In this episode, we talk with Dr. Sandy Hilton about what pain is, how it works in our body, and what we can do to manage it.
I promise we are not a broken record player, our rights are just constantly under attack. We’re covering another case of corrupt groups putting not only our lives but others in jeopardy as well. That’s right! Targeting uterine healthcare has turned into a problem for those even without a uterus. In an attempt to ban a certain medication used in abortions, this group failed to acknowledge that, like most medications, this drug can be used to treat more than one condition. These sinister groups are becoming bolder and bolder in an attempt to keep proper healthcare from our lives. They’ll have to keep on trying! We are keeping our rights and our bodies taken care of.
Pain is something uterinekind is definitely familiar with. From periods to chronic conditions, it is so extremely common for us to live with pelvic pain for the majority of our lives, yet our pain constantly gets dismissed.These conditions can heavily impact the way we view ourselves and handle our pains which is why our guest is sharing her incredible knowledge on all things pain. Dr. Sandy Hilton chats with us about what pain is, how we can control it, how pelvic pain works, and what you can do for some relief. Interested in learning more? Check out Why Pelvic Pain Hurts co-written by Dr. Hilton!
Lastly, we end on a high note from New Guinea. Sometimes you need to get away from the rest of the world…for 140 years!
Thanks for listening, learning, and being you. And join us back here every Tuesday for all things uterus, in service to you, uterinekind.
Carol: No one has a right to judge your pain. Your pain is real and it's not your fault. I'm Carol Johnson and this is Hello Uterus.
Today we're joined by Dr. Sandy Hilton, a pelvic pain physical therapist who has graciously taken time to share with us answers to questions that we for sure do not get the time or opportunity to ask in most consultations. But before we head to her gorgeous therapy studio in Chicago, it's time for uterus in the.
If I don't break things during this uterus in the news segment, consider it a great exercise in self-control because you're about to find out. Mifepristone is one of two medications used in a medication abortion. It's also referred to as the abortion pill. It blocks progesterone, a hormone that is require.
In order to sustain a pregnancy throughout time, and we all know this, there has been in place a standard medicating before operating, right? You have to do a medical therapy before you can do a surgical therapy. And we're like, no, we don't wanna take birth control pills anymore. No, we don't wanna do this anymore.
And the, and doctors are like, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. You need to follow the rules, right? So for many conditions, Not a condition, a procedure that treats many conditions.. It's a multitasker, right? It's a multi-tasker.
We're often not allowed to skip over the medicating portion, right? We have to go with the medical therapy, even if we don't want it, use it and we have to follow these rules, right? So amazing how sometimes rules can just be like melted and, destroyed and, anyway, so you're experiencing a spontaneous abortion.
For an example, the protocol might be depending on your unique situation, for sure, medication before, say a, D and C, or you need to terminate a pregnancy in the first several weeks for whatever the reason Mifepristone will be one part of that two part medical therapy that you use to terminate the pregnancy.
This drug has been safe and legal in United States since the FDA approved it about 20 years. In 2019, the FDA approved the first generic form of Mifepristone following a review of the evidence that medical management of abortion is a safe, effective way to end pregnancy, and that this drug should have a generic version.
And with the arrival of Covid, Mifepristone was. Able to be mailed to you so you didn't have to go into a physician's office or to a pharmacy in person to receive this all very good productive things, right? To take care of people's health in a way that is easiest for them and most accessible. But lymph ausone isn't just used for medicating.
Abortion. Caroline Hopkins of NBC News wrote a piece back in June on the hellscape, created by the reversal of ROE specific to clinical trials involving Gulf War veterans. These trials are now in danger of being shelved because of the potential for a federal ban on the fone. So one of the trials that she's running is, it has to do with, a a lot of these conditions that people came back from the Gulf War with, and the, feeling is that the exposure to the chemicals and the burn pits and things like that created a wide variety of problematic chronic conditions and cancers.
Are responding to or that may respond to treatments like Mifepristone Right. Which is fascinating, isn't it? Because not a doctor here, not a research scientist, but I am connecting the dots on how like burn pits and chemicals and all that stuff seems to be, really disruptive to our hormone system. You can get where I'm going, right?
And that there are a wide variety of drugs that can be used. To help protect our bodies as a result of exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals. Anyway, having too much cortisol circulating in your body can contribute to a bunch of illnesses and syndromes and conditions, and the ausone provides a way to block the receptors cortisol needs in order to act on the variety of systems in our.
At a slightly higher dosage than the one approved for abortion. If Apress Stone is also FDA approved to treat Cushing Syndrome, a condition involving excess cortisol, so here we have an approved drug that can be deployed to treat other conditions, and if outlawed abortion and other conditions like Cushing Syndrome won't be able to benefit from that approved drug.
They didn't think this through , they didn't think this through probably because it was never their intention to, either improve or minimize the disruption to female healthcare. not at all their question at all. Hi. It is really, really shocking when you sort of pull back and you take a bird's eye view of this and you, take the time to consider how many problems are going to unfold from this decision.
like we're just, we are just realizing the myriad of issues that are gonna crop up both issues that people are experiencing in ER rooms and in doctor consultations across the country, but also in our research laboratories, like they need any more difficulties to deal with the future of our species relies upon what researchers discover in their laboratory.
And it's just incredible to me that a federal ban could end up making that, take away that benefit to that research end. That research, much like a federal ban on cannabis, did not allow for any federally funded research of cannabis. What a wasted opportunity. It's just ridiculously, it's just ridiculous.
Powerful people saw abortion as a wedge. One that they could hijack and use to make themselves look is if they care about life, but how can they care about life when people are dying as a direct result of their actions? And it doesn't stop at overturning Roe. We know that it's not gonna stop at overturning roe.
It continues with challenges to access. To drugs like Mifepristone and it will also make it so much more difficult for physicians to provide excellent, modern, gold standard care to their patients, like these people that are running this. This quest to force us back in time, our living in the 15 hundreds, where one didn't have to consider the complexity of today's health.
You make a decision in the 15 hundreds, it's gonna take five months just to get it from the city out to the villages. Like here. You make a decision and it's instantly implemented, and then the systems that it impacts begin to shake under the weight of that new decision. In this case, the repeal of Roe, and those systems are shaking.
They are shaking. It's, boy, it's not good, but I'm about to introduce the next level of insanity to you and I, I wish I could just say that this is like, a joke. It's like Saturday Night Live or something, but it's not. and we need to know, we need to be aware of what's going on.
And I get that it's so hard to keep up. So hopefully this information is helpful, even though I'm sure it is not going to be.
Alliance defending freedom, , I can't even with that name. It's like, aye. Ya, ya. Anyway, I. They're a conservative group, as if I needed to say that, that has been involved in anti-abortion litigation, and last Friday, November 18th, . They filed a lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas on behalf of four anti-abortion medical organizations and four doctors who had treated patients with the drug mere.
The suit also named the Health and Human Services Department as a defendant. The suit claims that the FDA lacked the authority to approve the drug , which is hilarious, and B, did not adequately study the medication and C that the drug is. Okay. More than half the abortions in the United States are performed using Mifepristone
Mifepristone has like a, like a spotless safety record. like if, if they're going on that claim and they were in like a legitimate court of law, it would be dismissed. we gotta pretend like it has a chance to succeed because we've seen what happens when we don't treat these ridiculous threats seriously.
So I just wanna read, a quote, from the lawsuit and then a quote from a senior council at Alliance Defending Freedom.
The FDA failed America's women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States. I'm sorry, what are these people high it's like they just put ludicrous sentences out there and then just expect that like we can't actually do anything with them because it's total gaslighting.
And then we'll be in this like state of chaos trying to figure out like, are they high or are we high anyway? No, the FDA did not put politics over science. They actually studied it pregnancy is a life threatening condition.
Okay? Pregnancy is not all bon bonds and eat as much ice cream as you want. Put your feet up and everyone gets like fuzzy slippers and, soft little things to sit on. No. That's in fantasy land. That's on like, celebrity blogs and on shows like the Kardashians. I mean, pregnancy is so, taxing on the body.
The Kardashians actually like hired people to be surrogates for them to have babies. I mean, like, this is so ridiculous that people consider. Pregnancy to be this walk in the park. So anyway, pregnancy is a life threatening condition. Illnesses result when pregnant people can't be treated with modern life saving care.
So then, yeah, yeah, it actually does result in life threatening illnesses. But before life, life-threatening illnesses result, the condition itself of pregnancy is a life-threatening condit. And in the United States, more so than virtually any other, country in the world, our maternal mortality rate for pregnancy is pathetic.
So, Julie Marie , just Julie Marie Blake, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Council, wants to school us on the clinical aspects of pregnancy. And this is a quote.
I would like to have her on this show, but see that is, that's like a line I'm not gonna cross because then you all are gonna see a side of me that I would prefer to just, only be seen in the gym or like when I'm climbing a mountain or something. Here's what Julie Marie says, pregnancy is not an illness and chemical abortion drugs don't provide a therapeutic benefit.
They end a baby's life and they pose serious and life threatening complications to the mother. Oh, honey , come on, willfully ignorant of the common occurrence of spontaneous abortion, which if not complete, may endanger the life of the pregnant person. This happens all the time. Julie, Marie, all the. These people, chemical abortion drugs don't provide a therapeutic benefit.
you wanna make a bet on that, Julie Marie. You wanna talk to the person who's bleeding out in a bathtub because they have an incomplete, spontaneous abortion. Abortion is the thing the body does. Julie Marie, you wanna talk to that person and find out if they might, realize a therapeutic benefit from taking a drug that you want to take out of society, that you want to make a legal
man. I'm not a day drinker, but I swear I would grab a cocktail. I would grab a cocktail to read you this list of those supporting this ridiculous lawsuit. These are the people that Julie Marie Blake is representing. Hold tight. I'm, I'm not kidding.
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Hmm. American Association of Pro-Life. Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I mean, what pro-life, obstetricians and Gynecologists. Like what does that mean? What the, does that.
So that means that if I'm experiencing an incomplete abortion, you're just gonna let me bleed out and die. Cuz you're pro-life. third organization, the American College of Pediatricians. And then finally, Oh, I didn't even know these guys existed. Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
What? The Christian Medical and Dental Association. I mean, are you kidding me?
I just can't even. the cool thing is that this lawsuit, it's not gonna succeed cuz we're not gonna let it succeed. And hopefully Julie Marie Blake will learn from her mistake and decide that she's gonna go and repent and she's going to, I don't know, drive, . Home abortion kits door to door and hand them out.
Do something productive. Okay. With your life, because we live in 2022 where we understand a lot more about our body than they did in the 15 hundreds, and we have medications and surgeries and all kinds of things that we can take, take advantage of. Even though they're ridiculously expensive and far, and, and insurance companies make far too much freaking cash off of all of this, but you, you, Julie Marie Blake, and your your ridiculous little lawsuit, it's gonna fail and you're not gonna take this drug outta circulation.
And you should go back to school and learn a little bit about biology. Goodness. Okay, I'm gonna go take three cleansing breaths and then we're gonna be back with Dr. Sandy Hilton.
Carol: I'm so excited to bring today's guest to you, Dr. Sandy Hilton. Sandy graduated with a master of science and physical therapy from Pacific University, and she received her doctor of physical therapy degree from Des Moines University. Sandy is co-authored an amazing book, super helpful called Why Pelvic Pain Hurts and.
People who are experiencing pelvic pain utilize this book. And also physicians and other therapists utilize this book, to help their patients. She's also an instructor and speaker on treating pelvic pain for both professionals and for public education around the world. And she's the founder of Entropy Physiotherapy, a physical therapy clinic that is so gorgeous.
I wanna grab my bed and all my dishes and stuff, and I wanna set it up in your clinic and make it my house. How's that? Can we, can we do that, Sandy?
Sandy: well, you would need a shower in your own bathroom and a washer and dryer. Otherwise, yes, , we have a,
kitchen. Yeah. Little Details,
Carol: out. Excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. we appreci. your, wisdom that you're gonna share with us. And we appreciate learning about pelvic health from someone who stays on top of the latest research. So I wanna start with something that I think, we are all desperate to have the world's greatest comeback to, and it's that phrase, it's all in your head.
As a patient that feels so dismissive and gross, and it's gaslighting, but it's also dismissive of science. It suggests that the head or the brain is separate from the rest of the body. So can we start with giving people a classic response to the phrase, should they hear it? It's all in your head.
Sandy: Oh, if I'm being irreverent, it would be yes, cuz that's where my brain is. But
Carol: Good one.
Sandy: no. I like, I like what you're, that dismissive point is true because it also, it's like, it's not even acknowledging how amazing we are as a whole person where we have not just little bits of us, but everything works together. So we need our brain to be able to know where our hands are and how to use them, but we can't not understand all of the things that happen in.
So it's always both of it and our consciousness and our thoughts and our expectations. So it's just that comment isn't just dismissive of the pain you may feel or the problems you're having. It's dismissive of you as a, as a more than just your parts person. so
Carol: right. An integrated system.
Sandy: like, yes, we need our brains and thank goodness so you'd never be able to drink a cup of coffee.
But we aren't just that and we aren't just the bits of us we're more than that. which is both fabulous and challenging when it gets a little off.
Carol: Yeah, absolutely. so how does the brain and the body communicate around and about pain?
Sandy: I would love to have a very easy, accurate, defensible to everyone answer to that question, but that's almost the question of, you're really asking is what is the state of pain in a conscious person? you have to go into philosophy to really get, very far in that discussion because we are talking about consciousness and meaning and expectations, all of which appear to be at least in part, driven by things like your amygdala and your hypothalamus and the retina activating system, and all of these parts of what lives in the space inside our skull, but also communicates through the spinal cord and out to every little nerve in you.
in these. , non-linear, fabulous. Everything's happening at one time. Communication systems that turn responses up or down. and we don't even have to think about 'em, which is great because they, we couldn't exist if we had to consciously do a lot of the things that just happen inside of us, and around us.
So how does the brain, what's the brain's role in that would be? It appears to be some, like a dimmer switch can turn things up or down, controls the release of some of the chemicals that can make us more or like less likely to hurt. and it works both ways. So even if you're like, oh, my nervous system's upregulated, it's one of the terms you'll see.
It doesn't mean it's stuck like that. And it also can be turned down because everything works both directions. and that gets lost
Carol: How would somebody feel?
Sandy: Pieces.
Carol: when you say my nervous system is upregulated what would that what's in a description of how that feels like? What that feels like.
Sandy: Do you? So I be, have you ever had someone sneak up behind you and give you a hug and you jump, that's like you didn't expect it, and you have a startle response. That startle response is normal. That could be the person you trust most on this planet. You still have that startle reflex. that's a reflex.
They can get upregulated, they can get turned up to where you'd like startle. If a door closed, or someone says that you care about very much says, I'm going to walk up to you and hug you, and you still go, eh, that would be an upregulated system. So it's
something that belongs
Carol: I can see how, so it, would it be accurate to say that if somebody was living with a chronic condition like endometriosis, that they might be in that constant state,
Sandy: Yeah, a little more, which they've, which is reasonable . It's like, and I try and really explain that to people. It's like, this isn't a broken thing, it's a thing that's just doing it too much too often for too long. and it's out of proportion. if you have endometrial tissue squishing something, we need to know that so we can get the pressure off.
So the part that is being over pressured, whether that be a piece of bowel or the connections from your bladder to outside or from your kidneys to your bladder or a fallopian tube. If there's pressure on something from endometrial tissue, we need to remove that pressure. And it doesn't necessarily have.
So this is specific to endometriosis. Endometriosis. There's really good research now about how, how disconnected the amount of endometrial tissue is from pain. You can have someone with
lots of deep infiltrating endo and no pain and you're gonna have people with tons of pain and they go in to try and help them and they don't find very much.
We, new research is, is really lots of that evidence saying the pain and the amount of endometrial tissue are not proportional, which is super good news for people who think, but I heard so bad and they went and looked, they must have missed it and because that would be a logical conclusion. But it's not.
It's that, yeah, bodies are weird and you heard a lot and they didn't necessarily miss anything. they're both true.
Carol: so does that, even though I know we don't necessarily have that, we don't have definitive answers to what I'm asking. So I guess I have to ask, or, or I have to give a disclaimer. We're just theorizing here. but, Does. So that particular example, I'm so glad that you raised that the idea that some people can have, deep infiltrating endo and it can be horrible and they can have no pain and others can have tiny amounts of endo and have lots of pain.
So does that get back to whether or not that, nervous system or not whether or not, but how that nervous system is responding to the physical presence of Endo?
Sandy: I, I think that's a reasonable
Carol: that was poorly asked
Sandy: it's actually a great, it's a great question. It is unanswerable for. My ability to test that, but it makes sense. one of the things like, is that, the hormone load that changes, you know, cyclically as we go through cycles? Is it that the endometrial tissue is there or is it that your estrogen and progesterone levels are changing and was the anti-inflammatory part of estrogen protecting you from being bothered by that tissue?
And then as the level drops, is that why you hurt or is there something else going on or, there are really clever people trying to figure that out. but I am not one of them . I just have a very practical PT on the other side of it going, let's help you not hurt, let's help you not suffer while we come up to this answer.
Carol: Right.
Sandy: they are
Carol: So it, so if you work when you. Yeah, and also you, you brought up, hormones and, we're talking about, like, we're talking about structural, the word, sort of structural, issues. , where you have endometriosis or maybe you have fibroid pressing on a nerve or something.
And we've got these structural issues, but then we also have these chemical issues to contend with, meaning the hormones that are circulating throughout the body and the, the hormones that, regulate or respond to how we feel about pain. I'm struggling in asking the questions because, I'm just realizing like, it's like what happens first?
Does the pain happen first or does all the screw happen first?
Sandy: That's a fabulous,
Carol: Who knows?
Sandy: fabulous question. So again, infinitely practical physical therapist. you can get better without knowing the answer to that question. So that can be a really fun question and you can get better without knowing it. The answer, because I don't know if it's an answerable question and that is a, that is a phrase I learned from one of my research friends that really has saved me a lot of headaches over the last decade of when I just can't figure something out.
It's like, oh, we might not know enough to ask the right question in order to be able to figure it out. and maybe why I get so frustrated of not being able to figure it out is that it's an unanswerable question right now, cuz we haven't asked the right question or we don't have enough information to form an answerable question.
Okay? And infinitely practical physical therapist, what can we do about it right now? Because you hurt and you don't need to keep hurting. Hurting is not helpful when we know you haven't actually just stepped on a nail. but it feels like you did, check to make sure there's no nail. Excellent. Let's get that pain gone, or at least way down.
and then the other big part of that, I think especially well for any pain, but especially with pelvic or visceral pain, is how many ways can I teach you to do that for yourself so that when you hurt, you can help yourself in that moment and not have to endure until you get to someone who can help you, which is a fabulous first step.
Finding someone who can help you is fabulous, but ultimately the goal is how do we help you not need us?
Carol: Yeah. And I love the idea of thinking down the road, what happens when you exercise that sort of brain body connection and build that muscle to communicate intimately with your own system, that over time do you become like a superhero? I just wanna go with Yes. You become a superhero and, and it's all awesome. . So what, first, let's start out with what is most misunderstood about pelvic pain? And you can take that from a physician and a, patient
Sandy: can I do a societal first? We'll start really big and then go small.
Carol: Sure.
Sandy: I just found out recently, like a couple weeks ago that there is historical precedence that it was considered immoral to try and help women with period pain or pain in pregnancy.
And,
Carol: God.
Sandy: and because.
Carol: can you excuse me for a second while I go beat my head against the wall?
Sandy: Well, I was reading, I was reading a book on the, the history and I just, I swear I was staring at that page for like 10 minutes swearing all for a
Carol: I can totally understand
Sandy: Um, but then you, it's like, darn it. Cause I was wondered, why, as someone said recently, why are there three, societies and journals devoted to headaches and none to menstrual pain?
and
Carol: We can answer that question
Sandy: Right.
Carol: in one word.
Sandy: but,
But also written in this, and I, I will email you the, I, I'll send, take a picture of that page so you too can stare at it and swear, the historical
Carol: We'll post it on our social so we can
Sandy: the love
But it's like, well, cuz you think, why isn't this in our education, in our own education? Because it's not in the physician's education. Why is it not in the physician's education? Well, because they were purposely not doing it for centuries. . so it's like, oh. So it really is in 2022 where we now have a world Congress on pain posters of fabulous work done on how do we predict and prevent menstrual pain and how do we address, period pain right away so that it's not bothering and, a problem that that's new and you would think that it wouldn't be new, but it actually is new because it is just now gathering the momentum to overcome those centuries of this is something we are not going to address.
I mean like part of my heart just breaks when I say
that, but also, yay, we are not there anymore. so
Carol: Yeah.
Sandy: yay, . So that, so that's society
Carol: Yep. I, I totally know what you're saying. It's like a pendulum.
Sandy: Yeah.
Carol: pendulum when you recognize something and you're like, wow, that was really dark and ugly. Gosh. And then it's like, okay, I'm really glad it's not like that anymore. But that, that
Sandy: And we have an obligation
Carol: like I collect to honor it, recognize it, and then to teach people like what you just did there with the, why is this happening?
Oh, because this happened. And then why did that happen? Oh, because this happened. We have to do that all the time when it comes to, talking about our, female systems because we've been kind of trained to not question
Sandy: and we are the, butt of all the jokes. Sort of weird phrasing of that. But we're the target. You wanna make fun of something. You call it a girl. Oh, you throw like a girl, or you run like a girl. Or a current curfuffle on social media is a phrase that I grew up using.
And now I'm like, well, I have to de adopt this and pull it out of my vocabulary. And it's a whole 48 hours old, so I'm not good at it yet. But I grew up with people saying, don't get your knickers in a twist, or Don't get your panties all twisted, or things like that. And just realized that that is considered by some people to be a misogynistic, minimalistic thing.
And so I'm like having to go through my brain, like the thing in Harry Potter where they pull memories out like, like I have this ingrained phrase that meant you're getting really worked up, calmed down. I no longer call people hysterical because I realize. treat, but he was like, oh, that's hysterical.
And it's like, wait, that is a phrase that was based on saying women overdo. So we're just gonna remove that from our vocabulary. And now I get to remove this phrase from my vocabulary. But until, you know, you don't know, once you know you are obligated to change. So it's my very own, like, this is literally 72, 48 hours old of, oh my God.
I've been saying that for years. And I didn't, it didn't even occur to me that it was minimizing misogynistic kind of thing. And now I can't not see it. So sorry for that too. the, but
it's like, there's
Carol: Yeah. Same with me. And the word stupid.
Sandy: Yeah. And then you have to like, you start
to type it and you're like, Nope, nope, nope, nope.
Not that word. Not that word. What am I actually trying to say?
Carol: No,
Sandy: and the way
do that, like,
Carol: that what you just said is
That's the key, is what, what are you trying to say? Which is what helps us exercise our thinking and it, and it's kind of respectful to ourselves to allow us. To trust that we can identify what it is that we really need to say in that moment. I think that's so important, especially when it comes to communicating your symptoms to physicians and such that cuz we can, we can like well we minimize our own symptoms, but what we're, we can sort of like beat ourselves up in that communication, right?
And it's, ugh, we need
Sandy: because we've, because we do the thing, we've been trained to do the thing from the very beginning, we've been trained. See, I was like, I could talk about this forever. We've been trained, so even like sitting like, how is, how's a lady supposed to sit? I went to an all girls Catholic school and we had.
I am like ancient. So there was actually teeth,
Carol: you
are not ancient. Um.
Sandy: I'm, I'm 58 and I love, I earned every single year of it. I'm gonna be turning 59 soon. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not hiding behind that. I earned these years. Every single gray hair and whatever earned them. They all have stories.
But we've been trained. I've been trained my entire life that if you're gonna sit and you all can't see, but I have just fixed my posture. My ankles are beautifully crossed, my knees are together slightly off to the side. So you look really nice in pictures, right? Guys don't have to do that.
Carol: Right,
Sandy: do you know how ha the effort, the physiological effort of holding your legs in that position is a cost.
but sitting and doing the traditional man spread is less cost. So even how we were trained from little tiny girls of how to sit costs us more. then not doing that. And when I was thinking about that, I was like, darn it, like my whole entire life, you're like, sit, like you have a miniskirt on. But that's increased tone through your pelvis and your love.
Not a lot but it is, it's effort because that's not the natural human sitting position that's a socialized position for girls. And so you start looking at stuff
Carol: And that's how that, right.
Sandy: So I keep
saying, And then, then
Carol: that, that
Sandy: spreading, but like, I'm gonna start, call it human spreading. Yeah.
Carol: I don't wanna jump ahead, but, I am starting to, connect the dots on how these little micro movements or micro holds that we that we allow, that we sort of unconsciously are, it's happening in our body without us really even being aware of it,
Sandy: It's a
habit.
Carol: bad that can get when you also fold in a chronic condition.
Sandy: Yeah.
Carol: You know, because then you're, you're also. Right, there's no room. And then you're also folding in on top of that, the fear around, not really understanding the condition, not knowing if there's anything that's gonna be done. Okay. We're, we're jumping ahead. Let's stay. So we started at the social level.
Sandy: Okay. Yeah.
Carol: for 42
Sandy: know we could just do this forever. We just
break it up into as many pieces as you need. the, so the social, it's like how that system that we work through the organizational bits, over the whole planet and then we take it. So bring it back down into the US cuz that's where I live of habits that that individual has learned over time.
The, it's expected that if you're female, you will have pain with your period unless you're lucky. And you may leak unless you're lucky. So the expectation is that these things are gonna be a problem. Or that if they're a problem, that's just how it goes and don't complain about it cuz that's what everyone has to deal with.
That's changing a lot. And, but then in our own selves, because we don't get the education as a human, I'm lucky to have pursued pelvic health and learned all these things like, whoa, the clitoris is massive and this is how this works and that's how that's connected. And I didn't get any of that in health.
I didn't get any of that in college level biology. I got, if you look at the. No, I know all my friends who write these books, I apologize. But if you look at the orthopedic textbooks on hip and pelvic pain, the inside's not there. It's like, it's the glutes and the hip rotators and all of the structures for the actual hip joint, but the pelvic bowl and the inside of the pelvis and the structures around the genital urinary systems are not there.
And so how would, how is that not being presented even to the health professionals? You see, pelvic health is the specialty off to the side that those crazy people who don't mind putting their fingers in places deal. But we're not gonna go there. And I would love to see it in our professional training right up there with jaws and knees and ankles and don't do internal work if it makes you uncomfortable, cuz we never force anything.
But acknowledging the systems and their importance. Would stop. This would be preventative because then we would help young girls who start leaking when they do gymnastics to stay in their sport because they could get help. People who get period pain so bad, they miss school to not not have to miss school, not have to lose those social connections and get behind in studies and feel broken.
those are horrible that it exists because it doesn't have to. and then as that human that's feeling those things, you don't understand how your body works cuz you're not told, we don't come with an instruction manual. It'd be very large and lots of unknowns. and it just adds confusion to mystery and those messages and the.
Grandparents, how they were raised, and all of those things make it less accessible to be able to help yourself instead of more accessible, to be able to help yourself. And I think we can really, like what you're doing is a phenomenal way to stop that and get the information where it's needed. I
Carol: Yeah. One of, one of the catalysts. and it leads me to want to share one of the things that inspired us to start Uterine Kind and Hello Uterus and specifically the name Hello Uterus was because in my market research that I had done and then the interviews that I have done with patients, I heard repeatedly people say that they hate their uterus.
when I hear some, yeah. And I, when I hear someone say like, I hate myself, that's a very hard, that's a very hard thing to hear. Right? And you just want to help that person. But they don't, necessarily connect that,
Sandy: it's let 'em
Carol: saying that you hate the uterus. , I would say that The uterus is as angry as you are by the fact that society and the healthcare system have let you down.
Because it's often not the uterus is, is getting the kicked out of it as much as every other part of your body.
, so I I really love that you bring, this whole holistic, whole sort of awareness to someone's condition, to how they think about it and to connect all of those dots within the body.
I just think that is so cool. I'm grateful that I don't have chronic pelvic pain, but I swear to God, part of me wants to, because I wanna experience what, I've listened to some of your, um, patient testimonials
Sandy: Just, just,
just
Carol: know I don't want it.
Sandy: Don't, no.
Carol: Right. I just, but it's, it's so fascinating.
Sandy: that's the people. So you're one of those people that if I say, oh my God, I think this tastes horrible, and hand it to you, you would try it . It's like, cause I'm,
I'm, I'm not one of those people.
Carol: Yeah. The only thing I
Sandy: this is gross. try it. I'm like, mm-hmm.
M
Carol: does this milk smell bad? Um, I don't fall for that anymore. So now can you help us understand how chronic inflammation, which is also sort of this loosey goosey kind of thing that we hear all the time, but we can't really picture it.
how chronic inflammation can cause chronic pain and what can that feel like on, on multiple levels.
Sandy: you asked really good questions. How, so what is chronic inflammation? It is both peripheral and central maybe. So there's, there's per, you have peripheral nerves. You have the nerves that come off the spinal cord and go out everywhere. They're literally everywhere. and then you have the central nervous system, which is the spinal cord in the brain structures.
so the, there is peripheral nerve. Chronic inflammation. and there are, well, we're gonna get fancy. There is a neuro immune system that is part of why things can stay inflamed. So there, and that is also everywhere. so if you, we imagine nerves, like it's a string, like a piece of spaghetti, but it's not, it's like these lots of tendrils going out in all different directions.
But we draw 'em like they're the straight line. but then wrapped around all of that are all these neuro immune cells that glial cells, that can. Your nerve can be fine. Like you're doing squats and it feels great and all this stuff. And then late later, not cuz the muscles got sore but just irritation.
\ you can pay for it later with like, everything is more tender, more painful, you have less tolerance, it just gets gross. That seems like, and I will asterisk by that because research continues to develop it seems like that is more of a neuro immune influence than physical structures being unfit along that neural pathway.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Sandy: That makes sense. And the VI is the same. So bladder, uterus or bowel can have that same, the nerves around them are irritating everything else. So there's almost two different problem. There is the tissues themselves that need to get more fit and tolerate normal pressures and be able to tolerate movement.
And then there's this system that can keep, this is not how it works, but it's the cartoon in my head. It can, like the little gremlin goes and turns the dial up on inflammation for no reason whatsoever. It just does it. We have to turn that back down. And that can happen in the area where you hurt and it can happen at the spinal cord level and it can happen in the cortical structures in your brain because why not?
Why not have it be lots
Carol: Right.
Sandy: a friend of mine said once that if our, they're all protective. Those are protective systems. But they get too much. They're not broken. They're, they're supposed to be there, but they're. Just too much. he made a comment once when in my frustration I was like, Ugh.
And he is like, if our selves were as protected, or if our computers were as protected as we are, no one would ever be able to hack into a computer. There are so many layers of protection and I'm like, that is intriguing, but also doesn't make me less frustrated,
Cause there are, there are so many, there's peripheral protective mechanisms.
There's spinal cord protective mechanisms. There's cortical protective mechanisms, and they, they're so good at their job that we could think about. The person that I just saw this morning, you could think about having sex and it can make. Like nothing even actually had to physically happen. But you're so good at protecting that.
The thought needs to be protected against by local swelling and local muscle changes right in the area of your pain. Nothing's wrong with those tissues. Like we wouldn't be able to see it on, I mean, any imaging, but there is increased swelling. You could measure it. There's muscles that are guarding that don't technically need to be because they're responding to that chemical flush of, of a protective response that is happening out of proportion or even when it doesn't need to happen.
that's my current explanation for how that all works. Five years ago I explained it differently. I hope five years from now I explain it even better
Carol: Yeah, that's
Sandy: learning more all the time,
Carol: Exactly. We're never gonna run out of, things to talk about because we're still in the, we're still in the wild west of discovering our systems and, yeah. There's so much we don't know. And, and having grown up in the age that I grew up in as a Gen Xer, we were conditioned to believe that it wasn't our place to know.
, you know, doctors were, doctors were gods and, and they were capable of doing everything and anything. And
Sandy: Just, just be quiet and
Carol: really un 10. So again, so many people I've interviewed where they've gone to, 10 doctors and not getting diagnosed and dealing with all this stuff.
And then I say like, okay, how do you feel about your physician? Well, I trust, I trust him a hundred percent. he delivered my mom and he delivered my great great great, great great grandmother and, like this 157 year old guy walking around and you're like, I'm all in with this one.
So, I wanna ask you a question about something that you said, and again, I know that we don't have any data here, and I also wanna have a disclaimer first. This question does not, is not to suggest that we manufacture pain, that, you know, we're pain pill seekers or that we're manufacturing pain for some other reason.
But you said that, That you could bring up the conversation with me about painful sex and it's just the conversation. It's not the sex itself, and I can still feel pain Is the reverse true? Can I descend into a part of my body and release the pain to some degree with my own brain?
Sandy: Why not? Yes, because it works both ways. One would be a conscious choice that you would then practice so much that it becomes a habit. Because the other is unconscious too. We are not consciously saying, oh no, I have just thought about sex. Let me inflame my left pal, neural
Carol: Right.
Sandy: like, if you could do that don't use it like that.
Um, .But so that, that's not a thing that. That we consciously do. You're not, not choosing to hurt, you're not thinking wrong, you're not failing to think, right? It's just these reflexive, protective responses that get out of proportion. And they do work both ways. , cuz those expectations if you were like, Andy Clark is a researcher that I, I fascinated by his work and in, in his book Surfing Uncertainty.
he has a, a talks about if someone wakes up in the morning and they usually hurt in the afternoon, like their back hurts in the afternoon, that there is already measurable changes in pro-inflammatory mediators and muscle guarding and movement pattern changes based on prior experiences and a learned response that I should start guarding that part of me because by this afternoon it's gonna.
Which is fabulous because then we could, right. How efficient is that system then, except for it's in, in this instance, unhelpful. so it's efficiently not helping you? the, so then what if we just, what if we just put a maybe there, like maybe if I think about sex, it'll hurt. How many ways can I think about sex and have it not hurt?
This is where taking these thoughts and talk, using 'em to talk about back pain or shoulder pain or foot pain is a whole lot easier. Cuz when we use it for bladders and bowels and sexual function, it gets a little awkward, funny, hilarious. Depending on your sense of humor and privacy. But like how would, so how just spend some time every day imagining pleasurable sex.
And that would help,
Carol: right.
Sandy: because there's every reason to think that it would.
Carol: Yeah, absolutely.
Sandy: purposefully practicing pleasure, joy, happiness. I just had a conversation about the meaning of those words. So now I just use all of them , because,
Carol: Yeah.
Sandy: they are, they are
Carol: in there.
Sandy: they are socially charged words. So purposefully practicing those things can have a buffering response.
So it'd be good for us to do, do things that feel good, purposefully feel good in that area that normally hurts. Like touch it in a way that feels good. Think about it, feeling good, doing all of those things helps. Change that. I think that it helps to change that neuro immune response. This giant asterisk, I might find out that I'm wrong and have to change my words, but in this moment, that's how I think it's working, which is really super fabulous news for us, being able to manage that on our own for ourselves and not needing any special equipment or permission or provider, but a, power that we have in our ownselves to just what you said, turn that to the other direction.
So I think
Carol: Yeah, as you were describing, as you were describing that, I was thinking, you know, we do that with our kids and with our animals. like I remember I had a few large dogs in my life and I, they had, bad experiences getting their nails cut and I had to sort of, retrain them to love me, touching their feet and so that I could cut their nails.
And it's, it's not an apples to apples, but it's just that idea of like unwinding some conditioning that has gotten embedded, not just in our mind, but also in our brains and then also in our physical bodies. You know, that, that idea that the dog is gonna pull the paw out. And sort of retreat, so that, that is wild.
can you answer, I'm not even gonna ask you. I'm not gonna say, can you answer the question? Can you theorize and then you can let us know if you have the research on this. Why is pain so exhausting? Like, why is it so, I can't think of anything that is as exhausting as pain,
Sandy: I can answer that question. And we do have the
research for research for it because there's, yeah, because there's, there is a cost, there's a metabolic and a physical cost to hurting. It requires resources. It is not supposed to be sustained. The sustaining of it has a metabolic, I mean, it's not, not gonna help you lose weight, cuz of course not.
But it's, it doesn't have that kind of calorie burning, but an effort and a taking of attention of things that could otherwise be spent elsewhere and a suffering and literally, Chemical changes and structural changes in your body in response to, and also because, of hurting. So it's again, another two-way street.
Carol: Yeah.
Sandy: is, are your muscles tight because you hurt or do you hurt cuz your muscles are tight, infinitely practical me would say, I don't know, let's make them not tight anymore and see what happens. But the, we may never be able to answer that. However, yes, there's a cost is exhausting, but it's not supposed to be sustained.
the vast non-threatening example of that is when we talk about like hugs. Hugs are fabulous and then they get weird and then you start throwing elbows to make them let go of you. Um, there is a cost to the sustained thing that was once good or or chocolate chip cookie dough, which I love and some is good, but more is not.
And
so there
Carol: they, it's like one of the only, it's one of the only things that I remembered in economics that it's diminishing returns.
Sandy: Yes, yes.
The cost benefit ratio is whacked and there is a massive law of diminishing returns.
Yep.
Carol: Yeah.
Sandy: But in the short
term, it's fabulous cuz it's why we, how we protect ourselves. Like I just stepped on something sharp and we withdraw before it even pierces our skin. Brilliant.
Carol: right. And before, sometimes, before we are even conscious that we stepped on it, you know, like it's
Sandy: You don't even know you've already withdrawn. But if you did that every time you stepped for 14 years, that's,
Carol: brilliant.
Sandy: not okay.
Carol: Yeah, that's a crystal clear that is just, you're so good at, these, metaphors that's crystal clear. that the, impact would be consistent with what you would need to do if every time you made a movement you experienced pain and reacted to it.
Sandy: I mean, we do that, they do that to be cruel. I mean, that's a cruel thing if you did that to somebody else. it is exhausting and brutal inside our own cells too. Uh, and it's not on purpose. It's a
Carol: Wow. Never actually thought about the torture.
Sandy: Oh, it's
Carol: Yeah. That, that, that it is torture God,
Sandy: I
think if that's
Carol: and, the
Sandy: and I keep trying to d threaten, right? So let's make that not scary and in an absurd example, so, you know, having a little kid and they're afraid of something in their room and we calm them down and we go turn on the light and look at the shadow and see what it is, we make sense of it.
So it's not, they still might not like it, but it's not a monster. And, but if every time we walked in that room, we'd say, how's the monster? Is there a monster tonight? What about now? And you calm him down. You've stuck your head back in the room and say, is it gone?
That.
Carol: out and calm him down at
Sandy: Regulating their nervous system, and it's really mean.
We wouldn't do it, but we couldn't do it in our own selves. so it's fun. you have to do it nicely when you find it in you, it's like, oh, I'm doing that thing. Okay, let me turn this around and think of it a different way. Which is why I, I'd love like pain informed psychologists and counselors and sexual therapists and, that can help you find those things and change the wording around them or change the meaning around them so that you are more compassionate inside yourself, just as we would want to be with anyone else.
But it's, it is
Carol: So.
Sandy: It's a lot.
Carol: absolutely. and if not addressed, if the pain is medicated, let's say. so you're just, you know, popping Advil or whatever and maybe you can or cannot get in front of it. But, and I'm talking about chronic pain, not just I have a headache, takes medl goes away. How campaign affect our bodies over the long haul.
Sandy: we have less cognitive function. It takes too much. Remember the old, the old movies where computers were a whole room of these computer banks. It just takes more and more of that. The systems work and attention and effort to manage the pain, which leaves us less for everything else. Like enjoying a movie or reading a book or liking our favorite song or enjoying dinner with a friend.
It just sucks resources from us.
Carol: Yeah. that makes, um, sense and goes back to the exhaustion aspect of it. So we are gonna, we're not gonna stay.
Sandy: grief and being sad about it and the loss of things, that's exhausting. because there is
Carol: feeling broken, if you've been made to feel that way, is, draining as well.
Sandy: So on the other
side of it is when you start to get better, you are less exhausted, you have more energy to do fun things, and then that cascade works in your benefit
Carol: And as you've said, this is something that you can be helped to do with a physical therapist like Sandy, and you can also be taught to be able to carry out some of these tactics and, and strategies on your own. , what's so amazing about this, I used to think physical therapy.
I was like, physical therapy. Why? What? I don't have time for that. You know, like I, like I can, right? but actually to me it's like I'm so glad that the word therapy is there with physical, because to me, phy a good physical therapist like Dr. Hilton is somebody who is helping you not just physically improve your experience, but improve your relationship.
Your intimate, deep, loving, awesome, caring, compassionate relationship with your own body and we deserve to have that. We've been taught to hate our bodies for freaking ever, and, and I am not a scientist, so I can say what whatever I want. I don't care if there's no research on this. I am absolutely convinced that if you are taught to hate your body then that, that system, that exquisite system that requires your brain and your mind is going to be outta balance
Sandy: It's at a disadvantage, but there
is research. If you look at the professional athlete studies, no one tells a professional athlete. Visualize yourself losing,
Carol: Right. .
Sandy: your time being 0.7 seconds slower than before. We don't use that power against ourselves in sports and business and public speaking and all that stuff but we sort of are conditioned to do it a little bit when it comes to our healthcare.
Just accept that and, you're just always gonna not be okay with that. Just stop running or well, don't have sex. You've already had a couple kids, you could just not have sex anymore. And, and these minimized, diminishing you are less than comments, which are just garbage. and we need to reject them for each other because sometimes we don't do it so well for our own self, so often that it becomes habit for us to even do it for ourselves.
But if you're one that it's easier to do it for yourself first rock on, like they say in the airplanes, put your own mask on before you help someone else but work on it cuz it it is, and I made a joke earlier, it was like, if you say you hate your uterus, it can hear you. there is mucker Michael Thicker a really smart researcher that, and physio, that set a comment to me once it was in 2010 and it changed so much of the way my brain worked when he was talking about how our immune system protects us, right?
Yes. All right. It's a protective thing. Helps eat viruses and all of that. But if there's a part of us that we would rather not be part of us, is it protecting it?
Carol: Oh,
Sandy: And I was just, I put my pen down and closed the notebook, and I was just sitting there in the lecture hall going, whoa, . I was like, and so
many thoughts were going in my head.
Carol: right now. Wow.
Sandy: So those comments
like, oh, it's
my
Carol: a second. Is what is.
Sandy: It's like, whoa, nope, you're great. And see yourself winning
Carol: Oh
Sandy: race.
Carol: gosh. That's,
Sandy: like,
Carol: I can see, I can see the screenplay right now on this horror film, which is like, how you, like a, like a quiet, it could actually be a silent movie. It could just, we don't even need to have more than one character, but imagine if what you criticized about yourself literally disappeared, right?
So I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, my hips are so big. Well, what if my hips literally disappeared? Right. And it so it, yeah. That is, that is so wild. Really
Sandy: There's no monster. It's okay. It's just shadow on the wall,
Carol: Yeah. Totally. So,
Sandy: it's true
Carol: mm-hmm.
Sandy: and it's powerful because
when we go, oh,
Carol: research, right? Yeah. That's a real, that's a moment when things shift inside. When you get to have those aha moments like that from a research perspective leave us with , the biggest question that you are most excited to get an answer to.
Sandy: the pause is me. Going through the Rolodex of questions in my
head, like
Carol: I wanna do that. Dun, dun, dun dun dun dun.
Sandy: because I would like to have I want an answer to the why me that like, how come one person can have a baby and not have any pelvic pain and another person can have a baby and have pelvic pain?
How come? What's the difference? What is the cool thing about that person that recovers from a surgery that they don't have any follow on consequences? And can we find out what that is and teach it to other people? you know, is it a thought? Is it a chemical you kind of thing? Is it, you know, what is it?
What's, why? Why does one person suffer with persistent pain and another with technically the same diagnosis, not what's going on with the one that doesn't? And can we learn from that? Cuz that would be super exciting. I
Carol: That's interesting. And
Sandy: it more elegant to treat.
Carol: yeah. And on the flip side, is the person experiencing chronic pain? Do they have a sensitivity that, that has a really important, reason for being,
Sandy: Mm-hmm. , or
has
Carol: know, and not, not in a classic.
Sandy: to stop
Carol: Exactly. Yeah. Not, not in a classic sense, like that would be the classic sense. Like it's getting agitated or overwhelmed or, over, over stimulated.
But then in the non-class sense, from an evolutionary perspective is that an example of something that, you know, that we can get real excited about? Because once we get through the bugs of it being a problem, we're gonna get to the other side and discover that it's actually some sort of like, amazing thing.
And then this is where all the scientists that are listening to us go, okay, we're gonna check out on this conversation.
Sandy: was like, wait, what? I think there is . Some, some, some piece of that could be predictive and which is why I get very excited about the research that's being done around period pain, menstrual pain and endometriosis is if we, what would happen, and there's longitudinal studies being done on this what would happen if we identify young girls that are having painful periods help them not hurt every month?
Would those people then go on to have less likelihood for having persistent pelvic or visceral problems? If we remove
Carol: Oh, uh, that, that's, yeah, for sure.
Sandy: it would make sense that those people
then
Carol: So that's the chicken,
Sandy: have problems or be less likely to have problems later cuz we wouldn't be sensitizing their system. So what.
Because we can't go back. But what if going forward, we identify young women that are having painful periods and help them like within two months, because it would only take that second period to know well still hate it. what if that was an immediate, oh, let's calm that down. So it's not something you have to suffer and endure as your role as a female, and not predispose them in the future.
That would be, I think that would be an
Carol: Those. Yeah. that's brilliant. Words of guidance to all parents out there. Like it, you know, your child is nine, 10 years old and early onset of menstruation or 10, 11, 12, and experiencing pain outta the gate. Not normal. Not at all normal. Don't let it continue. Like, really not. Okay.
Sandy: Not
Carol: And, and, and to say that.
Sandy: yeah.
Carol: and think about when you were nine or 10, if your parents told you that something that was super unsettling, potentially scary, disturbing or what have you was normal, how that would affect how you viewed being alive on this planet, that, that's like
Sandy: sending you the picture from that book .It is. It's
Carol: I, I'm so,
Sandy: you have to accept this condition and there's nothing you can do about it. Complaining about it just means you're weak. It's like, absolutely not. We're just gonna blow that all out and say, what if we say there is no need for you to suffer, let's help you not suffer.
And those are not, that doesn't mean you have to stay on birth control forever. It just means. Maybe half an hour walk, a hot shower a little warm pack on your belly and learning some self-treatment to get everything around your uterus to feel. Okay. So the uterus itself is the only thing bothered.
But it's not bothering your back or your belly or anybody else, just the uterus. And then it's gone. And you don't have to think, oh, I can't go to school. I can't even concentrate to read. We take all those unnecessary components out. That would just be so profound. I mean, like, that would be it. I would love it.
And then I would, I could wave my magic wand. I have lots of lists, but I would make that really high on my list
Carol: Yeah. Hi. On my list too. Absolutely. Well, Sandy, I can't thank you enough. This has been amazing. I hope that you will come back on when other research hits that you're thrilled about. And, it's just, there's so many other things that we could talk about and I'm just, I'm so grateful for your time.
can you please let people know where they can find you
Sandy: , so, entropy.physio is our website domain. So the name of the clinic is Entropy, physiotherapy. And you can always find us through there. Sarah ha, my business partner, and I, it's not like, Hey, I'm gonna go read all the things on our website, but you can contact me through there
I do tend to hang out on Twitter right now, but social media's kind of weird, so, the website for the clinic's probably the best place.
Carol: so check that out. And then also there's some, talks that I saw that you've given on YouTube and, but just generally, follow the people who are following the research. Like that's, that is the best piece of advice I can give you as a non-clinician, that by following the people who are following the research, you will over time.
And you don't have to do it in a weekend, it's, we're not cramming for like a master's exam here. Over time you will become, I believe it's kind of calming because it's like, okay, good. There's adults on duty out there in the world who are looking at this stuff and I can just focus on taking care of me.
That's really good. Right.
Sandy: That's how I feel
about my
Carol: thank you for being an adult on duty,
Sandy: I'm like, they're doing the studies. I'm
Carol: that they're the adult on
Sandy: You go be the adults. I'm gonna take the information I got and I'm gonna be infantry. Incidentally practical PT of all right, how can I help you, , I'm gonna help you feel better right
Carol: Yeah.
Sandy: smart people are gonna go learn more.
Carol: Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Chicago is, is really fortunate to have you and we're fortunate to have had you on Hello Uterus, and thank you so much for sharing the cool stuff that we don't often get to talk about when we're in the middle of a therapy session or, you know, it's just so, it's, it's fun.
I really love it. Thank you
Sandy: Thank you for having me on. This is great. I love what you're doing. It's so needed.
Carol: No one has a right to judge your pain. Your pain is real and it's not your fault. I'm Carol Johnson and this is Hello Uterus.
Today we're joined by Dr. Sandy Hilton, a pelvic pain physical therapist who has graciously taken time to share with us answers to questions that we for sure do not get the time or opportunity to ask in most consultations. But before we head to her gorgeous therapy studio in Chicago, it's time for uterus in the.
If I don't break things during this uterus in the news segment, consider it a great exercise in self-control because you're about to find out. Mi Ausone is one of two medications used in a medication abortion. It's also referred to as the abortion pill. It blocks progesterone, a hormone that is require.
In order to sustain a pregnancy throughout time, and we all know this, there has been in place a standard proce medicating before operating, right? You have to do a medical therapy before you can do a surgical therapy. And we're like, no, we don't wanna take birth control pills anymore. No, we don't wanna do this anymore.
And the, and doctors are like, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. You need to follow the rules, right? So for many conditions, Not a condition, a procedure that treats many conditions.. It's a multitasker, right? It's a multi-tasker.
We're often not allowed to skip over the medicating portion, right? We have to go with the medical therapy, even if we don't want it, use it and we have to follow these rules, right? So amazing how sometimes rules can just be like melted and, destroyed and, anyway, so you're experiencing a spontaneous abortion.
For an example, the protocol might be depending on your unique situation, for sure, medication before, say a, D and C, or you need to terminate a pregnancy in the first several weeks for whatever the reason Merestone will be one part of that two part medical therapy that you use to terminate the pregnancy.
This drug has been safe and legal in United States since the FDA approved it about 20 years. In 2019, the FDA approved the first generic form of Miop following a review of the evidence that medical management of abortion is a safe, effective way to end pregnancy, and that this drug should have a generic version.
And with the arrival of Covid, Mione was. Able to be mailed to you so you didn't have to go into a physician's office or to a pharmacy in person to receive this all very good productive things, right? To take care of people's health in a way that is easiest for them and most accessible. But lymph ausone isn't just used for medicating.
Abortion. Caroline Hopkins of NBC News wrote a piece back in June on the hellscape, created by the reversal of ROE specific to clinical trials involving Gulf War veterans. These trials are now in danger of being shelved because of the potential for a federal ban on the fone. So one of the trials that she's running is, it has to do with, a a lot of these conditions that people came back from the Gulf War with, and the, feeling is that the exposure to the chemicals and the burn pits and things like that created a wide variety of problematic chronic conditions and cancers.
Are responding to or that may respond to treatments like mione. Right. Which is fascinating, isn't it? Because not a doctor here, not a research scientist, but I am connecting the dots on how like burn pits and chemicals and all that stuff seems to be, really disruptive to our hormone system. You can get where I'm going, right?
And that there are a wide variety of drugs that can be used. To help protect our bodies as a result of exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals. Anyway, having too much cortisol circulating in your body can contribute to a bunch of illnesses and syndromes and conditions, and the ausone provides a way to block the receptors cortisol needs in order to act on the variety of systems in our.
At a slightly higher dosage than the one approved for abortion. If Apress Stone is also FDA approved to treat Cushing Syndrome, a condition involving excess cortisol, so here we have an approved drug that can be deployed to treat other conditions, and if outlawed abortion and other conditions like Cushing Syndrome won't be able to benefit from that approved drug.
They didn't think this through , they didn't think this through probably because it was never their intention to, either improve or minimize the disruption to female healthcare. not at all their question at all. Hi. It is really, really shocking when you sort of pull back and you take a bird's eye view of this and you, take the time to consider how many problems are going to unfold from this decision.
like we're just, we are just realizing the myriad of issues that are gonna crop up both issues that people are experiencing in ER rooms and in doctor consultations across the country, but also in our research laboratories, like they need any more difficulties to deal with the future of our species relies upon what researchers discover in their laboratory.
And it's just incredible to me that a federal ban could end up making that, take away that benefit to that research end. That research, much like a federal ban on cannabis, did not allow for any federally funded research of cannabis. What a wasted opportunity. It's just ridiculously, it's just ridiculous.
Powerful people saw abortion as a wedge. One that they could hijack and use to make themselves look is if they care about life, but how can they care about life when people are dying as a direct result of their actions? And it doesn't stop at overturning Roe. We know that it's not gonna stop at overturning roe.
It continues with challenges to access. To drugs like Mione and it will also make it so much more difficult for physicians to provide excellent, modern, gold standard care to their patients, like these people that are running this. This quest to force us back in time, our living in the 15 hundreds, where one didn't have to consider the complexity of today's health.
You make a decision in the 15 hundreds, it's gonna take five months just to get it from the city out to the villages. Like here. You make a decision and it's instantly implemented, and then the systems that it impacts begin to shake under the weight of that new decision. In this case, the repeal of Roe, and those systems are shaking.
They are shaking. It's, boy, it's not good, but I'm about to introduce the next level of insanity to you and I, I wish I could just say that this is like, a joke. It's like Saturday Night Live or something, but it's not. and we need to know, we need to be aware of what's going on.
And I get that it's so hard to keep up. So hopefully this information is helpful, even though I'm sure it is not going to be.
Alliance defending freedom, , I can't even with that name. It's like, aye. Ya, ya. Anyway, I. They're a conservative group, as if I needed to say that, that has been involved in anti-abortion litigation, and last Friday, November 18th, . They filed a lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas on behalf of four anti-abortion medical organizations and four doctors who had treated patients with the drug mere.
The suit also named the Health and Human Services Department as a defendant. The suit claims that the FDA lacked the authority to approve the drug , which is hilarious, and B, did not adequately study the medication and C that the drug is. Okay. More than half the abortions in the United States are performed using Miop, Christone.
Miop. Christone has like a, like a spotless safety record. like if, if they're going on that claim and they were in like a legitimate court of law, it would be dismissed. we gotta pretend like it has a chance to succeed because we've seen what happens when we don't treat these ridiculous threats seriously.
So I just wanna read, a quote, from the lawsuit and then a quote from a senior council at Alliance Defending Freedom.
The FDA failed America's women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States. I'm sorry, what are these people high it's like they just put ludicrous sentences out there and then just expect that like we can't actually do anything with them because it's total gaslighting.
And then we'll be in this like state of chaos trying to figure out like, are they high or are we high anyway? No, the FDA did not put politics over science. They actually studied it pregnancy is a life threatening condition.
Okay? Pregnancy is not all bon bonds and eat as much ice cream as you want. Put your feet up and everyone gets like fuzzy slippers and, soft little things to sit on. No. That's in fantasy land. That's on like, celebrity blogs and on shows like the Kardashians. I mean, pregnancy is so, taxing on the body.
The Kardashians actually like hired people to be surrogates for them to have babies. I mean, like, this is so ridiculous that people consider. Pregnancy to be this walk in the park. So anyway, pregnancy is a life threatening condition. Illnesses result when pregnant people can't be treated with modern life saving care.
So then, yeah, yeah, it actually does result in life threatening illnesses. But before life, life-threatening illnesses result, the condition itself of pregnancy is a life-threatening condit. And in the United States, more so than virtually any other, country in the world, our maternal mortality rate for pregnancy is pathetic.
So, Julie Marie , just Julie Marie Blake, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Council, wants to school us on the clinical aspects of pregnancy. And this is a quote.
I would like to have her on this show, but see that is, that's like a line I'm not gonna cross because then you all are gonna see a side of me that I would prefer to just, only be seen in the gym or like when I'm climbing a mountain or something. Here's what Julie Marie says, pregnancy is not an illness and chemical abortion drugs don't provide a therapeutic benefit.
They end a baby's life and they pose serious and life threatening complications to the mother. Oh, honey , come on, willfully ignorant of the common occurrence of spontaneous abortion, which if not complete, may endanger the life of the pregnant person. This happens all the time. Julie, Marie, all the. These people, chemical abortion drugs don't provide a therapeutic benefit.
you wanna make a bet on that, Julie Marie. You wanna talk to the person who's bleeding out in a bathtub because they have an incomplete, spontaneous abortion. Abortion is the thing the body does. Julie Marie, you wanna talk to that person and find out if they might, realize a therapeutic benefit from taking a drug that you want to take out of society, that you want to make a legal
man. I'm not a day drinker, but I swear I would grab a cocktail. I would grab a cocktail to read you this list of those supporting this ridiculous lawsuit. These are the people that Julie Marie Blake is representing. Hold tight. I'm, I'm not kidding.
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. Hmm. American Association of Pro-Life. Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I mean, what pro-life, obstetricians and Gynecologists. Like what does that mean? What the, does that.
So that means that if I'm experiencing an incomplete abortion, you're just gonna let me bleed out and die. Cuz you're pro-life. third organization, the American College of Pediatricians. And then finally, Oh, I didn't even know these guys existed. Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
What? The Christian Medical and Dental Association. I mean, are you kidding me?
I just can't even. the cool thing is that this lawsuit, it's not gonna succeed cuz we're not gonna let it succeed. And hopefully Julie Marie Blake will learn from her mistake and decide that she's gonna go and repent and she's going to, I don't know, drive, . Home abortion kits door to door and hand them out.
Do something productive. Okay. With your life, because we live in 2022 where we understand a lot more about our body than they did in the 15 hundreds, and we have medications and surgeries and all kinds of things that we can take, take advantage of. Even though they're ridiculously expensive and far, and, and insurance companies make far too much freaking cash off of all of this, but you, you, Julie Marie Blake, and your your ridiculous little lawsuit, it's gonna fail and you're not gonna take this drug outta circulation.
And you should go back to school and learn a little bit about biology. Goodness. Okay, I'm gonna go take three cleansing breaths and then we're gonna be back with Dr. Sandy Hilton.
Thank you Dr. Sandy Hilton outta Chicago. I'm learning so much about pelvic pain therapy from these amazing doctors and I hope you are too. We are gonna be right back with ending on a high note that takes us to pop a new Guinea.
There once was a bird. Well, a pigeon pheasant to be exact. It kind of looks like a black horse with a camel colored saddle, and it's been MIA for a really long time. An organization called Rewild. It's spelled r e Colon Wild. So cool. Placed a total of 12 camera traps on the slopes of Mount K Caren, which is the island's highest.
And they placed another eight cameras in locations where local hunters reported seeing the bird in the past. And these camera traps, by the way, just cameras. they're not trapping these birds. But anyway. So they go there for a month. They're climbing around in the jungle, they're climbing up mountains. They're watching, they're looking at film. they're going to get the cameras and, fast forwarding and rewinding and looking for this bird, and they're not finding it.
And of course, just before getting ready to throw in the towel this spot one. It doesn't matter where you live in the world or what your language is, there is only one word that is universally appropriate in situations like this. Take a listen.
Christina Biggs, the manager for the search for lost species at Rewild. Isn't that the greatest job title ever? The manager for the search for Lost Species. , I don't think, I don't think I know a better title. Like it just has, it has such an amazing amount of coolness in it. Just so, so, so funny.
. So wild puns. Anyway, Christina Bigs says this rediscovery is an incredible beacon of hope for other birds that have been lost for a half century or more. And that's true. I mean, could you imagine? birds are amazing. they migrate, they follow the, electrical grid that's on the planet.
They can go for, days without food and, they're just so wild. And personally as, as a kid, I really discounted the cool factor of birds They're just birds to me. But in my later years as I become, I don't know, less judgey, I have really fallen in love. With birds and watching them fly and, reading stories about how they do what they do and all the colors and the way they dance and the fact that they can learn a language and speak, you know, speak, mimic our languages.
They're all just so amazing. And so to know that there was one bird that could have been extinct, but now we find. Because if Christina bigs the manager for the search for lost species, we find that it's still alive. So an incredible pigeon, pheasant, cute camel colored, little black bird. You're just awesome and I'm really glad that they found you and we'll, we'll have the link to the video cuz it's hilarious.
You gotta see it on our Instagram, which is at uterine Kind. Thank you to Dr. Hilton. Thank you to everyone tuning in. And thank you to Angel and Maryelle for producing the podcast and being part of one hell of a dedicated team at Uterine Kind. We are preparing for big announcement come December 1st, so stay tuned and coming up on the show.
More on Pelvic Pain, an episode on adenomyosis, an interview with the director of the Endo documentary below the belt, and an interview with a renowned researcher getting at the brain uterus. Connection, Dr. Heather Mont Nelson. So subscribe where you get your podcast. Please give us a review and tell your friends.
The more of you here, the more we can accomplish together for those living with chronic conditions that impact the female system. We just love it that you're here. So thank you. Till next week, be well. Be cool. Be kind.