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0:00
Hey, and welcome back to the Pulse Check Podcast. I am Mandy. I'm HeHe. We have a really exciting guest today. I know we say that every time, but I'm super excited for today. Functional medicine, using nursing fundamentals to become true healers. I am so curious about this. I have a page of questions. I cannot wait to get into conversation with Brigitte. We have Brigitte Sager today of Integrative Nurse Coach Academy. Thanks for coming Brigitte. Oh totally.
0:32
I'm super happy to be with you guys and talk about this. Oh, I'm so excited. So for our listeners who have been with us for a little bit, they will recognize Sarah Collins's name as a previous guest that was just here. And she has so much energy and I love emailing because I can see her face cuz I watch her on TikTok and she's like, I'm so excited. You're gonna love this. I have someone for your podcast. It's Brigitte. She's really different than me. It's gonna be so great.
1:00
And like you just said It's gonna be more upbeat. And Sarah was like, Wawa, here's what's going on and what you need to know if you're, if and when you're going to press charges for retaliation or file motions against retaliation of your hospital, which is extraordinarily helpful, in my opinion. Absolutely and unfortunately necessary and necessary and kind of like, geez, I did not expect. I did not expect that, but she gave us a lot of good information and connected us with other nurses.
1:29
So I'm so grateful for that. So you and Sarah are close and you both are in the West coast. Mm-hmm. And I saw on your site, so what I know about Brigitte, we don't have to do like a whole long intro, but I did see a lot of letters behind your name. Y'all are gonna see her blogs and podcasts in the show notes. You wanted to be a midwife. Mm-hmm. Yes. Hehe, I thought you would like that part. You wanted to be a midwife because your website says you empower
1:59
people wanted to empower people to believe in their own bodies. So we can totally get down with that. And you became a critical care float nurse.
2:07
Followed the medical model, followed the algorithms, chase the disease process. No one was getting better. Then you became a family nurse practitioner and you became what you call manager of disease. Mm-hmm. And you felt like you went to school and you're like, I know about great nursing care. This is me putting words into your mouth. I know about great nursing care.
2:29
And you went to work as an advanced practitioner and then you were what your blog says, not practicing in a way that you knew would be the most helpful in the way that you could help the most people. And so then after that, what happened? So yeah, I would call that standard of care. I was practicing in the way that my corporate model was pushing me and the way that I was trained. What I found is when you go to a nurse practitioner school, you leave behind
2:58
a lot of the nursing and you learn how to diagnose people and which medication they're gonna get for it, or which surgery they're gonna get for it. So once I started to practice in primary care, I had had this vision of being a healer and that was you know, my goal and I just kept feeling that wasn't where I was at and so it all culminated into a conference I was at and I, it was the same conference I'd done like two years before. But I was really excited for new content on IBS, cuz that's a
3:24
really challenging thing to treat. And so it was the same speaker and I was sitting there with a hundred other providers, probably at least and he pulled up the same slides from two years before and they were the same interventions that haven't been helpful for my patients. And so I was really bummed.
3:41
So instead of listening, I was scrolling through my phone looking for something different. And I'd looked before, but I hadn't found what spoke to me. And the Integrative Nurse Coach Academy was having a nurse coach's the intro to their course in live near my house. And so it was an hour away and I was like, Oh, this sounds like more aligned with what I wanna do. So I went to that and it was like a immersive intro and then a six month
4:03
program, and then you go back and you're together again at the end. So it was really great. I became a nurse coach, which means that I do the opposite of nursing almost. It's really interesting because I, I help people figure out, What they wanna work on and what's in their way. And so it's a lot of open ended questions and helping people meet their own goals rather than in nursing I feel like we do a lot of teaching and preaching to people about what they should be doing.
4:31
And so coaching was really cool to flip that on its head and say, Wow, I'm gonna help people figure out what they want to be happy and healthy and what they, what their intuition is about their own bodies and, and create some awareness for them. So nurse coaching, super cool. And then at the same time, I was kind of starting to learn functional medicine and the more I integrated it into what I was doing in primary care, the more frustrated I got because it takes time and it's hard to do.
4:56
And at the same time, my corporation was asking me to work faster and faster, seeing more clients quicker. And so it was detracting for my ability to do that. And I was getting pretty broken-hearted about it. So the more I was learning functional medicine, the more I realized I just needed to take the leap and practice it. And then while I was doing my training and I started working on my doctorate and I was doing consults from home with my clients, Karen Aino, who's
5:20
the director of Education for Inca, the Integrative Nurse Coach Academy. She reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to make the functional medicine course. And so I was a little intimidated by the whole idea, but I agreed to do it, and now I'm so thrilled. It's really exciting. Oh, that's awesome. That is awesome. I'm really into, into this. Okay. So I, I have a thought. It's not so much a question. I'd love to hear your thoughts about my thought.
5:46
I imagine that with your model of care of allowing patients to choose their goals, you must have an incredible follow through rate. They must have this intrinsic self-motivation to achieve these goals because they chose them versus a medical provider telling them what they should and shouldn't do, which is obviously going to create in a lot of people resistance. Absolutely. Yeah. Even if you end up aligning in the same place, is what you might
6:15
wish for them when it comes from their own desire to make a change. It's just like, I always say like how often do nurses tell people they should quit smoking, right? And then you have to hear it until you're ready to hear it. That's like a really classic one. And with this, it's people that come to me motivated, they're ready, they're excited. With functional medicine, I do do the teaching, right? It's not just open ended questions.
6:34
And so for me, now, I have clients that come to me super motivated. They're ready for change, they wanna heal, and they sometimes find out that the thing that is in their way is different than what they expected it to be and it is challenging and that's when I get to use my nurse coaching more. It often ends up being something about their lifestyle or healthy boundaries and relationships and things and we have to work through that, but that isn't my job, right?
6:58
I just ask them the questions to help them uncover that, you know. So it's super helpful when I'm practicing functional medicine. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like congruent to therapy like you should be having a functional medicine doctor and also a therapist, and I feel like that will improve your life so much. Absolutely. HeHe, have you been to a functional medicine provider? No, but I am on a wait list here in Boston for someone who had an
7:23
18 month wait list, and I'm like in town to like seven months now. So I should be seeing her next year sometime. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. That's wild. She is like the best in Boston apparently. I'll be driving a little bit to go to her like 45 minutes, so when I have, I have doctors literally like down the street for me. I live pretty close to the city, so yeah. Functional medicine, I'm into it.
7:45
It's interesting that I think I wanna go back to kind of how you realize that this was for you because I think a lot of our listeners are in a place of
7:57
resistance, confusion, frustration, and we have more than nurses in our audience, but I know we have a lot of nurses that are listening and nurses are in place of frustration, as it sounds like you were. So, you were even learning more and more and more to try to feel more aligned with what your role as a nurse practitioner more aligned with your patients.
8:23
Yeah. You know, I teach adjunct sometimes at an associate's degree nursing program. And it's the same program that I did a long time ago. And when I started to teach I was like, Wow, we are really focused on teaching nurses how to go to school to work in a hospital. And when I asked nurses, and I often do this cuz it's kind of a passion topic for me, is like, why did you become a nurse?
8:45
Most nurses went to nursing school they'll say it was like me to the midwifery thing was to empower people about their bodies. I wanted them to know, to believe in themselves and that we have this incredible ability to heal. And that gets taken away from you when you're a woman in labor walking in a hospital setting in a lot of cases. And so that broke my heart. So as I went to nursing school, I learned that it's more than that. It's like I didn't just wanna do moms and babies.
9:09
I wanted to do the whole picture because it's, everybody needs to know that. So when I ask other nurses, their stories are similar. They're, I wanted to help people, I wanted to heal people. I wanted to teach people about their bodies and we aren't really afforded that opportunity when we go to school and learn how to just work in a hospital, how to work at the end of the story. And, you know, it's when people have had a problem going on for a really long time
9:33
and we're like putting out fires for them. So for me, I kept being hopeful or optimistic that when I got to the next step of my goal, I would be in that place where I was gonna heal them. And I thought primary care was gonna do that and it was unfortunately not the case. So with functional medicine, the whole point is the why, figuring out the why. And a light bulb went off one day where I was like, Oh my gosh, this is fundamental nursing.
9:57
It really is like when you peel back the layers of functional medicine, it is what we learn in nursing school. And then in the course I teach, I add in the how, like how do I use what I already knew as a nurse to truly heal people because that was my calling and it is incredible and I just like, it fills my heart to see the comments, my students and when we talk together because they are having that same moment that I had where they realize they finally get to live their calling.
10:20
And a lot of my friends that still work in the Alopathic model are so broken hearted right now in the role that they play, and so I am so excited that more and more nurses are looking towards this. I love that you say that and I think I had read your bio. I had looked you up.
10:37
Sarah spoke so highly of you and I was like, Who is this person? I need to go see where they started, where they are, what they're doing, what is all this coaching? And I was getting it, but I didn't read your blog posts. You sent us some links, but I read 'em today and I think timing is so funny, isn't it? Yesterday we just, I am one of the creators of a trauma informed birth nurse program, and it's for perinatal nurses working to learn trauma informed
11:04
care, and we say all the time in trauma informed care, this is nursing. This is the type of nursing you got into nursing for. And I know that because many of us share these universal beliefs that we can support folks to be better. We can walk alongside people. We want to see them grow and improve, and we wanna be there with them for that, either teaching or medication or assessment or whatever. The human to human connection is what like poof goes away. Mm-hmm.
11:44
And like you're saying, your timeframe with seeing these patients is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And you talk to a nurse in a hospital and they say conveyor belt imagery. And patients also, because of social media, we're able to tap into a lot of a lot more patient experiences outside of our own experience. And so we hear patients telling stories about, I felt like I was being taken care of by robots and no one was answering my questions.
12:09
They weren't even like listening to me and they just did all these tests, like things happened and I didn't even know what was happening. I was drawing so many parallels to trauma inform nursing care.
12:22
I mean, you say that nurses become nurses to be healers, advocates, and empower our patients. We don't want them to need us forever. Right. We're not like on call. We don't have a phone nurses at the bedside, like RNs or in that level. We don't have a phone, we don't have an office. Don't call me.
12:43
I'm gonna give you information that you're gonna then go use or let's talk about where you're at and then go figure out where you wanna be. But what you are saying is The same with functional medicine as content was the material you had learned in nursing school, but the topics are rarely given any priority in modern healthcare. Is that not the most like biggest freaking bait and switch you've ever seen? Right. Come on in the water's nice. You're gonna be an advocate.
13:11
And then you're like, Who am I an advocate for? I'm an advocate for the hospital, their legal team, their bottom line, which is money, and then the hierarchy the latter is providers who make more money for the hospital's bottom line.
13:27
I'll give you a great example. That's like, So basic, but it's like, oh my gosh, how did I not think of that? The example I love to use is we learn about our sympathetic parasympathetic nervous fit system, right? And like fight or flight. And that like an animal, if something's chasing you, you're running for your life. Our body, whether that's stress or a lack of sleep or whatever that stressor might be, our body doesn't know the difference.
13:50
It thinks we're running from an animal and then we have our resting and digesting phase, and we learn that in nursing school. And that is when we can actually digest our food and have healthy absorption of nutrients that we need for every cell in our body.
14:04
But we are rarely in that state, and nurses are the best example that work in a hospital is like, from the time they get up and think, Oh my gosh, my patient's from yesterday, you know, I'm going back and, you know, and then what about my kids and what about the five other things I need to juggle, Get their clothes on, get to work, run in the break room and eat something really quickly and leave, and, and, and then there's huge rates of infertility and high blood pressure,
14:27
like all these things that are happening to the public at large are happening to hospital based nurses on a huge spectrum. Most of the nurses that I worked with in the hospital developed health conditions, you know, at a faster rate than maybe our peers that work in a more peaceful setting. And it's, you know, how are you supposed to digest the foods you ate and absorb the nutrients in them? And what were those food choices to start with, to even have those nutrients in them.
14:53
So that is just so basic and that changes the course of health for a lot of my clients. Just teaching them how to take the time to get into that state and the awareness that being there is essential. I love it. I love it. It's such institutional betrayal because I, I mean, I go to the doctor and I've been to the doctor a lot recently. I've been going through some stuff, some surprising stuff, and I'm like, I'm a nurse. I've been to a functional medicine doctor.
15:22
She's like, Wow, what have you been eating? I'm like, I don't wanna tell you. I know what I'm supposed to eat. I teach people, you know, and in, in birth we're alongside and we're like, Nope, nope, nope. That contraction's over. We're back to relax. We're sleep. We're like the, the monkey that fell out of the tree we're just cool. Calm. We're fine. We don't have a contraction. Meanwhile, I'm being chased by a lion. You are fine, and you're like our bodies literally know what's happening.
15:50
You know, I'm not fine, Like I am not a safe person to be in your birth. I'm being chased by lion. I'm at work. I have another patient. I didn't eat lunch. I have to pump, I have to pee, and the provider is on my ass. And the unit culture sucks just to name five, right? I'm being abused. I'm being bullied. I'm being manipulated. I'm underpaid. My feet hurt.
16:11
I don't have enough fingers for the number of lions that are chasing me. And I'm supposed to be like, I teach childbirth ed. Right? And I'm like, rest and digest is how you connect with your baby and oxytocin and relax to let your baby out.
16:24
I'm not safe. I'm gonna be over here behind this two way mirror saying all the things because my body literally is charged. You're so right about that and acknowledging it is.
16:40
First for nurses and I think the speed at which they can acknowledge that has hastened since Covid.
16:49
And I think our social media and our online platforms at the same time as Covid, I think like hospitals showed their hand a lot, very obviously in ways that like they didn't need to hear it from us being.
17:05
Or having experienced it in the hospital, having that light bulb moment that we've had, we've had to have on our own. They, they saw it and they were like, No, I literally know mask can save my life, but I can't have one what's happening right now? So, yeah, I think the parallel to trauma informed nursing care. I think what another parallel, you're asking the why and you're listening more. You moved into a space where you can have time to do that.
17:31
Do you think you are shedding some of the taught saviorism out of your nurse history?
17:41
Yeah. You know, for me that that exactly what you just said about The, the pandemic kind of hastening the process. What happened for me was like the clinic was like, Okay, everybody, you know, we're gonna do virtual right? And so while we figure out what to do in the first couple weeks. And so I was at home and I would go outside and walk through my greenhouse and play with my dogs and eat a salad cuz I had time to chew when I was eating.
18:07
And I realized it was the first time since I'd become a nurse a really long time ago, that I felt calm and not stressed out all the time. And it was a unique opportunity that created that awareness for me. And that was when I started to think about leaving my position, but I was still teaching adjunct at the hospital through the pandemic. And so we would go into the hospital and I'd see all my great friends cuz I, I did float and so I knew people all over the hospital and so I was
18:34
so excited to go in and get to see everybody I hadn't seen in quite a while. And they would just start crying, you know, I would be, they'd be like, How are you? And I'm like, Oh, I'm great and I'm, you know, this and that. It's going on. And I felt bad even saying that, but then they would just start crying and it broke my heart. I feel so bad for everybody that's still living in that land and not, And it, it's, the thing that you're talking about is like with nurses is like, it's almost
18:57
this mentality in school that you're supposed to suffer to care for others. And it's remarkable how it's ingrained in our culture. And it gets talked about a lot in the course that I teach. Just this idea of, wow, I have to take care of myself so I can take care of other people and I don't have to live in this. You know, I took a total leap like jumping off the like corporate income situation to do what I do now, but I totally believe it's my calling and I
19:24
have faith in that and we live in that idea as nurses of like the hospitals where it's at to like make a great income. And then you have to suffer through your career and develop health conditions to be a sacrificer, to save others. And I really feel like that needs to change because I don't think that most other jobs have that level of stress and responsibility that we do. Doesn't make any sense. You'd kill all your workers. Even like in a business model, it doesn't make any sense.
19:53
Like you're a business. All three of us own businesses and have teams like Second up is is our team. Yeah. But I think that's indicative of how they view nurses like replaceable, right? Like if one gets sick and can't come to work, we'll just hire more. We literally saw that in the pandemic. They did not care. They were like, Okay, quit if you want to. We're hiring them right outta school. They're in that funnel of medical industrial complex.
20:21
So preparing them to work in the hospitals and the hospitals, understand who cares? We have an endless supply of nurses. We don't think about our people like that cuz we know our people are not replaceable. We know the people who help us run our businesses are far and few between. Hospitals don't view their workers like that, I don't think.
20:43
Yeah, for sure.
20:46
How do you think leaving, taking that risk, you've gotten all this education through the medical industrial pipeline.
20:58
If that's not so hurtful to identify, because I can identify that way too. Pay a lot of money to that pipeline. Pay a lot of time to that pipeline. A lot of breast milk to that pipeline. you can tell I'm like, not over that part. Yeah, I hear you. And you know over it enough, but like, that's some shit. How has leaving helped your burnout or how doing this other side of medicine helped your burnout? You know, I always, like, I used to say, Oh, if I get a doctorate,
21:25
it's gonna be in nutrition because I don't want to go further in nursing. Like I don't. That whole thing going through the NP program kind of
21:34
showed me what that would be. Right. And so now I am getting my d and p because I'm like, Oh, because I can take research and disseminate it into practice in a way that could change healthcare. And so for me, it's like I find, yeah, I, I totally feel like I was raised, My dad was like this kind of like, White collar, hippie, sorta, you know? And so I always wanted to like fuck up the system ever since I Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got into healthcare.
21:59
That's, And, and I don't like how the corporation that bought up our local hospital has treated my friends and my community. And so I'm kind of tearing it up because, you know, I'm teaching all the nurses in my community at the, you know, the school that I went to at like, and, and all the nurses through the country that take my program and through the world that take my program, that That we can figure out why people have chronic conditions and it's different.
22:26
Everybody's problem in functional medicine is unique. The cause is unique to them and that's why it takes time cuz we have a lot of questions for each person to uncover that and heal it. But when you do that, they don't go to the hospital anymore. Right. So I feel super thrilled about that. And you know, one thing you just said that I thought it was, I was reading a student's assignment this morning and they said that they felt more aligned
22:48
with who they were holistically before nursing school, because once they went to nursing school, we get taught, like you just said, you go onto the conveyor belt of following the protocols to meet the goals of a corporation in most cases. And so she was excited that she was flipping that over and looking underneath and seeing, like remembering who she was before she became a nurse. I thought that was really cool. Yeah, because you're creating a space that's safe for them to do that.
23:16
It's safe to be like, Well, shit. This is what I spent so much time doing, so much energy doing. I thought this was the key. I thought it was the answer. I was told all this, this was a scam, and I am this other person and I'm not okay with these practices. I'm not okay with these priorities. I'm not okay with telling me one thing and then doing it differently in practice and having that resistance all the time and those new nurses smart, aware. That's who we're trying to get.
23:53
That's who we're trying to talk to. We're like that inner voice. That's the smart one. The new nurses, the younger generation is exactly. I think you're exactly right. Like what's your gut saying? Go with that. How do you find that? If it's not in nursing, go through your grief. If it's not in the hospital, like, not that nursing can't do it, nursing teaches you so, so, so much. I think we get a great foundation of so many good things.
24:18
But what I'm hearing from you is it can look all different kinds of ways and feel better to use your nursing and your system fucked with the wrong bitch. I am so excited for your community. And, you know, I've done two really big training programs for functional medicine and ours is the only one for nurses because I, of my realization, oh my gosh, there's so much of this is just what I learned in my ADN program a long time ago. And then I add in the how.
24:48
So I, I realized when they asked me to teach the course, like, One of the programs is two years long and, you know, you could buy a car or you could take that program, but it has health coaches in it. And so they're getting, they're, they're not healthcare practitioners. They don't, they're, you know, so, so they're getting a ton of the basics from nursing school and then on top of that. So I'm like waiting right in my class when we get the part that I don't know already from nursing school.
25:12
Oh, and it's the end. It's the how. Yeah. And so this program is how. It's the how from nursing school, right? Yeah. And so my hope, I mean, I'm really excited to teach my course, but my hope is that that realization comes across in healthcare in the next decade. And this isn't necessary anymore because it's that last bit of connection that nurses don't need to work for a physician and wait for a prescription to talk their patients into. A lot of my students are there. It's right there. Yeah.
25:45
We're not that person for you hospital medical industrial complex. We're not talking our patients into anything that's against everything we believe in.
25:55
And RNs and nps like that take the course are like, they have their own businesses and it, and it takes a while. You know, we have these Zoom sessions and we talk through the course, and nurses come from every modality. They have other skills like, you know, massage or reiki or something that they incorporate or doulas. Like they, they have things that they're using with their nursing, and then we add in functional medicine and maybe they take the coaching course
26:18
or we have like a cany nurse course. So maybe they're learning about cannabis and connecting that in and so, At the end of that, it's so fun to see everybody's ideas cuz they're like, Wow, I didn't realize how powerful toxins and detox is. That's my passion now. I wanna teach people about that and how it affects fertility or how, you know, risk for chronic disease and people get into hormones and, and that topic. Ultimately, I'm really optimistic that that can align in nursing
26:44
programs, but in the meantime, it's very cool to see nurses finally seeing like, Oh, this is what I wanted to be a nurse and this is so exciting and I can go have my own business. And it has nothing to do with prescriptions. It has nothing to do with surgery. I have them research their scope of practice. There's nothing in scope of practice about getting directions from a physician to teach people how to be healthy. We're educators.
27:07
And that is totally in everybody's scope of practice that's a nurse. Exactly. Wait, can I ask, I know people listening are like, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready brigitte, just tell me the secret sauce. Do I have to go get my master's to do this? No, no, not at all. Like bachelors nurses that are like. I love what I do, but I can't do it anywhere else. And you're like, maybe you could do it better and you don't pay anyone while you're at it.
27:33
Like you don't make other people ugly money while you're at it. I'm thinking pharma, big pharma. Do I have to go back to school? What is the hurdle that you're not telling me? So, so zero. I mean, I'm trying to think of a number because I'm not the numbers person at all, but like for Inca. But I, I would guess that 75% of my students have a RN bachelor's degree, and the other 25% either are masters in nursing or a master's and they're a nurse practitioner.
28:01
For me personally, what my visits look like is my patients do this really huge intake. I tell 'em, you know, get a cup of tea or coffee and sit down and plan to tell me what you've, No, you've been frustrated, nobody else has listened to, you know, I wanna see it. And so then I spend time before their visit looking at labs from the last few years. And I teach the RNs how to do that too, cuz there's a lot inside a reference range
28:22
that we can use to see cues for maybe poor digestion or, you know Lots of examples. I'm not gonna go down that tunnel, but, oh yeah. Mine found like all kinds of shit. I mean, she was like, Well we could try 16 things to begin with cuz I'm like, acne, hair loss. I came up with like the craziest and it was like right before Covid and I was like, Fix me? She's like, Yeah, alright. And all my labs are like green, right? I was like, Oh, don't tell me, don't tell me I'm a mess.
28:50
And she's like you're a mess, but we got you. Yeah, for sure. It was hours. Yeah, cuz they say, you know, you go, That's the story that we, we hear all the time from people is everybody told me everything was normal and their A1C was 5.6 for four years and their, you know, fasting blood sugar's been around or over a hundred and it's like, that's not optimal. That person has been in a state of inflammation for years and everybody told 'em they look great.
29:15
I have no idea why you're tired all the time you. I can't prescribe you insulin now, but come back in five years and we can absolutely help you. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. in the meantime, try to do better. Right. Could you lose 10 pounds? Ooh. Makes you not wanna go back. So, so I uncover that kind of stuff and, and more questions I wanna ask when they come. And then we have the visit and we spend 90 minutes together and go over all that. And I get to ask more questions and make connections, and then
29:41
I give them some education. So, The thing that a lot of nurses get hung up on when they're entering the course is, or if they wanna take the course is, I can't diagnose and I can't prescribe. We don't prescribe anything. I don't teach anything that we would prescribe, and we are not diagnosing anybody with anything. We actually go back to nursing diagnoses, which drove everybody crazy in nursing school, but functional medicine is that, it's like caregiver role strain
30:10
and like these, you know, it's, it's the basic things about people. We're not saying they have hypertension. We're saying that maybe they had an exposure to something, or they have a nutrient deficiency that's causing that, or they have sleep apnea that's causing that. So You don't have to diagnose anybody to work in functional medicine, and you don't have to use lab work to diagnose people, But nurses look at labs every day at work, right?
30:31
We go, When I worked at the hospital, I went in there every day and looked, and then you go in the room and tell the patient, Well, actually, your leg cramps are from your low potassium, and here's some foods that are rich in potassium, and here's your supplement of potassium that you're gonna take. Yeah exactly. Yeah, so, so for sure. I think when nurses start to go through that road of, well, I need to learn more to do better, which is messed up, and we could have a whole episode of just
30:57
that phrase, you know, that mindset, they go down the road of learning more, I'd be curious about how long they spend asking questions of their patients. Just, you know, this hasn't been studied, but we'll just go with you and me, and our friends who did the same thing of like, Well, I'll just get this and I'll just learn more and no one can just get this other cert certification and I'll just do that. And then we go in and we're like, Okay, let's look at their chart real quick.
31:24
Boo boo, boo boo. Oh, this is interesting. Let's go talk to their whole, whole room whomever's in there and get a picture. And then, well, how do you sleep? Okay, who do you sleep with? Show me like, Like this way, Or you sleep like sometimes it is like we know them
31:44
. And that's when you're trying to be a nurse that feels good and you're trying to help the whole human and your whole self is trying to help the whole human. You need the whole picture. It's not just labs. Oh, I see that your blood pressure's up. No, that person was super scary. That's why my blood pressure was up. And then you believe them and you take it again and you're like, Oh, thank you I am a kind person. Like that's what your blood pressure's telling me.
32:09
It's a whole different ballgame, a whole different relationship with these humans when we're trying to get out of that, pipeline off the conveyor belt. But then, you know, we don't have enough time to really do that. So then we get in the weeds, like you said, the frustration of wanting to do better, knowing you can do better, having it in you that you could do better. That's what drove me out too though. That like the frustration is killing me like it's moral injury, honestly.
32:36
It's traumatic stress. Secondary traumatic stress. It's these like, who am I working for? What am I doing here? All these like questions start spinning because you're seeing example after example, after example, and it's very helpful to hear you say that that was your journey because I think so many people can resonate with and you have ways for nurses to get back to nursing the way you did.
33:04
Absolutely. Yeah.
33:06
We can do online learning now. Everybody. How wonderful is this ? We can, we don't have to like go back to college,
33:15
pay that, pay into that system. That's also, you know, questionable. And then Do something on our own. And I think a lot of nurses are, I know I've been sending my friends all of the side hustles I can find for them because they're like, like you said, they're just limited in the fact that they think that they have to do it this way because we've been told that we can't pay for our house. We can't put food on the table if we don't do that.
33:42
And you know, that scope of practice question and the believing that we can't, you know yeah, the, it really comes back to that I mentioned the educator part is that nurses are educators. And when a lot of times like students will say, Oh, how can I, I don't know if it's in my scope of practice in my state to be able to do this on my own. And I say, How often have you had in your nursing career? Somebody say, Oh Hey, Mandy, I sprained my ankle last night.
34:10
I'm wondering if I should go to urgent care and they send you a picture or, you know, whatever. How many times do we tell people, go grab alternate ibuprofen in Tylenol and ice and heat and elevate, You know, so those are more harmful than most supplements that in functional medicine, our goal is to not need any, right? It would be awesome if we were just getting everything we needed from our food and our life and our relationships, but sometimes we need supplements.
34:34
Like, I live in Washington, so we need vitamin D. Right? Like, we're not getting it anywhere. How often as a nurse do we say, Oh, I see on your lab work from your primary care provider that your vitamin D is low. Did you know that that can contribute to depression and chronic health conditions such as autoimmune diseases and here's a target range for you. So all of that is educating and that when that light bulb goes off for nurses, that's when they start talking about their own businesses.
34:59
Cuz they're like, Oh my gosh, I can look at labs that they've already had done. Teach them about that. I can teach them about resting and digesting. Even before this, when I saw people for depression, anxiety, my first question was always, how much sleep are you getting? If you're not getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep how are you not going to have a health condition from that ultimately? So when you shine a light on things for people. You educate them.
35:24
They get to go home and make choices for themselves. We're not their bosses, we're not responsible for their health anymore. We're helping them.
35:32
That sounds so good.
35:35
We shouldn't, We're not, Anyways, We're just Saviorism. Saviorism. We're told we're responsible and we are. Misguided that we're out of scope. In our program, one of the biggest questions is, how do I chart this to reduce liability? And so we have to teach about whose liability and who's holding all of the risk and it ain't us.
35:57
And those two things are, the things that I think hospitals use to disempower nurses. Fear specifically fear around our license, fear around litigation, those two things. Those things will take us right outta that barely making it, paying for childcare realm in to can you even support your family. All of these internalized fears that we have and I love hearing you just knock 'em down. No excuses. We can do this. You're not doing anything unsafe. You're not doing anything illegal.
36:32
You're not doing anything to lose your license. That's empowering. We don't hear that very often. Your license is powerful and what you can do with it is impactful now the way it is without adding another license to it. Yeah, because, you know physicians practice functional medicine also, but they still approach things from a medical model. And even the training that I've done, So Inca and the Institute for Functional Medicine have partnered for my course to like endorse it.
37:00
And that's huge because they're like, The parents of functional medicine. They're like gospel. They really focus on quality research. But you know, I've done all their training and it is a physician led training that is very, Evidence based and it's amazing and I'm glad that I did it, but I don't think that nurses need to do two years of training to have a huge impact because they teach higher level, they go into prescriptive opportunities for treatment, and they go into more advanced testing.
37:31
And I teach testing in my course to the extent that nurses want to know what it is and how to interpret it, but not to the level of go have all your clients do thousand dollars tests for every symptom they have, because the bottom line is what has increased the prevalence of all our chronic diseases is not a lack of a prescription medication or a lack of a surgery. It is our lifestyles and our food choices and stressors. Over half of US adults are deficient in magnesium.
38:00
And that is one of the leading causes of hypertension, actually. So you can throw three full highest dose prescription hypertension medications, antihypertensive medications at somebody, and it's not gonna fix them if their real problem is they're, they're not getting nutrients that every cell in their body needs. So I think that like, you know, nursing as a whole, recognizing the influence that we can have on the path that healthcare has taken and revert it to a place where we're
38:30
the foundation of that and take over. Right? Because, Yeah, because else nobody else has this training, right? and all we have to do is understand that the things that we already know, Are the actual things that are gonna help people get better. We've been blindly following this medical model that is for money, it's for profit, and then also, you know, it's also led by a lot like the American Medical Association makes a lot of decisions that suppress nurses.
38:58
Very frustrating because meanwhile you have nurses over here that are the ones that have the time, generally more than a physician to say, How many vegetables are you getting a week? You know, like, just to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. the trajectory of healthcare today, man. I'm gonna send some postpartum geared nurses your way. Awesome. My, my community needs it. Ready to shake shit up.
39:23
Oh, that's so exciting. My wheels are spinning. Thank you for sharing this, Brigitte. This is absolutely inspiring. Yeah, it really is, man. This is, My wheels are turning, imagine if, imagine if this is required in medical school.
39:39
We would have any doctors left in the system, but maybe that's what we need. Maybe everyone goes outta the system and that's how we take it down. But yeah, what if this was the course? What if these were the conversations? What if these were the questions that we were asking in medical school in the education that we were giving, what would the American Health, not even healthcare, but like, what would our United States health look like? It would be totally different.
40:06
People would once again, wanna be coming to this country because we had a good lifestyle to, to offer. Right. People were healthy here, people were happy here. Now I feel like so much of our country is just unhappy and stressed and we just run like hamsters and wheels, always going, always on. We always want our patients in perinatal medicine, but I know in all types of medicine and all types of areas where nurses are working. They know that their patients have power.
40:39
They know their patients can make lifestyle changes, but they can also make choices and decisions that impact their health that nurses feel like their hands are tied inside of say the hospital, or even outpatient, anywhere. They give 'em a little information, but those patients are the ones that have to say and speak up and advocate for themselves. We wish we could like whisper all of the things to them. Give them the information they need because we know a lot is on their shoulders.
41:05
Imagine nurses teaching communities just like this, how to do just that. Those are our voters. Those are our committee members. Those are our community leaders. Those are our teachers. Those are our parents in our community that are like, Oh, wait a second. This is what it feels like to be listened to and heard and I can make a powerful, positive impact. And it didn't hurt. Like that's the next generation saying. Mm-hmm. I don't have to, I don't have to suffer for this. Mm-hmm.
41:36
, I can help you without losing anything.
41:39
One of my students in this cohort is a school nurse, and we were talking as a group last week about the power that she has to change the trajectory of health for children. You know, because who she's seeing in her office all day long, they're coming in with diabetes and asthma.
42:00
She has the ability to educate them and their parents and maybe change the course of their whole life. Maybe add 10 years to their life by teaching them the impact of maybe food and gut health on asthma or food choices and diabetes. it's so incredible to think about the impact you can have when you get involved in the community and even reach out to a younger demographic. It's pretty exciting. I was thinking school nurse and school teacher, while you've been
42:26
talking, I'm like, Man, talk about people who are ready to unleash. Nurses and teachers are ready to just get unleashed. Oh, thank you so much, Brigitte. We would love to hear comments from our listeners on what you're thinking. Any responses, questions, comments you have about this episode? You can also on our Instagram at Pulse check dot podcast, and you can also find Brigitte in a few of the links that I've posted below. you have some great blog posts that speak just to nurses that I found
42:54
really, really helpful and inspiring. but at mandy irby.com/pulse check podcast, you can drop us a voicemail with your comments and questions and we'll play them on our next episode and respond to whatever you have in that voicemail and we won't answer it. Don't worry. You just talk it records and then you hang up. All right, Brigitte, is there anything else that you wish to impart on nurses and healthcare professionals and consumers that are listening today?
43:20
I think the bottom line of functional medicine is asking why, and I just think that the pandemic in a one positive of it is that it has made all of us question the practices of healthcare and recognize there's different answers. And so asking why more is a huge thing that I think that patients can try to find a practitioner that is asking those questions and nurses can be. Providers for them, which is really exciting. And live our callings. Right.
43:46
For us to be teachers and healers and empower people. Oh yes. Thank you so much, Brigitte. This has, this has been incredible. Thank you y'all. Thank you. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks so much, Brigitte. This was awesome. Thank you. Bye. Bye Bye.
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