EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Sarah Wood
Sarah Wood is a Registered Nurse and has worked as a Clinical Research Assistant at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and for Dr. Gafford at Lubbock Integrative Medicine
Sarah’s journey into healthcare started when she was 14 years old and had to offer first aid after an accidental gunshot wound to save the life of her stepmother. At that moment she decided she wanted to do everything to always know what to do to help people and to have the most updated knowledge to give the best care possible.
Her experience with research started at the Clinical Research Institute at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. She was working with some very principal investigators that came up with original ideas based on their clinical practice of how to improve the lives of their patients and how to improve their care. Sarah would help them develop their studies, carry out their studies, and take care of their patients during the studies.
When her husband went through some health challenges, Sarah sought out a less stressful job and started working with Dr. Gafford, treating patients with Traditional Chinese Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine.
As an RN Sarah is a health coach which is a term that is thrown around a lot. This episode discusses what makes a good health coach and how to choose the one that is the best fit for your situation.
As someone who has worked in both western and eastern medicine and has a well rounded background in what is considered alternative and also traditional medicine, Sarah shares her opinion on why there is often a lack of understanding and cooperation between the different specialties and what to do to break down this divide.
Sarah gives a plea to researchers to publish their findings regardless of whether it supports their hypothesis or not in the spirit of moving science forward and avoiding to repeat the same mistakes.This is important because it not only improves patient care, but it improves the overall knowledge that your practitioners have out there for taking care of their patients.
There are different ways to design research studies and Sarah discusses how to design a study in a manner that helps people rather than just pushing profits for the sponsors of the study.
Sinus issues are something that has plagued Sarah. She found out her sinus infection was really a “pain in the neck”! It is wonderful to have it gone and feel better,
To contact Ruth:
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck. I'm here today with someone who's become a good friend of mine, even though we've only known each other, I think maybe about a year or so. Her name is Sarah Wood. Welcome, Sarah.
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
Sarah and I first met when I just cold-walked into the place where she works. Usually, people are a little suspicious of people who do that. When I say cold, it wasn't exactly cold because my husband had reached out multiple times to Sarah's boss at the time, and we were having trouble getting ahold of him. I just walked in and thought, "Well, maybe I can get stuff done this way." Do you remember that, Sarah?
I do. At the time I did not realize you had tried to reach out to-
I realize that, yes.
-Dr. Gafford ahead of time. I was completely unaware. [chuckles]
Yes. There's a saying that I thought about when I was preparing to talk to you today that says, "First impressions last," but I don't think that's true in this case.
Oh, how do you mean?
A lot of times you say first impressions are really important, but I think your first impression of me is like, "What she want to sell me? What's going on? Why is she walking in?" Anyone who works at a front desk-type situation knows there are calls and people walking in, who have an agenda and want to sell you something.
That's true. That's true.
I think that's probably what you thought.
It was. Yes, it was. It was what I originally thought.
Yes, and then also when I walked in, my first impression of you, you were new in your role at that time. I think it was your second week. You had a little, to be honest, deer-in-the-headlights look.
I believe that entirely, yes. [laughs]
Yet you are one of the smartest, most savvy, most caring people that I know.
Oh, thank you.
That's why I have you here today.
Thank you very much.
Sarah, you are a registered nurse. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your qualifications today. Then I want you to go into your background because I think it's fair to say that not only do you have a bunch of varied experience within the healing profession and you have a huge amount of experience in healing, but I think it's also fair to say you have a talent and you came to it really early on.
Yes. I am now currently a registered nurse. My journey into healthcare started with the night that my-- I grew up on a farm in Michigan, and my stepmom and I, and my stepsister were always on the farm alone at night because my dad would go off to work at his night job. It was just the three of us there. I had my radio really loud because I was 14, and that's what 14-year-olds like to do, is play their music too loud. All of a sudden my stepsister came to my door in a clinical panic, which I'm not going to do because it makes me hyperventilate. [laughter] She came to my door panicked and saying, "Ma shot herself."
Wow.
It was interesting. I pushed her to the phone and dialed 911, waited for the operator to pick up, shoved the phone at her, and said, "Speak," waited for her to say something, and then I went running outside.
You're saying she shot herself. Tell us a little bit about that. It was an accident, from what I understand.
Yes. It was entirely accidental. We had a lot of chickens on the farm. My stepmom absolutely loved them. She went out that night to protect them from a skunk. Shot the skunk once. We did not know the safety was broken on the gun. She was doing everything she was supposed to, but the safety was broken. When her finger twitched on the trigger, she fired it off, and it entered on the outside of her right leg just below the knee, ricocheted all the way down both bones and exited on the same side out her ankle.
Wow.
She had an entry and exit wound on the same side on that leg and just completely had shattered the bottom part of her leg.
You're 14, and your older sister is panicked?
Yes, but that's just the way things go in emergency situations. Whoever isn't panicked, it doesn't matter their age or experience, they take over. I made sure Shannon-- My understanding was that as long as you said something to emergency services, they were going to send an ambulance. I just made sure she said something, and then I went out to take care of Georgia. I got out to the barn. There was no moon that night, I could not see anything. The lights around the barn wasn't working. It was completely pitch black.
It's interesting you have that memory just glued in you.
Yes. That was one of the difficulties to me was, my dad would always cut seat belts out of old cars from the junkyard because their tensile strength is so great. We had those all over the place and I was looking for one of those to tourniquet her leg, and it was so dark I couldn't see anything.
At age 14, how did you know to tourniquet her leg?
Old westerns. [laughter]
Oh, wow.
It was entirely because of old westerns, was my experience-
You take lessons from movies.
-with what you do with a gunshot wound. I couldn't find it. I ended up finding some bailing twine. I sat behind her and let her lean into me and had my arms around her and tourniqueted her leg. Kept that pressure on and kept her awake and aware for the 45 minutes that it took for the ambulance to get all the way out to our farm. They got there and--
You made a realization after that, you told me?
Yes. That was the moment where the ambulance driver, the EMT when they got there, they said that I had saved her life, but because I used a tourniquet and instead of applying pressure, which I would like to pause here for a moment and make it clear that the current research shows tourniquet, always tourniquet, don't relieve the pressure on the tourniquet until you're in an emergency room. Ignore this part of it as far as medical care goes.
You did the right thing at that time.
I did actually do the right thing, but at the time, current research was showing don't tourniquet, apply pressure to the entry and exit wound, and that's what he told me. I was afraid she was going to lose her leg because I had done the wrong thing.
Oh.
From that moment on, I never wanted to not know what to do to help somebody medically. That became my sole focus, was going into medicine and increasing that knowledge and knowing what I should do to help people.
Right, and since the age of 14, you've had this drive to always know more.
Yes.
With our bodies, there's always more to know.
Always, always, and always new research showing new things that we thought we knew, and turns out there's more there. There's always more there.
You've said the word "research" several times already.
Yes, research has always been very close to me.
Talk about your experience with research and then how you got into research.
Originally, in high school, I wanted to join the CDC and do research. That eventually became, I wanted to be a nurse, and I became a nurse.
The CDC is?
The Centers for Disease Control.
All right. Believe it or not, we actually have listeners from around the world who may not know what CDC is.
Anytime you talk to somebody in the research field, we have to pull ourselves back. We all want to use the acronyms like crazy. They go all over.
Okay. I will try to call you out on that if it happens. [laughs]
Please do. I wanted to do research. When I was in high school, I would spend hours looking at microscope slides trying to learn what I was looking at. I wanted to be a microbiologist. That was the drive at the time, and it ended up turning into becoming a nurse. I love being a nurse, but I've always had that background love of research. It was amazing when we came here to Lubbock, that eventually I realized I could do research as a nurse. It's one of those things that I did not even realize that the nurses could be researchers.
What kind of research did you go into and what was your journey there?
I joined the Clinical Research Institute at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. I got the wonderful privilege of working with some very amazing principal investigators that just, they came up with these original, wonderful ideas just based on their clinical practice of how to improve the lives of their patients and how to improve their care. One of them is Dr. Griswold, and he has just revolutionized burn care over the last 30 years. He's actually, at the time that I left the Clinical Research Institute, he had become the head of the Clinical Research Institute. Just doing all of those different research studies and being able to work with those principal investigators.
Help them develop their studies, carry out their studies, take care of their patients during the studies. Then see that follow-up and see it go to print where that knowledge can get out there to everybody else, and everybody else can learn from that and grow their practices was just a wonderful thing to see.
Yes, that's the beautiful thing about research is getting the information out. The more you know and the better the knowledge that you have, the better your decisions can be in small things and large things. I want to know what kind of research projects you're involved in.
I can be vague about it. I can't get into too much detail.
All right. Just tell us what you can. Give us an idea.
Dr. Leslie Shen, I got the huge privilege of working on some wonderful projects with her, and she specializes in trying to improve the health of postmenopausal women specifically. She has done some studies on taichi and various supplements, ginger, turmeric, a specific type of vitamin E called tocotrienols. She's looking for ways to help improve their health because when you go through menopause, your hormones change, and your body doesn't work quite the same way it used to.
I have found that out firsthand. I'm right there.
It's, you have to have that specialized research for different areas and different groups of people.
Yes, I appreciate that. I think I might ask you some questions about that off-air.
[laughter]
We can do that. Then I got to work with Dr. Phil Sizer and Lindsay Penrose, Dr. Penrose. They had developed this amazing study for helping women in the third trimester of pregnancy with low back pain. The current treatments have just been shown to be ineffective, but there's very little you can do in the third trimester of pregnancy without harming the baby for low back pain.
Chiropractic is actually one of the things you can do that's very effective. I don't know if that was part of your study.
It wasn't, but that is good to know. I'm going to keep that in mind.
That is atrocious to me.
No, it's more a matter of it wasn't part of the study just because Dr. Sizer is a physical therapist.
Okay, I see.
That's his specialty, so he was working at it from the physical therapy side of it. No, it wasn't that they were excluding chiropractic. I would like to know more about that.
Actually, my call to action is chiropractors need to publish studies on that, the efficacy of chiropractic in the third trimester of pregnancy. That's my call to action. If you know a chiropractor, or you have a chiropractor, or you are a chiropractor, I--
Maybe that can be Dr. Elder's next research study.
Yes. Actually, his interests go other places. I'm sure there are studies that we can find, so I'll look for those, yes.
It's a good call to action.
Dr. Elder actually is involved in research at a high level. There's so many different things that you can research, and the more specialized you get, it's like getting to know more and more about less and less.
Yes, that's the general flow of research. You start out with the very general, and then you get more and more specific until you're finding out exactly how to treat each patient population just the way they need to be treated. If you keep it too general and you never do that specific research, then it becomes one size fits all medicine. That only helps, it turns out, a very small percentage of people, not the majority of people.
Yes, exactly. That is a good point, something that Dr. Elder does talk a lot about is helping more people with more things, more of the time. What it comes down to is percentages. I think everybody who's in the healing profession helps people. It's just, who do you help and how many, and what's your success rate?
Yes, exactly.
You were working at the hospital, at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center.
Yes.
When we met, back to the story at the beginning, you were not at the hospital.
No. My husband went through a difficult journey medically, and it became necessary for me to leave that job to be able to provide him and our family the care that they needed. I went and worked with Dr. Gafford at the Lubbock Integrative Medicine. He is an acupuncturist and doctor of oriental medicine, so he can also prescribe traditional Chinese medication. At the time that we met, we were still trying to figure out what my role is. I've got all this background, and I'm a nurse, but I was basically functioning as the receptionist at the time.
Go ahead.
Over time, we kept throwing ideas out there of how I could best be utilized in the practice. We ended up settling on me being a health coach, which I think is a great thing. We need more nurses out there to be guided through their medical care so that they can understand what all the different options are out there, and the different modalities to help with what specifically is going on with them.
I want to grab ahold of this term, "health coach." If you can address that, what that looks like from a nursing perspective because I see that term being thrown around a lot, "health coach." It could mean everything from selling one product, maybe being part of an organization. Basically being a salesperson for a product that is purported to help your health in some way. They call themselves a health coach to very highly educated people and everything in between. If someone thinks, "I have a lot of health problems, and I don't know where to turn in my health, a health coach sounds good to me," how do you advise people to navigate that field?
If you're looking for a health coach, there's actual certifications in health coaching. Any registered nurse is qualified to be a health coach. The training that we go through and the experience that we get as nurses does qualify us to be a health coach without any certification. The Board of Nursing is also concerned about that. When I talked to them and verified that I was qualified to be a health coach just with my RN and not needing to get that certification, that the American Nurses Association and the various state boards of nursing were working to try to bring that under the purview of a nurse so that people were not getting health advice from people that didn't actually have the knowledge they needed to give that.
If you're going to use a health coach that is not a nurse, which is okay, but if you're going to use a health coach that's not a nurse, they should have a certification from an actual accredited agency.
How do we know if a agency is accredited?
That's where it gets a little bit difficult. There's the whole process with knowing whether or not an agency is accredited. If you can call your state board of nursing and ask whether or not an agency is accredited, that's helpful, but there's just a tremendous number of accrediting agencies, and it is a process. I know how to look for it myself, but it's a difficult process to go through to find that accreditation. It's best if your health coach has a degree, quite frankly. That certification is okay, but it's best if they have a degree. If they're a physical therapist, or they're actually trained to take care of your needs that you're asking them to take care of.
Maybe ask about references, and maybe it's flat out say, do you have-- You said something useful to me when we were talking yesterday. You said, "What is your experience in treating my particular issue?" Something to that effect.
Yes. A physical therapist is great, but should you have them looking at your medication list and helping you make those decisions?
No.
They should be referring you to somebody who's got that training.
Same thing with a chiropractor. You don't ask your chiropractor about your medication. Not qualified.
Exactly.
About the alignment of the spine, ask your chiropractor. About your muscle strain, ask your physical therapist.
Exactly. That's the same thing. If your health coach is a nurse, and they're trying to do physical therapy with you, they're stepping outside their lines. They're supposed to be referring you to a physical therapist. As a health coach, you're supposed to be helping someone navigate their own care, not providing all of their care.
For you as a health coach, it's more like you're directing traffic. It's like, "Okay, you need to see a physical therapist. Maybe you see a massage, maybe you go for acupuncture for this. Go see the upper cervical doctor for your post-concussion syndrome," those kind of things?
Yes, exactly. A health coach will quite often, what they'll do is the first time they bring you in, they'll usually have you do a survey of some kind, to see what barriers you have to moving forward in your health because that's usually the point where somebody will actually seek out a health coach is they're saying, "I've tried all this, I've tried all this, I've tried all this, I've tried all this." A lot of the time, the barrier to moving forward is there's either a resource that you didn't know that you needed, that is out there, or there's something going on within you that's keeping you from moving forward.
You have a toxic relationship you didn't realize you had. You have a barrier in your own thinking that's keeping you from moving forward. You have time constraints that you've over-committed yourself in one area and are simply not allowing yourself the time you need to get healthy. A health coach is not a counselor unless they're trained as a counselor, but they can help you to see these things are setting up barriers for you. If we break down this barrier first, then we can move forward with the other things.
Sounds good. I want to switch direction just a tiny little bit because we were talking extensively about how different specialties often are suspicious of each other is where we started. You were somewhat suspicious of me when I first walked in with you. My intention was, I want to get these doctors together so that they can understand each other and find out about each other's specialty with the goal of helping more people. We do upper cervical here, and we do that better than anyone in the area, but we talked about being a specialist means you know more and more about less and less or a narrower field.
In order to be the best at treating the neck, by definition that means that there are other things we don't do. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, we have complicated health issues, and we have more than one thing wrong with us a lot of times. My heart was, let's build a network of people that are really, really excellent in their field, and have them understand each other and get to know each other and trust each other, and help each other out. I feel like when really smart, dedicated healers, healing profession, or healthcare professionals work together, more people can get help more of the time.
Yes.
You had some really smart thoughts, and why that isn't happening? Once we started talking, I think that's when we really became friends because we could understand each other.
Absolutely. There's this gap that occurs in different specialties because the more you specialize, the more you tend to hang out with your own specialty.
That makes sense.
The more that you get engrossed in that and believe deeply in it, which is a good thing. When you have specialties that have any kind of overlap in care, that are not familiar with other specialties, that don't know people in those other specialties, and talk to them, what you end up seeing is, say the chiropractor, or rather it would be more likely, I suppose, your surgeon maybe, they are used to being around surgeons. They're used to seeing things from a surgical perspective, which they should, but they'll get a patient who's using alternative medicine, a complementary medicine.
That patient may be seeing someone who's fully qualified to be advising them, but the patient never completely understands. Otherwise, they would be a doctor, they would be a medical professional. They never completely and totally, fully grasp every aspect of what they're being told by their specialist. They grasp enough to be compliant, which is what we hope for. [laughs]
By compliant you mean they follow the doctor's advice?
Yes, and that they understand it well enough to make a good advised decision on how they want to proceed with their health care. They're not going to ever fully understand it unless they go to school and learn it. They go from their alternative medicine doctor, and they go over here to, just as an example, their surgeon, and they say, "This doctor told me to do this." The surgeon is like, "That doesn't make sense. Why did they tell you to do that?" The patient who doesn't fully understand it is trying to explain it to a surgeon who has never talked to this other doctor.
The doctor is going, "Oh, well, that's crazy and kooky." It turns out, it's not crazy and kooky. It's not well explained. The way to break down those barriers, in my opinion, is to do what you are doing, which is to get people together, where they can see and understand and talk to each other in the medical profession, to really fully understand what those other perspectives are, and know who they can trust to send their patients to.
Here you are, you've been employed at a major research university hospital, as well as a doctor of oriental medicine that does mainly herbal medicine and acupuncture. You were talking about research in those two settings.
Yes. Originally, Dr. Gafford had hired me to do research with him. We never quite got there, we got all set up, but things were just so busy in his practice, we never quite were able to bring it back to that.
I feel like that is actually one of the hurdles for a lot of doctors, that it takes a lot of time, a lot of money. Then when you're busy taking care of patients, how do you do this other full-time job of doing research too?
Exactly. Coordinators, that's what we're designed for, research coordinators. We're trained to try to take that research load off you and give the primary investigator just enough information, or just the right precise information that they need to keep the patients safe and to keep the research flowing. Most of the process should be handled by the coordinator.
Then it's the issue of funding it.
Funding is always a huge issue, but that's one of the things that I loved about working with the Clinical Research Institute, is we had so many of our doctors that did not have large funding sources. We came alongside them and helped them and helped their residents to understand how to create studies that weren't going to cost them anything more than just the cost of the coordinator, which at the Clinical Research Institute, they didn't have to pay for the coordinator, but most of the time you do. That was just built into the university.
For instance, if we were going to have a research coordinator here, we would have to put you on our payroll to do that.
Yes. It takes a lot of time to coordinate research, so it's the essential. It's, if you can find a way to design the research, because if you enroll 60 people, but it costs you $150 for every last one of those enrollments, it doesn't seem like $150 is that much. When you multiply it by 60 people, that's a good chunk of change that you either have to pull out of your own pocket to do your research, or find funding. If the research is not expected to actually do anything other than improve quality of care, if it's not going to financially benefit some corporation or someone, it becomes very, very difficult to find that funding.
That is significant. Essentially, what you're saying is, if it's just for people's benefit, it's harder to do the research. I think maybe you want to address that where people say, "I only want to follow the evidence."
When you have a hypothesis, and you find, through your research, that you were wrong, your hypothesis was wrong, please, please, please still publish that result because other people will follow you down that rabbit hole and spend their time and expense and money, and resources of themselves going down that same rabbit hole. The idea you came up with was valid. There's a reason why a well-educated person came up with that idea. More educated people are going to come up with that idea. If you don't publish the research showing that, yes, I thought it was going to be this but it turned out to not be--
Whether or not people lose money on it is for people's benefit to know the true result.
Exactly. A result is always a result, even if it's not the result you wanted to get, even if you've disproved yourself. That's still a result and still needs to be shown that it was a result. Even if you get no clinical significance at all and you show that it was just a misnomer, people still need to know that because other people are going to follow you down that rabbit hole. That's why you see that so many discoveries in science, it turns out they barely beat out somebody that didn't even know they existed in another country. Everybody was thinking along the same terms at the same time. It's just, we only know that this famous person came up with this idea because they managed to publish it first.
That's why it's important to publish the studies and publish the results.
Yes, it's so, so important because it not only improves patient care, but it improves the overall knowledge that your practitioners have out there for taking care of their patients.
You said something yesterday about doing research that moves science forward versus doing science that just bring in funds for a certain business.
That's a difficult thing. I've gotten better, having worked in research, at being able to read a research study and determine whether or not the study was set up from the beginning, that no matter what happened, they were going to get a certain result, but even I can't spot it a lot of the time. A lot of the time it takes somebody who's actually trained as a biostatistician to be able to look at the statistical analysis, and the design of the study, and say, "This statistical analysis would actually prove or disprove a point," because, some statistical analyses, if you don't use the right pattern for that type of study, are just going to show whatever result you want it to show no matter what happens.
That's poor research. That's just trying to prove a point so that a company can make money. I'm not okay with that kind of research. It can be hard to spot, especially when you're looking at the final published study instead of actually seeing the whole protocol that went into making that research.
I just have one more question about research before I have another question in a totally different direction. Just, fair warning.
Sure.
A long time ago when we first started talking about research, you said something about people thinking modern western medicine is based on science and oriental medicine is just mystical or something like that. When in reality it's different than that.
Yes. That's very much not the case. The Chinese and oriental world has been doing research and proving that their techniques work, acupuncture and herbal medicine, and all of that. They've been doing that research for 5,000 years.
Basically, they have a head-start by thousands of years.
They do, and we have the actual archeological proof that they have been doing it. Now, did research look exactly the way it does now, back then? Of course not. It looked different. You had one person who was a practitioner who didn't really design a study, they just had notes from patients, and they said, "Okay, this is what's going on." That was still research even if it wasn't designed just the way we did, and we've been proving that over time.
Especially when you have thousands of years worth of it.
Exactly. You have multiple people through multiple generations showing, yes, this is working, or no, this isn't working. All of that, it all starts back 5,000 years ago in, I believe, China, but I might be wrong about that, but somewhere in the Orient. That's really where clinical research was born. The idea that we've magically made it, that we just came up with it later, on and we have refined it, we've made it into something better and we will continue to, and 150 years down the road, it's going to be even more amazing, the kind of research we can do.
We have those roots that we came from and that oriental medicine is proven. Whether we always understand exactly what's going on scientifically, doesn't matter if we can see the results because we are emotional spiritual beings existing in a physical body. Even Western medicine will prove this, if you ignore the emotional-physical being and just focus on the body, the body is going to die. You can't ignore that side of it. Oriental medicine brings in that side of it. It remembers to not forget that. Often Western medicine does too. Nurses are trained, doctors are trained to bring that side of it in. I just think it's brought in more fully, more often in Oriental medicine than it is in Western medicine.
Again, I think when we had this conversation before, your encouragement again was for doctors to understand each other and talk to each other and fully understand each other's background instead of putting a line and saying, "This is modern medicine, and this is oriental medicine, and they don't mesh," instead of figuring out how can we work together and understand each other and take everything to the next level.
Absolutely. Surgery has been being done in China for thousands of years as well. Surgery, in my opinion, has been refined into an amazing fine art through Western medicine. When you need surgery, you need surgery.
Like your mom's leg?
Like my mom's leg, exactly. She had to have multiple surgeries to repair that. What I found now is if we had had somebody like Dr. Gafford, or somebody else in that side of it brought in afterwards, her healing could have been tremendously sped up. Her recovery could have been more comfortable. Her likelihood of getting that gangrene infection that she had to fight off would've been less likely. All of that works together and should work together. You need different aspects of medicine for different aspects of the person, but they all have to work together to get a whole healthy human being.
Yes. I have one other question. What's the neck got to do with the sinuses? [laughter] You can tell that story if you want-
I can tell the story.
-or you can go about telling it however you want.
I understand it's told from my perspective, and Ruth might have a different perspective. From my perspective, it basically went, Ruth was standing there talking to me one day. We were having a conversation about, I don't even know what, but all of a sudden she stopped, and she went, "I know that this is a little bit of an invasive question, and you don't have to answer it, but are you having sinus issues? I can just tell by the way that you're holding yourself up." I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have been having sinus issues." She was like, "No, you've got to come in.
You've got to see Dr. Elder. I'm pretty sure that we can fix this. There's no guarantees, but I think we can help you with this. I think we can get rid of this sinus infection for you." I talked to Dr. Gafford, and he was like, "Yes, that sounds great." He sent me over, and we had been trying to fight this sinus issue since-- It started before I started working for Dr. Gafford. I had gone through two rounds of antibiotics before I started working for Dr. Gafford. It wouldn't go away. It wouldn't get better. Then I met him, and he started doing acupuncture and herbal treatments.
It got tremendously better, but still wouldn't go away and still kept coming back and still kept recurring. Then I went to Dr. Elder, and he put my neck in alignment through wonderfully gentle adjustment. Oh my goodness, the dramatic improvement in that sinus issue. It still periodically comes back a little bit, but what I'm finding is when it starts to come back a little bit, if I go back and get my neck adjusted, guess what goes away? [laughter] It's, there's this definite connection between having good spinal fluid flow and good neurological flow through my neck and having a sinus infection, which if you really get down into the nitty gritty of it really makes sense, but isn't something that would've occurred to me, that that would be a thing.
I have since referred people with sinus issues over to your clinic because I'm like, "Wait. No, I know you don't think this is connected, but it might be."
Yes. Thank you for being willing to share that story.
Yes. I'm tremendously happy that he was able to help me so hugely because it's a huge distracting thing. It kept moving into my ear and causing ear pain, and it was very painful. It was throwing off my equilibrium periodically when it would get really bad. It's just tremendously wonderful to not be living with that pain every day anymore.
That's great. I've asked you some questions based on some of our conversations that we've had, but you know so much more. Is there something that you just wanted to share that I haven't touched on?
When people have found that they've hit a wall in their medicine, when they've found that they've hit that spot where they don't think there's any hope left anymore, and I'm not talking about valid end-of-life care, that's different, then that's when medicine and nursing and doctors and specialists should step in and help a person to understand what they're going through and help them to have the most peaceful death that they can have. That can be a beautiful, wonderful thing too, but what I'm talking about is when you think there's still a possibility, when you've tried everything when it feels like there should still be a solution out there, don't stop asking and trying.
If you still think there's a solution out there, it might be something you never expected. There were so many people that came into our clinic and that I've sent over here to Dr. Elder, that had been to so many different types of specialists and thought, "I'm just going to have to live with this pain the rest of my life. I'm just going to have to live with this debilitating illness the rest of my life."
It's almost everybody that we see.
Yes. There is still hope out there. It might be a path that you did not expect it to be, but it's still worth trying another thing to find that healing and that hope. I've seen so many in the last year and a half. So many, just for lack of a better word, miraculous recoveries for people that the words out of their mouth was, "This is the last thing I'm willing to try. I've tried so many things." To have them actually get that full recovery and see them go through that path, it makes me want to just go out there and find every person that doesn't have that hope left, that's like, "I'm at the end of my rope," and be like, "Wait, talk to me.
Have a conversation with me." That is another way that health coaches can help, is please do have those conversations with your nurses, with your doctors. Ask them, "Are there other things that you think might help?" Be willing to go that extra mile for your health because even when you've been living with something that's debilitating for years, and you can barely even remember what it was like to not live with that. There is still the possibility of hope because not only is there the possibility of something that you haven't tried that is actually that perfect thing for you, but we're constantly doing research.
We're constantly doing new things trying to find solutions to those questions that we couldn't answer yesterday. It's possible in the last 5 or 10 years that we have found your answer. We just have to find you the right person that knows how to do it because it's a new thing and not everybody is doing it and not everyone is aware of it yet.
I want to thank you so much for your time, and I am sure that because of this conversation, somebody is going to find hope and health, and healing. Thank you for that, Sarah.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here, Ruth.