that. I think you want to do the earlier homework, get your body ready, interview a couple of different surgeons, feel really clear that they have a strong suspicion that endometriosis is likely.
Think about your goals, whether it’s around fertility, quality of life, pain management, there’s lots of good reasons to have surgery. Then go into the laparoscopy, they will do that. They’ll kind of look for it. It’s a diagnosis and treatment then at the same time. And then it’s just less trauma that you have to go through.
Dr Ritamarie (20:01.934)
Absolutely, absolutely. So most of our listeners are generally practitioners of some sort, holistic practitioners, whether they be naturopaths, MDs, nurses, health coaches, chiropractors, physical therapists like yourself. And so when we’re working and working up a patient, that may be part of the picture, right? They have these debilitating periods, and they’re not thinking anything beyond that.
And I have fatigue and I get migraines, right? So I just want to kind of give everybody a sense of the best way to approach that. Obviously we all do the foundational stuff and get the nutrition and the sleep and the lifestyle and the stress and all that. And we do some functional testing. And at what point, should we be considering getting all those foundations? Does getting all those foundations in order help, in your experience, with reversing the endometriosis.
Dr Jessica Drummond (21:04.981)
It may. There is not a lot of research about actual reversal of lesions, but there are a few things that have shown either stability or reversal of small lesions, and not every case of endometriosis is progressive. So we can sort of stall it, if that makes sense. And there certainly are, I’ve had many clients who, because this is an elective surgery, and it’s rarely life-threatening. There are times when it is, when we’re talking about lung endometriosis, if women do have shortness of breath related to cyclical, or at the same time as their pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, head pain, diaphragmatic pain, the lung endo and more of the extra pelvic endo, often are the more serious life-threatening cases.
Dr Jessica Drummond (21:55.496)
But because most of the time, this is an elective surgery, there are some women who either choose never to have surgery or give it a year or two of really kind of working on optimizing their gut microbiome, anti-inflammatory nutrition, really changing their relationship. That could be a huge shift in their life. Like their relationships with stress that may be triggered by their job, which they may completely change.
They may move. Or maybe they love their job, they love their family, but they don’t have a lot of tools and practices that they’re doing consistently for stress resilience and learning to navigate pain. Consistently exercising can be a really valuable form of trauma release and of building physiologic resilience.
We absolutely could reasonably spend a few years, even. I’ve had clients decide, they didn’t want to do surgery. They wanted to spend a year or two trying to get pregnant first and then consider surgery after. And some of them had gone on to have surgery and some never had surgery. So it’s not a requirement, but it just can be valuable in a lot of cases.
So we’re thinking about a couple of key things when we’re working with endometriosis. First, we’re going to put into place the detoxification support, the immune support, the gut microbiome support, the digestive function support, nervous system regulation, and, immune balancing, if you will, because we don’t want the immune system overactive or underactive. And then hormones are interesting, because for many years, it was this myth that endometriosis is an estrogen dominance or an estrogen driven disease.
That’s not true. There was a great study that came out in 2018 out of Belgium that showed that endometriosis lesions can be upregulated in estrogen receptors. Some can be upregulated in progesterone receptors, some in both and some in neither. And so we can’t really try to manipulate the hormones to impact the lesions, because the same woman could even have all four of the different kinds of lesions.
And the only way you would know is after they’ve been removed, and if the surgeon had them put through histology, which they don’t usually do unless you ask about that, or if they’re doing a research project or something. So we want to optimize hormone health in general. And this is where things get a little complicated in perimenopause, but I want to go back for just a second and talk about how can we stabilize or maybe even unwind the severity of the lesions and the progression of the lesions, and maybe even reverse endometriosis at some level or at least stop it in its tracks.
There are a couple of nutrients that have been found to do this. Pycnogenol is one. There’s another great study that came out just about two years ago, maybe even less than that, on N-acetylcysteine being given at 600 milligrams, three times a day, three days a week, for three months. It actually did better if it was pulsed like that.
And then there’s a machine called the HoCatt, which is basically like ozone through the skin. I believe it’s combined with red light. That also has had some really interesting results for endometriosis that has some peer reviewed data on it. So I think there are some of the things that we would utilize.
Are we dealing with viral or pathogenic triggers? Are we dealing with just chronic inflammation, that combined with certain genetic underlying, that’s like the person’s Achilles heel, if you will. And then similarly, because the ovaries can be very stressed by endometriosis in these patients, we really want to do a high antioxidant diet, CoQ10, alpha-lipoic acid, NAC, we’ve already talked about, sometimes glutathione, to really support egg quality.
If you have done any fertility episodes, the more we can support egg quality in these patients, even if they’re going to do egg retrieval younger, their eggs can be a little bit accelerated from an aging standpoint. So we want to really support egg quality.
Dr Ritamarie (26:41.09)
Wow, a lot to unpack. So you said that they’ve discovered it? How do they know that it’s developing prenatally that some people are born with it?
Dr Jessica Drummond (26:51.133)
In female fetuses, studies have been done showing endometriosis, even in female fetuses who did not survive, but yeah.
Dr Ritamarie (27:00.342)
Okay, wow, wow. And so what else? So is that a large percentage of the people who go on to have it?
Dr Jessica Drummond (27:06.549)
About 9% of the female fetuses in that population were found. And in the normal population of how many women actually have endo, it’s about 12%. So it’s pretty stable that there’s a genetic underpinning. And it definitely runs in families. So if your daughter has endo, and you had painful periods, like, I maybe didn’t think of it.
Think about how few generations we are from when women were allowed to really say anything about their pain, right? So, your daughter, if you have a Gen Z or something like that, daughter, a daughter in her 20s or even teens, I think that’s Gen Alpha now, they may be more comfortable talking about this kind of thing because it’s much more common on social media.
And what I’m seeing more is that we’re seeing women in perimenopause who are like Gen X or young baby boomers who didn’t have infertility, or at least it didn’t stop them from having babies. They may have had multiple miscarriages. They may have had challenges with their fertility, but at some point they had daughters, and their daughters are now showing endo. The likelihood that the mom or an aunt or a grandmother, someone had endo is very high. It’s like 40, 50%.
It’s just that up until very recently, it was running in families, right? Everyone in our family has painful periods, like welcome to the club. It didn’t actually help you get a diagnosis. Does that make sense?
Dr Ritamarie (28:42.712)
Right, exactly, exactly. Absolutely. It totally makes sense. So I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say, so we have somebody who has that genetic tendency and they’ve developed it in utero and baby is born, and they have a mom like you or I, who raises that kid on healthy food and healthy lifestyle and et cetera, et cetera. Is the likelihood of that person actually developing a problem with endometriosis much lower than the average population?
Dr Jessica Drummond (29:15.273)
The answer is we don’t know. There are no studies that have really looked at that. And I think the other problem is that even if that daughter, if you will, eats a better diet and has better stress management, one thing we’re seeing more of in the last five years or so is women in perimenopause presenting with sort of new onset endo symptoms. And so I think we have to look at the environment as well. So chronic stress is at a very, very all time high. We also have this new pathogen that pretty much everyone has dealt with. It’s been interesting among my colleagues, we have seen multiple people with endometriosis, the only symptom of COVID being an endoflare.
Dr Jessica Drummond (30:10.707)
They get the back pain, the pelvic pain, and then they might, a couple of days later, start coughing or have a little cold, and they had COVID. So COVID is not great for endo because COVID, of course, is a brain and vascular inflammatory disease. And so if we’re seeing it triggered, also people that most commonly have long COVID are women in their mid to late 40s.
So you’re having perimenopause, you may have had endolegions all your life, but maybe they were small, or they weren’t bothersome, or you did all the right things from a nutrition lifestyle standpoint, but now you have the stress of the hormonal shifts, the stress of life in the 2020s, right? And the stress of maybe aging parents and teenagers and the regular stresses of midlife.
And then the stressors of new environmental pathogens. So it’s not just the pathogens. I had one client whose pain was almost completely eliminated. We did all the things, but the final step was stopping wearing plastic flip-flops. So exposures to Xenoestrogens, which are increasingly dramatic, right? Like water.
Plastic water bottles, plastic flip flops, plastic exercise clothes. Think of how many micro-class plastics are in people’s leggings and stuff like that now, right? That is very disruptive to a neuroendocrine-driven inflammatory disease. So we have to be thinking about the environmental pressures that I do think are accelerating in the last few years.
Dr Ritamarie (31:57.012)
Absolutely, absolutely. So it’s the whole, you know, the whole bucket, right? The stress bucket and how full it is and how much that’s going to be expressed, kind of like the stuff that we as functional practitioners deal with all the time, right? So whether we have evidence or studies that show, hey, if you reduce the exposures and you do the diet and you reduce the stress, et cetera, it’s going to reduce it. We may not know it from a study, but we know it from a perspective by knowing how the body works and how we’ve helped people over time.
Dr Jessica Drummond (32:37.789)
From an experience perspective, I would agree that maybe we can’t stop someone from having the underlying vulnerability of endometriosis, but can we improve the expression of their case, making it minimal in terms of impact, in terms of symptoms, in terms of fertility?
I do think the potential is there. I think we have a lot of skills to be able to, just because if we’ve seen these studies even in the last couple of years around things like antioxidants being very, very helpful, identifying certain gut bacteria that when treated directly reduce the risk of endometriosis.
So I think our full body systems optimization approach has the potential to stabilize, minimize, and possibly reverse or even keep someone from actually expressing endometriosis, I absolutely believe that potential is there. I think the challenge is that while we have those tools, and we have that understanding, now to some extent, actually executing it in the sort of toxic, stressful world that we live in is tough.
Dr Ritamarie (33:58.166)
Well, this has been fascinating. And I just want to close with just a little personal background as to how did you get into this as a physical therapist? It’s not a typical specialization, so to speak, as a physical therapist and what prompted you to write your book?
Dr Jessica Drummond (34:18.143)
So I started my career back in 1999. I was an athlete as a kid, and I always thought I would do sports medicine, physical therapy, which I did at first. I did sports medicine and orthopedics, and a lot of hands-on manual therapy. I was working with a woman who had a shoulder injury, because she had breast cancer surgery. Then I started working with women with back pain who were pregnant and wanted to keep exercising.
And that kind of dropped me into the tunnel of women’s and pelvic health. And so early in the 2000s, there is a subspecialty of physical therapy called pelvic health, because we do work with pelvises of all genders. But because the pelvis can’t really be separated from the rest of the body and has so much impact from a hormonal perspective, and neurological. How many women hold their stress in their pelvises, in their jaw?
There’s a lot of orthopedic and neurologic interconnectedness with this. And so I just got really interested in working with women in general, working with pregnant women. I worked for several years at a maternity hospital, which I loved. We got to work with women in all stages of pregnancy and postpartum and new babies. It was just like a really fun place to work, but with a lot of complexity though. And so just professionally, I was very interested in it.
When I started it, I had no children. I don’t have endometriosis myself, but it was an aligned specialty with the kind of work that I like to do. And then the reason I became so interested specifically in endometriosis, and other chronic pain and chronic conditions, it’s really helped me over the years to work with really complex chronic patients.
We now have a program called Menopause Solution, mostly because women know they’re in perimenopause or menopause, but very few people are also addressing the iceberg underneath that I know you address. It’s not just that you need an estrogen patch. It’s that you probably have many other things going on.
So in my 25 years of experience, I got really interested in pelvic pain, because especially in the early 2000s, there were just not enough tools. Like I said, women were addicted to opioids. They had terrible surgical outcomes and in physical therapy, there is a manual subspecialty around pelvic pain. So I began to develop that professionally and teach, and I’ve been doing it for a long time now.
Dr Ritamarie (37:09.26)
Wow. This has been so eye opening. And I’m sure our practitioners listening are going, yeah, how many of these people that I am dealing with or have dealt with in the past were actually suffering with endometriosis that wasn’t diagnosed. And like I said earlier, I’m not a big fan of needing a diagnosis, we need to put people in a box because that usually puts people in a protocol, a cycle of this is the protocol for that. And people are people, and we have to look at all of the factors. So how do people stay connected with you if they want to look further and and your book, talk a little bit about your book?
Dr Jessica Drummond (37:47.699)
Yes, so the book is Outsmart Endometriosis. You can get it on Amazon. My publisher actually went out of business over the pandemic, but you can still get it on Amazon, a Kindle copy, or feel free to reach out to me, and we can make sure you can get a copy. And you can reach out to us anytime through our main website, integrativewomenshealthinstitute.com.
And if you’re struggling with your own chronic illness issues, hormone issues, there’s a little button right on that page that says menopause solution. So that’s where we work directly with women to heal their own bodies all the way under the iceberg, all of the different conditions.
Dr Ritamarie (38:31.382)
All of the different pieces that are dealing with it. I always show an iceberg picture with the little top and then all the other stuff. And the top might be just the presenting symptoms that we don’t realize are actually affecting every organ in the body. One of my biggest things that I talk about that way is blood sugar imbalance. So you’re on a roller coaster and you know, that’s here. And what’s happening in your lungs, your heart, your kidneys, et cetera, et cetera. We really need to take those symptoms, the presenting symptoms, not just at face value, but look at all the underlying things that we can address as functional practitioners. And thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you, Jessica, and we’ll talk to you again another time.
Dr Jessica Drummond (39:14.431)
Thank you so much.
Dr Ritamarie (39:20.866)
So for those of you listening in, know that we are the future of healthcare, that we’re putting the care back into healthcare. We’re looking at underlying causes of symptoms that present rather than just the outdated and archaic approach to just suppress the symptoms and hope for the best. We know that that’s what leads to long-term chronic illness. So I’ve dedicated my life to this, and I know Dr Jessica has as well and other people that we bring on, because we’re here to change the paradigm of health care, and put the health and the care back into the word health care.
So if you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, just visit our site at inemethod.com and you can learn all the strategies for getting the foundations balanced and doing all the lab testing and knowing what to do to help people to truly get to their causes and get well. So together we can continue the movement to reinvent this whole system.
And until next time, shine on.
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