Farrar Duro [0:01]
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the PCOS Revolution podcast. I hope you’ve had a wonderful week and I’m very excited to share a special guest today, who actually has her own podcast and we will share that information with you later on the show. Her name is Adrienne Nolan-Smith, and she actually is a health advocate and blogger as well as podcaster. She was diagnosed with Lyme disease when she was 11 and her conventional doctor prescribed antibiotics but they didn’t work and her mother was told there was no other option. So two years and multiple integrative therapies later, Adrienne was Lyme-free. Now over the years, other health issues came up and each time it became clear that conventional doctors had tools to treat her symptoms, but they never got to the root of the problems, nor do they really try to cure them.

In 2010, Adrienne lost her mother to suicide while she was on anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications to treat schizoaffective disorder. At that point, Adrianne knew she needed to completely switch careers and began working for a healthcare technology company, hoping to fix the system from the inside. After several years working with hospitals, she realized that until wellness is a standard of care, the current chronic disease crisis would only continue to rise. And she also realized that until people demand wellness from their doctors, their brands, their employers, their governments, and ultimately themselves, nothing will change. That’s so true. I wholeheartedly agree. Adrienne founded Wellbe to facilitate this change by helping you get and stay well, and demanding a system that supports you in this endeavor. Adrienne received her BA from Johns Hopkins University, her MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and is a Board Certified patient advocate. She lives in New York City where she was born and raised and she gets well with acupuncture, Chinese herbs and eating mostly clean real food. Welcome Adrienne to the podcast!

Adrienne Nolan-Smith [2:02]
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Farrar Duro [2:04]
And love your blog, we will definitely link to that. But this is looks like definitely such a wonderful resource for people that are even with PCOS or without PCOS, but just wanting to learn about how to get healthy. You actually have many trainings in there and also your podcast. So I know that this is a podcast for PCOS and we didn’t talk about that in your intro, but you had amenorrhea, which for those of you listening who don’t know it’s basically an absence of your cycle, your menstrual cycle for a prolonged period of time. And so tell me about what happened with that. And also we’ll get into kind of the treatment that you had and that sort of thing, because I know that it can look a lot like PCOS.

Adrienne Nolan-Smith [2:57]
Yeah, absolutely. So went to college. As you mentioned, I moved to Baltimore, from New York where I’m from. And about six months after being there, my periods stopped. And it had been normal, you know, coming, probably an average of every 30 days since I was, you know, 12 or 13. And so this was really unusual and strange. And so after about six months, I started to get pretty worried and started to try to research and you mentioned I had this Lyme experience, but since I was about 13, I really hadn’t had many other major health issues. So I hadn’t gone back into this conventional healthcare world where you’re going to all these different kinds of doctors and specialists trying to find answers. So I was reminded about how terrible that process is. But I was going to doctor after doctor, endocrinologists, gynecologists, taking blood tests, doing all that stuff and I was lucky enough because I was at Johns Hopkins to go to some really good Hopkins doctors, but still, it actually wasn’t, you know, providing any answers. And all of them said to me, we don’t see anything particularly wrong with you and your blood work.

Just it’s probably stress, or maybe you lost weight or this or that. And I was like, I didn’t lose any weight. I showed them, you know, I’d steadily gained a little bit of weight having been at college. And, I also, as far as times in my life that I had been really stressed like, college was pretty fun. You know, I was, my parents had been getting divorced and my mom’s mental health had started to decline, but college was kind of a nice escape for me.

So I was able to just kind of put all that aside and make great friends and have fun and so I kind of didn’t believe that that was the answer because I was not feeling particularly stressed and so I kept going and they all told me to take the birth control pill, they just that was like, you know, nothing’s wrong with you, here’s the birth control pill, it was just the standard treatment. And for all of them, I had done enough research to say, look, no, this is a synthetic hormone. Who knows what other side effects is going to happen my body. And also it’s not getting to the root of the problem. I was able to get as a female, my natural period for seven years and now I’m sorry, for six years. And now I’m not so clearly my body is trying to tell me that something is wrong. And I want to figure out what’s wrong and if I take the birth control pill, I not only could create other issues, but I’m going to mask whatever is wrong because I’m going to have this fake period created. And it will continue to get worse until whenever I go off of it.

It could be a full blown who knows, other diagnoses or ovarian cancer, whatever, who knows. And so I said no to all of that actually, finally, one of the doctors, I out of spite, I think I took the birth control pill for two or three months, just to say is don’t get it back naturally. Trust me. They kept saying, Oh, no, you know, yes, you’re right about it’s not going to get to the root cause and it’s, it’s unnatural, but it’ll kickstart your natural one. They kept saying, I said, I don’t believe you, but Okay, I’ll try it. So I think two or three months and then going off of it, sure enough, didn’t get it for several more months. So at I think about a year and a half of not having it, my father was pretty worried and he found me a naturopath because a lot of my Lyme experience had been in the integrative and functional realm. There was no functional medicine realm there.

So the integrative and holistic or whatever you want to call it, medicine world. That was really what got me better. Where all these different therapies that were not antibiotics because it was too late, I think for the antibiotics to work. So my family had grown familiar with this other side of medicine, this other world. So he thought, Well, look, you’ve exhausted all these resources in the conventional healthcare system. All these doctors are saying the exact same thing. They’re hardly doing any work to try to get to the root cause. They’re spending, you know, five or 10 minutes with you. And let’s go to this naturopath. So she was in New York, and I came home for the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. And she looked at my blood work so differently, it was wild. I mean, we spent 45 minutes to an hour just going through it line by line and understanding how all these different things from micronutrient deficiencies to certain indications of having maybe parasites or fungus…

To my thyroid, which I had never gotten a full thyroid panel and seeing that I had hypothyroidism and all these different things were quite connected and I was also having some GI problems when I was at college which is really funny. I went through a phase I think it was my, I don’t remember exactly when but I was you know, chewing a lot of gum and it all had fake sugar in it and I didn’t really make the connection but I was having a lot of constipation issues a lot of like, smelly gas issues just it was weird to me but you know, I think a lot of girls just kind of deal with this stuff they just kind of manage. I remember the stuff I used to do to be able to go to the bathroom…it was like seven-step process with chlorophyll and this and that and and I began to just think that was normal… that’s what you had to do go to the bathroom and now looking back I’m like, that was insane.

A very normal human process, you shouldn’t have to go to so much work to do it, you know. And so, lo and behold, she showed me how the connection between my thyroid and my gut troubles and I include the parasites and fungus and stuff in there because I studied abroad in China when I was 16. And as anybody knows, who’s ever gone to China, there’s a lot of a lot of issues for Westerners, especially with what we call “China Belly” because there’s a lot of issues with their water. And also just there’s a very different set of bacteria for their microbiome. And so Westerners are like, you know, usually really thrown for a loop with their guts.

Farrar Duro [9:52]
That’s putting it nicely!

Adrienne Nolan-Smith [9:55]
I’m sure I mean, it was a long time ago. It was maybe 17 years ago, 18 years ago that I was this time that I’m talking about when I went to study abroad there when I was a junior in high school for four months, but I do remember, having quite a bit of stomach things here and there and also then probably taking Cipro which, of course I thought was like candy. Even everything I knew about my Lyme experience and the natural therapies that had helped me nobody really talked about at that time that it wasn’t okay to take antibiotics all the time. Like we never, we didn’t talk about it. And so I always had tons of Cipro on hand for any kind of GI issue in China, and I’m sure that just wreaked havoc, because, you know, sure enough, this whole period issue started about, let’s say a year and a half after I got back, but that’s enough time to kind of let bad bacteria take hold if you’ve wiped out all the good and bad bacteria through all these different courses of antibiotics. So my thyroid, my gut issues both with like, how much fake sugar I was eating, which does a lot of damage to your gut, as well as these parasite, fungus and things I had picked up in China, and wiping out all the good bacteria with my antibiotics…over “antibioticing” myself.

And then couple that with this or rather both of these things really playing into your hormones and your hormones not being balanced. And so what she was able to see was I was really not making or secreting enough testosterone, and you need both estrogen and testosterone to have your menstrual cycle. And so things were just like really out of whack. And so, on one hand I remember being like a little frustrated because there wasn’t a silver bullet like a one thing that was why I lost my period. It was a lot more. It just showed how interconnected all these different systems in my body were, and how it was just a such a delicate balance. And if you messed up one, you know, you mess with your gut, then your hormones spiral. Or if you have this underlying thyroid condition that affects your gut and then your hormones can spiral so I realized how connected everything was. And so we started doing this protocol of Chinese herbs by capsules, a ton of supplements based on the micro-nutrient deficiencies she was seeing in my blood work, and then radically changing my diet.

You know, this was in 2006 is when I started with her, so we didn’t call it gluten-free, but I wasn’t allowed to eat wheat. No sugar because the sugar fed the fungus and no processed foods because, you know, all bad bacteria loves processed foods. And then I think her only she really didn’t stipulate anything regarding dairy or meat intake. And I just remember that one of her other major issues was about raw food. So I had to stop eating raw food out that I didn’t wash myself. So no sushi, I haven’t had sushi since 2006, as far as raw fish, and even you know, I was a college girl. What do college girls do? We eat salads constantly, right? We think we’re going to get fat otherwise, and yet, I had to completely change my diet and I couldn’t eat a salad unless I made it myself. And I couldn’t eat fruit at a restaurant unless I washed it myself.

So it was a huge adjustment and sure I was I was like, “What? This doesn’t make any sense”, but I learned how to do it. And I didn’t get fat, it was fine. Everything was fine with my body and sure enough doing this diet protocol with the Chinese herbs, the supplements and a little bit of acupuncture when I was in New York to see her but that wasn’t that often. She said do this for six months and your period will come back and six months and a day later. It did it was like so right on the time. And I remember what was cool was she was using some Chinese herbs that were meant for fertility and menstrual cycle issues. And we just chose the moon cycle to you know, create a new period because my body forgot when to do it, and it had been so long since the last one. And so it was a full moon.

I thought that was pretty neat. And, yeah, it’s been completely normal ever since. And by normal I mean, it comes, you know, every 28 to 32 days, every month and yeah, that was 13 years ago. So it was a huge eye opener for me both in the on the conventional healthcare side, how few of those very notable doctors that I had to skip waiting list to get into see, really cared at all about finding out the root cause of what might be going on. And how many of them through birth control at me and had I taken their advice and taking it for years. And just assume that, you know, oh, I’m getting this big period. This is good enough. Those thyroid issues, those parasites, fungus issues, gut issues, all of these things would have gotten worse and worse and worse without me intervening and changing my lifestyle and certain way and kind of doing a protocol to kill off the bad and strengthen the good. And I don’t know where I would be now, you know, if I had stayed on a long time or say I stayed off until my you know, mid 30s or something and then wanted to get pregnant and couldn’t, you know, there’s just so many things that could have gone differently had I really listened to them. And so I’m, you know, really glad that you didn’t. But anyway, it was that’s my story with amennorhea.

Farrar Duro [16:28]
Yeah, that’s so true. And I think it’s kind of hard because I know that the medical system is not set up to spend as much time with a patient as a naturopath would or an acupuncturist would really reading everything line by line, like you said, they pretty much have five or 10 minutes. And so what can you do in five or 10 minutes? It’s really just write a prescription instead of going in a little deeper. It takes a lot of work. And I think that more and more we’re seeing that there’s been a shift since then, and it’s a similar experience where I had birth control thrown at me, but why do you want to induce a pill bleed? It’s not really even a period. What does it really solve? I think it kind of gets people out the door. And unfortunately, and it’s really up to you to as a woman to actually start to research like you did. And, you know, I think even you had all the greatest, like you said, healthcare facilities and providers, but sometimes it’s just a matter of finding what works for you. And that’s so true…while birth control would have probably suppressed certain things, but also aggravated a lot of other things. As we know, including inflammation. So, where are you now as far as with the Lyme and with you know, the autoimmune issues.

Adrienne Nolan-Smith [17:58]
So yeah, so I have not I mean, I...