041: How to Be Your Own Health Advocate, with Misty Williams

Have you ever known something was wrong with your health, gone to your doctor only to be told you are “normal”? Our guest, Misty Williams, has and she’s here to talk about it. Today Misty is the founder of Healing Rosie, an online space that provides women with the resources they need to reclaim their well-being. But it wasn’t long ago Misty was learning how to be your own health advocate.

To hear how Misty began this journey we start at the beginning of hers. She went into the doctor at age 35 for a routine physical. She asked her doctor to check on her fertility because she had begun hearing her biological clock ticking; Misty was shocked when they found a cyst the size of a large cantaloupe. She was referred to a specialist for surgery and thought it was a routine procedure. Within two days she was so sick she couldn’t keep water down. Six days later they found the problem: part of her intestine had been stitched up during the surgery.

But that wasn’t the end. During her follow up appointment, her doctor told her she had endometriosis and they didn’t know why Misty had this health condition. The doctor also told her they had removed one of her ovaries, and if it came back they would do surgery again. Misty didn’t want that path, and being the overachiever she was, she continued her search for answers.

Misty explains what actions she took next including how bioidentical hormones helped her. After years of struggling and revolving doctors’ visits, she wanted to help other women find providers and resources that actually help and actually listen. With Healing Rosie she did just that: it is an online space where women can get the support they need.

On today’s episode, she tells us what is in store for the community in the future and a few basic steps everyone can do right now to start improving their health. Join us on episode 41 of Awesome Health Podcast to hear those topics and more with Misty Williams!

Episode Resources

Read The Episode Transcript :

Wade Lightheart: Good afternoon, good morning and good evening. It's Wade T Lightheart at the Awesome Health Podcast and oh boy. We've got an action packed set show and session with you today with none other than Misty Williams and she's going to talk about how to be your doctor's boss. I love that concept. First and foremost, you have to remember that your boss works for you. He is not a dictator and you need to ask them questions and you need to direct them in order they do or you're just going to get the standard treatment. Now, Misty has a great story. She spent years struggling to reclaim her health and vitality after surgery. Um, there was some life threatening complications. We're going to get into that. I want to hear about all of that, but the bottom line is her doctor told her the only remedies for her issues were drugs and surgeries and then her labs were normal.

Wade Lightheart: How many people have heard that you're normal? Who wants to be normal? I don't want to be normal. I walk around and see normal, normal doesn't look too good to me. It doesn't feel good. People are normally tired, unhappy, unfulfilled, overweight, staring at the book in tube every day. This isn't about normal. This is about feeling awesome. So she's going to talk about some of the things that she did. She founded a group called HealingRosie.com and this is to provide high performing women with the resources and the community to successfully confront the unexpected chronic health issues that women often experience as they age. So Misty.

Misty Williams: Yes. Thank you so much. What a wonderful intro.

Wade Lightheart: Well, you know, I'm excited today.

Misty Williams: Actually, I love your enthusiasm.

Wade Lightheart: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'm, I'm, this is a topic, you know, so let's rewind the tape. 20 years ago, uh, when I was a personal trainer and I got an extraordinary amount of women in this situation there killing it in their business. Some of them had families as well there pushing the limits. Something happens, get a surgery or all of a sudden they get some kind of metabolic thing that gain a ton of weight. They don't know what's going on. They're trying to die at their ways. These are accomplished women that are used to getting it and they're, they feel out of control, they lose a sense of confidence. It starts to impact their work, their family life, their relationships. It's really, really deep. How did you get into telling your doctor or how to be the boss or being the boss for your doc? Like how did that happen? What happened?

Misty Williams: I wish it would have happened even faster actually, cause it took me a while to really get my feet under me with my own journey. You know, my journey started in 2011 when I went in for a routine physical. I was 35 years old. I wanted to be a mother

Misty Williams: and I was curious about my fertility. You know, I hadn't tried to get pregnant up to that point in my life. And um, I was kind of starting to hear the proverbial biological clock ticking and it was just kind of an aside. Okay, do my physical, why don't you check my fertility? So they did an ultrasound and found a cyst the size of a cantaloupe, very large ovary. And got referred out to a specialist, an OB gyn who told me when I went in for that appointment that I needed to have surgery to have the cyst removed. And you know, at the time I wasn't super confronted by that. I was like, Oh, there's a cyst that needs to be removed. And I didn't, I didn't have a frame of reference or anything to make me feel afraid, you know. So I wanted to do surgery pretty lighthearted about it.

Misty Williams: I was going to be an outpatient surgery. I didn't tell a soul. I'm the only person that knew was my roommate. And if she wouldn't have been living with me, she wouldn't have known. I did tell my mom, I did tell my mom, but that was it. I mean for me it was like completely like a non thing. I was just going to go do this little procedure and go on with my life. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 26 years old. Um, I was running half marathons at the time. Um, so this, this to me was just like, we're going to handle it and move on with life and didn't work out so easily. I went in for the surgery after the search over, um, they sent me home with a sheet that said, if any of these things happen, here's your instructions.

Misty Williams: And what wasn't on the sheet was what to do if you start vomiting. And after about 12 hours, I started vomiting. I couldn't keep down food or water. This was on a Thursday. I had called the doctor's office on a Friday. Doctor didn't call me back, no one from a doctor's office called me back. We kept calling and calling on Saturday. We finally had on call doctor call us back that knew nothing about me or my case or situation. And he just said, you know, talk to the doctor on = and if she gets dehydrated, take her to the emergency room, which I mean, who knows, what does it look like when I get too dehydrated? You know? So Saturday, Sunday, Monday I was supposed to have my follow up appointment with the doctor. I call at 4.30, it was a 4 o'clock appointment.

Misty Williams: She'd gone home sick that day. No one had called me to let me know. So Tuesday I packed up the car, 9am I was in the doctor's office. Like I am not leaving until I'm seen, because nothing else had worked for communicating. And I was starting to get really, really scared. Actually starting on Sunday, I started getting really super bloated. Um, everything was swelling just from, from not being able to keep down the water. And I didn't know it at the time, but during that surgery, the doctor had stitched up part of my small intestine and that's why all this was happening. So I wasn't actually in a, in a major crisis situation that could have cost me my life if I hadn't been proactive six days in and gone down to the doctor's office. So I got referred to the emergency room. They stitched me up, you know, fixed, fixed everything and sent me home and I didn't sleep for 144 hours.

Wade Lightheart: 144 hours??

Misty Williams: It's 6 days in case you're trying to do the math.

Wade Lightheart: Where were you going on? Were you losing your mind?

Misty Williams: Awful. It was like torture. Yeah, to be able to sleep. I would go in the first night, it was just weird. I'd never had insomnia before. So the first night was just like, God, I just laid there all night and didn't sleep and it was kind of like this weird thing. I wake up in the morning and I'm like, God, I'm feeling really tired. You know? By the second night I'm like, I got to go to sleep, but I laid there all night and I did not go to sleep and then it just starts being weird like what's going on? And then the third night I'm in bed begging God for sleep. Please please, I need to sleep.

Misty Williams: It was a torture sure. Like emotionally I was falling apart. I was just like a basket case. I hadn't, I wasn't equipped at that time. Who do you call and talk to when you're not sleeping night after night? Like it was such a profound, unexpected phenomenon for me. I had no clue what to do. I mean, now I'm so well connected that I would, you know, I have a whole Rolodex, but back then it was, it was just like I didn't, didn't know what to do and I really didn't trust the doctor who never, her office didn't call me back for six days, you know, like I'm not going to reach out to them and get any help, you know. So it was sucky. Um, I've talked to people since I likely just had so much cortisol. That was, that's an extreme amount of stress for your body to be under, to not, um, not be able to process food and water for that long.

Misty Williams: Um, I'm sure I was severely dehydrated and just all the things, you know. Um, so all this, all that cortisol just kept me from being able to sleep. I was so out of balance, but yeah, it was super scary. And finally went in for my follow up visit afterwards, doctor told me that I had endometriosis. They had spent two and a half hours moving scar tissue from my abdomen. When they were in there, they'd removed the a cyst from my left ovary and they also removed my left ovary. And I was stunned. I remember sitting in a chair. I was, I already kind of went in. The follow up home was two weeks later and six of those days I hadn't slept. So I was already kind of going in like my, I was experiencing fatigue and brain fog and like all these symptoms had kicked up that I had no experience with. I mean, before this, I thought I was super healthy and enjoying a great life, you know? So I asked her during our session, right, what is endometriosis, that's a disease? I've heard of it. What do I need to do? Like I'm an achiever. You just tell me, give me the list. Do I need to change my diet? You know, kind of just tell me what to do.

Wade Lightheart: Yeah, right. Give me, give me the program here. Let me go integrate it. We're doing it.

Misty Williams: Well, I'm up for it. And she was like, we don't know what caused it to me. You can Google it, I can put you on birth control and we can do surgery if it comes back. And that was it. It was kind of like, she didn't really want to spend a lot of time with me. The appointment was maybe 15 minutes.

Wade Lightheart: So this is basically a death sentence for your dreams.

Misty Williams: That's horrifying, first of all, you're telling somebody having strange experiences, you know, the brain fog, the exhaustion, not sleeping, you know, you're basically telling me that there's this stuff going on inside that I had no clue was there. I had no pain. Like it was just, it was shocking. I was in shock walking out of her office. I felt like I had been hacked. I walked into her office, she saw a surgery that she could do. I fit the criteria and that's what I was to her. That's how it occurred for me as a patient, you know? And I went back to my primary care doctor, told my primary care doctor what happened cause I'm thinking, you know, that's just her. That's just her. Not everybody's insane and crazy like she is and someone else will be able to help me but come to find out every, I went to a primary care doctor, I went to an endocrinologist, I started finding other primary care.

Misty Williams: I was hearing the same thing from everyone. Your labs are normal, things are fine. You know, this was just a blip on the map. You're going to be fine in time and I'm just like, I'm freaking out because meanwhile at home, weeks later I am utterly exhausted. I can't focus at work, as someone who like prides herself on being able to take on a lot and achieve and accomplish a lot of things. This was just like, this was like a death sentence for me. It was just, I can't, I can't accept that nobody knows anything. And I started, I knew that I had to figure this out on my own, but of course I'm, my background was marketing and business. Figuring out the body was not in my wheelhouse whatsoever. So it was kind of like, all right, well I figured out other hard things, you know, we're going to roll up our sleeves and do this.

Misty Williams: And fortunately later that year, I did find a doctor and neurosurgeon in Nashville where I was living at the time who was just getting started with his blog. His name was Dr. Jack Kruse. Jack is really brilliant and he's also kind of fits the typical neurosurgeon profile I think, where they have a bit of a God complex. But you know, in some ways it's like if you don't, I don't know that you're going to ever cut up anyone's head or spine or it's a very interesting program.

Wade Lightheart: It's very, very much like Dr strange, you know, the character that's played in that, you know, and it's part of the psychology of being a surgeon and stuff, but Jack puts out great stuff. If you haven't checked out Jack Kruse, I highly recommend checking him out. We writes at two levels, one for the medical industry and then one style using layman terms, which I think is a really great service.

Misty Williams: I met him in Nashville. I actually ended up managing the launch of his community for the first couple of years. That was my personal foray into the space and really learned a lot. And I used that as an opportunity to get educated myself. So I learned a lot from Jack and I learned a lot from the other leaders who were coming up at that same time. Ben Greenfield, Dave Asprey, Rob Wolf, dr Sarah Ballantyne. There's a lot of these people. Evan Brand was just getting started back then. Um, so, you know, I just looked at it as an opportunity for me to learn and then I kept hearing about things like when women get older, you know, maybe they need some extra hormone support. I would hear a lot from Jack about all the mismatches that we have with our environment that makes us sick.

Misty Williams: And that was something that spoke to me and rang true. Like, okay, it makes sense that I am totally mismatched with light cycles. Right? And that's affecting my ability to sleep at night. And a lot of these things I was learning about - ancestral health and how the body worked. What was missing for me is what do you do when you're past the point of being able to make some dietary changes. I was making all the dietary changes and I was not riding the ship, I was still having a lot of fatigue issues, especially the brain fog eventually subsided. But the fatigue was just awful for me. And really the reason why Healing Rosie even exists is because in this space we have a lot of men who are leading this conversation. And I actually love and respect these men.

Misty Williams: They're my brothers. They're my introduction into this entire movement that we have now of biohacking. And you know, taking on health as your own personal mission. Really. But what was missing is that a woman's biology is different from a man's, and we are as the perpetuator of the species, our biology is much more sensitive than a man's biology to biohack. And man, you just do a couple of key things and man, everything starts snapping into place. But for women, it's like we're so complicated - everything, everything affects the body. And so my journey really has been about as a woman, you know, like I'm listening to these guys in their great hacks and I'm trying to apply them and not getting the same results. In 2013, two years after my surgery, I had mercury fillings improperly drilled from my teeth, but I didn't know that they were improperly drilled until 2018.

Misty Williams: So I had a mysterious 45 pound weight gain. At this time I'm paleo, I'm working with a trainer twice a week. My house is hardwired. There's no wifi in my house. I've detoxed everything. I've gotten rid of all the rugs, all the cleaning supplies, the shampoo, all the entire checklist. I've cleaned it all up, all metals, and in three months - 45 pounds on 5'2! And I was freaking out as you can imagine. I was going to doctors then. I'm still trying to find doctors. I'm hearing the same song and dance, you know, Misty, everything's fine and normal. Finally, I had a doctor tell me that it looked like I had premature ovarian failure because my labs were abnormal and she referred me out and I was put on bioidentical hormones. That was a big game changer for me to finally get that help.

Misty Williams: That didn't till three or four years ago I finally found a doctor that would help me with hormone therapy, but even then I was learning things and hearing things. I went into the endocrinologist six months after my surgery and she's telling me my labs are normal and things are fine, and then checks around on my neck. She's like - you might have nodules on your thyroid. Let's go back for an ultrasound. And sure enough, I did had nodules on my thyroid and it was the same content. It was like deja VU. Oh my God, not just on my thyroid. What causes nodules? We don't really know what causes it, but I can refer you to a surgeon. Yours are very large. And I'm like, what? You know, my body is mutating and nobody knows what's happening to me.

Misty Williams: I have never been one that's going to accept things like that that don't make sense, you know? I'm just not wired to be that person. So me moving to Austin in 2014 actually for my health was a big game changer because I started getting connected to people who understood woman's biology and how it was different from a man's, and I started discovering these unbelievable protocols that really started helping me get my life back. It was just six years at the time, unveiling BMI against the wall towards it. And that's really kind of what inspired everything for the Healing Rosie community that we have now is that for me as a woman, it was very hard in our space to find the resources. And there's so many women who are in the same situation that I'm in and there's good news because there's so much that we can do. We just have to know where to look. But it's been a crazy journey. And a big part of that, to get back to your opening question, was really learning how to be my doctor's boss. Learning how to take this healing journey on for myself and own it instead of expecting a doctor or a practitioner or somebody else to own it for me. And it changed the game. It changed everything.

Wade Lightheart: That's really powerful. So what were the things that you did have to change and then how did the emergence of Healing Rosie come about? I want to see how that journey went on and what happened.

Misty Williams: Obviously I'm sure that you've talked about this tons Wade with other guests - the dietary things and the environmental things that you need to do to really clean up your environment. Those things are all really important. And I learned those things pretty young, but what really worked for me - was doing deeper things. First of all, I found out that I had a chronic Epstein-Barr infection that I'd probably had for about 30 years. And interestingly in the research, whenever I was trying to research thyroid nodules, I kept coming across the connection between Epstein-Barr and thyroid nodules. Epstein-Barr actually attacks the thyroid. So I went to my doctor, one of my doctors at the time, I went through them like crazy for a while. Like it's like dating on Bumble, you know, so this one doctor went to and I asked him to run Epstein-Barr labs.

Misty Williams: He ran, and there's four by the way, there's not just two, there's four Epstein-Barr labs that you need to run. And I didn't know that then. So my test came back, for both of them my numbers were high and I asked him about them like, Oh my God, my numbers are high. I must have Epstein-Barr? And he was like, Oh, that just shows you have a past infection. And for him, that was the end of the conversation. And for me it was like, but wait, we're trying to rule out a current infection. I didn't know what to do next. I didn't know that there were four labs that needed to be run. Epstein-Barr in the Healing Rosie community has so, so many women.

Misty Williams: And of course I talk about it and I encourage women to get tested. If you're exhibiting these symptoms, a lot of fatigue. Epstein-Barr is a big fatigue one for me. But there's a whole host of things that can happen with Epstein-Barr. And as I talked about in the community, a lot of them have started getting tested and they all came back on my God, I have Epstein-Barr too, you know, we have these chronic infections. Over 90% of the people get Epstein-Barr, but typically your immune system is able to basically put it into remission. But for some of us that doesn't happen. And we have these low level infections that flare up all the time. Stress is a trigger for Epstein-Barr. And what that does is it puts this crazy load on your immune system of trying to find this virus that's very elusive.

Misty Williams: Epstein-Barr super elusive in the body and very hard to target the immune system. So me going after Epstein-Barr was really beneficial. And then figuring out the heavy metal thing and detoxing metals was like, whoa. I started having issues in 2017 with not being able to maintain my weight. It kept creeping up and I was eating the same way, you know, doing all the same things, but my weight kept creeping up and I went in to have labs done. I was showing actual clinical hyperthyroid, not functional medicine ranges, but I could've gone to any doctor. My 3T3 was 2.1 which is very low. I'm showing that I had hypothyroidism, but for me that was probably tied to, first of all, the middle toxicity just trashes your thyroid. I mean all of them, the drilling, you know, sends it down into the thyroid, up into the brain and hypothalamus and everything just gets really screwed up.

Misty Williams: And then I didn't address it for years, and the body's just trying to cope and deal with it. I had no idea and nobody ever asked me, by the way, no doctor ever asked me. And you would think that would be like a common question, like once as I got more educated, I knew how I just wasn't working with the right people. But first going after Epstein-Barr and then going after toxicity really helped. I did gut stuff early in my journey to try to heal my gut and I know gut is a big topic in your community too. And I actually was not able to get the kind of traction with gut health that I'm getting now because I had so much metal toxicity.

Wade Lightheart: Yeah, our tough cases we work with, a lady Katrine and she does our genetics, epigenetics. And one of the tests that we look that she runs all these things on infections and these types of things of how they can create real drags. And you mentioned something really important that people can carry these infections for a long period of time and then suddenly go through some sort of stressful situation and bang, that's the thing that takes you out. And it doesn't show up in a lot of these regular things. So those people are out there that are hearing maybe some commonalities with your story of they can't figure, you know, nobody seems to know what's going on with me. Oftentimes that's where you need a really good holistic health practitioner that can kind of dial that in for you and find it, fare it out, the things that are dragging. But back to your story. I don't want to interrupt.

Misty Williams: That was, that's really great. And one thing I will say, I beat my head against a wall trying to find a good provider, I happen to have, I mean these people are all my friends in our space. I'm super, super fortunate that way. But it took me a long time and I learned a few things about finding doctors and how to set up your medical team. I'd love to share a little bit about that because I think that's something people commonly struggle with.

Wade Lightheart: It's how to be the boss of your doctor.

Misty Williams: I mean, first of all, free pass to start with you knowing what your goals are, what do you want for your health? And this isn't just looking at my labs, I want to not be hypo. I want my 3T3 to be in a certain range. Those are not health goals. Health goals are things like, you know, I want to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed. You know, if you're a woman who like me at 35 was thinking about having a baby, I I want my body to be able to get pregnant and have a child, a healthy baby without tons of medical intervention to make it happen. Um, it could be something like I want to be migraine free. I'm tired of having all these migraines all the time. When you think of your health goals, it's like what do you want for your health and body?

Misty Williams: I want wherever you are on the fitness spectrum. Cause people are all along that spectrum. I have no agenda of where people are with their fitness except whatever is important to you in your life, for your body to be able to do, for you to have the kind of lifestyle that's important to you. You want your body to be able to keep up. So if that's hiking, if that's jumping out of airplanes, if that's, you know, having a yoga practice, I mean, whatever it is that's important to you, doing stuff with your kids, you know, some kind of traveling that you want to do. You're your boss. You want your weight to be stable in a healthy range. You know, these are the health goals that you need to get clear on. And when you're interviewing a doctor in the beginning, you want to actually bring those health goals to that first meeting.

Misty Williams: And you want to see if this doctor is going to enroll. Because if you're talking to a doctor and you'd tell him, if in my situation, for example, if I went to a doctor and that this is what I wish I would have done, I wish I would've gone to this particular doctor that I'm thinking of and actually said to him - 'it's important for me to have really fantastic energy and it's important for me to have my weight in a healthy range and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get there. I need a doctor to help guide me and support me.' If I would have asked that question, I would have learned that this doctor that I was talking to didn't think any of that was really very important as far as what he should take on as a doctor in our doctor-patient relationship.

Misty Williams: And I've kind of moved on my way instead of wasting six months building this relationship only to get really far into it, to realize this guy doesn't listen to it. Doesn't matter what comes back in the labs. I remember my hormones were already showing tanked at that time. And I remember him to me - women's over 38 hormones are supposed to go down as you get older, completely. I was 38 years old, I was not 54, I was 38 and my hormone levels were so low and he was just very against. So I think that's a really important first step. And establishing a patient-doctor relationship is getting someone that's going to enroll in your health goals and then the things that are important for you. And if they can enroll or they seem uncertain or I'm not sure I would help you do that or whatever, don't you want to know that?

Misty Williams: And that first visit - they don't have the confidence that they can guide you to your health goal, you know? So that's the first step. And then I really think people should find two different kinds of practitioners to work with, especially women. I think women should have a doctor who is well versed in thyroid and hormone health, who's very open-minded, will run labs for you. Or she will run labs for you. That doctor is basically to help with the bulk of what you need just to be stabilized. And then find someone else that's going to be your root cause practitioner. Because in my experience, these or not, I go to root cause. I work with an amazing guy, Ryan Frisinger, here in Austin, Texas. The Kosmic Animal is kind of his moniker. I think that's his website too (kosmicanimal.com).

Misty Williams: He's the one that first really started addressing my Epstein-Barr and the heavy metal toxicity. He's a jedi, especially for those people who are trying everything and nothing is working. Your mitochondria is just shot to hell, you know, Ryan can take on that case. And he helped women in our community get well, who've struggled for 20 years and had been to a gazillion functional medicine practitioners. He's awesome. But when I spoke with Ryan, we first started working together. He didn't want me to be on thyroid support and didn't want me to be on hormone support. His ethos or mission, first of all - he can't prescribe those things. So he doesn't know much about them and he had another way that he liked to get people well, and that's great for what he's doing. But for me, I'm thinking if I go off, I know if I go off thyroid and hormone support, I am so screwed.

Misty Williams: I am not going to sleep at night. I'm going to be exhausted again. Like just all the things you know are playing in my head. And I told him this, I said, listen, you're what you're doing, what you're asking me to do is threatening my quality of life. I'm terrified to even entertain this. And he said, all right, I understand. I hear where you're coming from. Let's not deal with that now we'll set that on other things. just started to learn. Just seeing these patterns, trying to like navigate this for myself, that the root cause practitioner has a completely different set of tools than a primary care doctor or nurse practitioner. And as a woman, I need both sets of tools. I don't need just one. Especially, I'm in a pretty advanced hormonal dysfunction state because of the mercury reports.

Misty Williams: And this all absolutely trashed me, my hormones just tank to hell. So I'm very compromised. You need both of these people. You need someone that can write the prescription when it's necessary. And so I have a root cause practitioner and a primary care type practitioner. Leverage my insurance over here as much as I can, you know, get labs paid for and you know, whatever you can get out of your insurance company and then someone different that has the tools to go deep and the tools to go deep as what's has been and continues to just changed my life. I mean I feel like I've got more energy and vitality than I remember having in my thirties at this point. You know. I feel like my brain is just on fire and the very best way. And you know, a lot of this has come through doing these deeper healing protocols that a lot of these primary care docs don't understand.

Misty Williams: I even have a functional medicine doctor here in Austin that I visit with hormones. And that functional medicine doctor has never taken the initiative to go deeper with my labs. But anytime I've brought it up, Hey, I'm, I'm seeing these things in my labs and what do you think of this? And I want to go Epstein-Barr for example. I'm seeing these things, they're supportive of me doing whatever, but they're not taking the lead because that kind of practice is set up differently. And that's probably a bigger conversation than what we could really cover in, in our interview here. But I think it's important to have both doctors on your team. And I worked with Ryan for a while and then it got to the point where I wanted to go deeper in a couple of other areas.

Misty Williams: And so I found people who had a little more expertise than what I think he has in these new areas. You know, like Ryan, he's so great with the mitochondrial stuff and really sick people stuff, but some of the gut health stuff that I wanted to do, I don't feel like that was really in his strike zone as much as this other mito stuff. So, you know, I've been working a lot with Dr Michelle Sands who's wonderful. She has the globe protocol. And she's a personal friend. I think that she's probably one of the smartest people in our space for those who wants like a 'one stop shop'. I mean, I just think it probably doesn't get an email from her. So yeah, those are, those are just a couple of little bits on what it takes to work with a doctor.

Misty Williams: I go in with my labs now. I have a lab tracker that I actually give to everyone in the Healing Rose community. In fact, I can set it up for you guys: healingrosie.com/bioptimizers. You can download the lab tracker, but I go in with a list of here's the labs that I want you to run. And basically I expect my primary care doctor to give me that support. And if they're not going to, I'm going to find someone else. And that can be hard. In the beginning, I spent years looking for the right doctor, and I learned little tips. I can share a few more of how to find a doctor. But when you say NO to one doctor and you don't have someone behind that doctor to say YES to, it can be like - 'I'd rather just at least have a doctor that keeps you stuck for a lot longer', you know.

Misty Williams: So I want a doctor that's going to run whatever labs I want and insurance will cover it. And if insurance doesn't cover it, then I'm willing to pay for it. And I want to be partners that way. And that's what I expect. And I've learned that the doctors who, really the best ones, they love how I'm showing up 100% and clear certain - this is my months. Now, they look at it, laugh, I call you dreamer. But there's so many other doctors I would show up like that. And it's kinda confronting to them like, well, you know, I'm the doctor. You're the patient. You don't tell me what to do. I'll tell you if there's a problem, there's something that you need and yeah, I'm not down.

Wade Lightheart: Yeah. I think that's one of the interesting things. I think that's happening in one of the podcasts I was listening to. It was funny, I was listening to Joe Rogan not that long ago, and he was talking to a guy about that guy's lab results or whatever, and Joe's has them as days 'well, how old is your doctor'? And he's like ' Oh, he's in his late fifties'. I was like, no, dude, you got to get a young guy. You've got to get someone that's like hip to what's going on. You need to look at this and you need to look like NO. Joe is not a medical expert. However, he's interviewed a lot of really great people. But he brings up a great point and I think this is one of the things that I've gathered from your interview, which I think is really important, is to not look at your doctor relation to something that you passively accept.

Wade Lightheart: Whatever's going on - you can't reduce the quality of your life down because of what somebody said in the 15 minute visit who may not have the information you require. And you know, we have an Awesome Health Course and one of the key components on it, I call it as assembling your jedi council. And that is, it's really hard to be really great at a lot of different things. However, nowadays, thanks to the internet and technology, you can access experts in just about every single field that you go on. Cause once you get into this rabbit hole of high performance and real yogis, it just never ends. And it becomes a fascinating journey. And it's also an empowering one. And you brought that up. So can you give us some tips of what you did or what you think you should have done earlier, what you suggest in the Healing Rosie community about how to select and find these type of people who can help you overcome whatever quote unquote death sentence you got or you know, life compromising kind of proclamation that oftentimes comes from these areas.

Wade Lightheart: And it's often because these people don't know. How do you sort through that? How do you find the people that are right? How do you move on from someone or integrate that? I'm curious about what you've discovered.

Misty Williams: Yeah, so there's a couple of ways that you can find practitioners to work with. Obviously you can find someone locally in your area and you can also work with people online. And that's one of the cool things about 2020, you know, or whenever this airs, 2021, the 2020s.

Wade Lightheart: Yes. The new decade.

Misty Williams: Yes. The new decade is that we can work with an amazing practitioners wherever they are and wherever we are in the world, we don't have to be limited by what's in our city. AndI was fortunate that Ryan was in Austin. Um, but Michelle is not. And several of the other practitioners that I've reached out to you to work on different areas of my health, have not been in Austin and you know, we're in a remote just like you and I are able to do this interview together - you can talk to a doctor practitioner this way. So I think one of the things that people should be doing is really getting engaged with a lot of the summits that are so many great health summits that happen. Health talks puts on a lot of commits and listen to those interviews and start looking for someone that you wrote.

Misty Williams: They resonate. I think that will bring your way to find a great practitioner. Find someone who like you, like their style, like the things that they're saying. And just energetically you feel like you're going to vibe with them. I mean, there's certainly been good people and smart people in our space that I've spoken with and had interviews and I could just feel, I would not want to work with them professionally, you know? I'm thinking of someone who I really like as a person actually, and he's been in our space for a really long time, but you know, the way that he kind of minimizes ideas are little things that I might say or others might say because he has a better idea in my head. Because as a patient you want to, you want to feel like you have a voice and that your perspective matters to this conversation that we're having.

Misty Williams: So I think that's one way is to just start paying attention and educated yourself and you'll find some really great doctors. And I love functional medicine. I think functional medicine and a naturopathic medicine, integrative medicine, all three of those areas have some really amazing doctors and practitioners and all of them. If you go to https://www.ifm.org/find-a-practitioner/ in particular, you can look for medicine practitioner in your area that way. And you can go to these other websites too for naturopathic medicine. And look for a doctor in your area. That's what's important to you. You can also go down to your local pharmacy and ask for a referral because the local pharmacist will know first of all, if a doctor is writing prescriptions for compounded medications, those are really only needed for the anti aging stuff and you know, the deeper healing stuff.

Misty Williams: So they're writing those kind of prescriptions. Then there are probably a little more tuned in and then the pharmacist generally knows, you know, especially if it's a local pharmacy and they've got relationships with the patients that are coming in. They'll know what patients are getting great results from which doctors. Right? So your local compounding pharmacy, I would check there before I checked ifm.org. Frankly, if you can just find out, I love a referral. So that's one thing you can do. There's also great companies out there like SteadyMD. I don't know if we're familiar with SteadyMD at all, but they have great MDs trained. They do have doctors who are trained in functional medicine. Not all of them are, so you have to be specific before when you sign up that, but they have an amazing program for getting a primary care doctor who's basically your 24/7.

Misty Williams: It's almost, it's concierge medicine. You know, you've got text access, email access, as many doctor visits as you need. And then they'll work with you, they're not covered by insurance, but they'll work with your insurance company to get your labs covered and imaging covered and, you know, whatever the other things are that you need. They also have a whole bunch of specialists that are on staff so they can get some extra support for you without you having to go to a specialist. So they have a great program. I would put SteadyMD in the doctor. You know, I told you, you might have two different types of practitioners on your team. I would put them in the doctor spot. Dr Michelle Sands has an amazing program, a couple of amazing programs to help women especially. But she works with men too to do a lot of the deeper healing stuff.

Misty Williams: So she's phenomenal. I'm in the Healing Rosie Facebook group. You'll see people talking about the doctors that they're working with that they're having good results from. And that's a really great way to kind of put your feelers out a little bit, is just join the community and strike up a conversation, you know, new members, and then starts, 'Hey, hi, I'm new here. Here's the things I'm dealing with. Here's my questions'. And you know, other members come out of the woodwork to provide support. But you can ask about doctors. You could do some and find a doctor, or maybe you heard of a doctor on a summit. 'Hey, has anyone worked with this person? What your experience has been like'?

Wade Lightheart: Yeah, let's talk about that. There's a lot of that. There's a lot.

Misty Williams: Yeah, a lot you can do to make it a little less cumbersome.

Wade Lightheart: Yeah. I want to talk about what is going on at the Healing Rosie community? How did it form and what's it all about? Cause we've mentioned it a few times and I think it's a great service for people. So can you talk about how that came to fruition and who it's catering to and how do people get access to it?

Misty Williams: Well, Healing Rosie, Rosie the Riveter, she's the iconic, like emblem of the feminist movement. Rosie the Riveter called all of the women up to work in the factories while the men were overseas fighting in World War II. So, you know, I think that what she represents for women, kind of a dawn of a new era where women could actualize in so many more ways than just being a housewife. You know, Rosie speaks to me that way. I actually have a great aunt who was one of those women that went to work in the factories during World War II. And when Rosie the Riveter called the women up, she was really quick to join in the effort to support the war because her mother, my great, great grandmother was a business owner and she was a business owner at a time when women were not business owners.

Misty Williams: So my great grandmother Tyna May lost her husband Carl, to double pneumonia in 1933, I believe. And in those days, when a woman loses the provider in the home, the kids get orphaned out to other people in the community. And Tyna May was freaking out. Like, I just lost my husband. I can't lose my entire family. You know, she loved her kids. So she went to the man who had been helping her husband run the business, asked him to stay on, and she took over the business in the 1930s, headed straight, long into the great depression. Of course, she didn't know that the great depression was coming. But this was a time when no women owned businesses or had careers or anything. She was very much abnormality in her day. And so my aunt Florence, who went to work in the factories did so, so quickly because her mother.

Misty Williams: But for family it was like, no. Well, you know, so I come from this long line of women who've always been really empowered around, actualizing in other ways. And you know, kind of this idea that the sky's the limit and you can do whatever makes your heart sing and whatever's gonna make you happy. And I was definitely conditioned from a young age to be independent and strong. And I actually remember my mom telling when I was seven years old, - 'you're going to grow up, you're going to be independent, you're going to college, and you're not going to depend on a man'. Because at the time, her relationship with my dad was really, really unhappy. And so, you know, I have all this programming of these strong hand-do women, but I learned when I was 35 in 2011 that the way that I was living my life was actually contributing to making me sick.

Misty Williams: All the stress I was taking on, not cultivating nearly enough support in my life. So that kind of is the bedrock for the vision for Healing Rosie and what Healing Rosie is about. And you know, my vision for this community is a place where women could come and it'd be really honest and vulnerable about what they're dealing with, get lots of support to each other. It certainly isn't just me providing support in that community. And I think it's what makes it so special. In March 2018 I talked to Bobby and out of the blue he was just like, well, you know, what are you planning on doing, Misty? And I'd had this little idea in the back of my head and he offered to do a summit for me.

Misty Williams: We launched in October of 2018 with the fix for female hormones. And the community just took off from there. We have over 5,000 women in the Facebook group now. We had almost 60,000 women sign up for that first summit. So, you know, there's definitely a space and our community where women have been looking for more support and where can we have these conversations and talk about this. So, you know, in some ways I feel like I've just been a channel for the divine in all of this and I'm super excited to do it. I feel really passionately about this topic as you can tell from our conversation today. And another way is this is something that's been totally co-created with other amazing women who are getting their lives back and want to help the sisterhood. So that's what we're doing together right now.

Wade Lightheart: Do you have anything coming up in the next little while? And how they can reach you and all that sort of stuff.

Misty Williams: Sure thing. We have a summit March 16th through 22nd. You can go to URL bestsleepsummit.com and sign up to join the sleep summit. It's going to be free for a week. Tons of interviews with people. I chose sleep because in my own journey sleep was the thing. First of all, you know, I went 144 hours without it, but I really started learning early on how significant sleep was to our health and to being able to heal. You can't heal if we're not sleeping well. And I know over the last year have just noticed this pattern in the community of so many women who are struggling with their sleep and they can't get any protocols to work.

Misty Williams: They can't get traction on things cause they're not sleeping at night. So I wanted to take this on and bring together the best experts that I could find and talk about sleep and the importance of sleep and what to do in a whole variety of situations. So that you can get the sleep that your body desperately needs so that you can heal and be well. So that's coming up, super excited and of course people can go to Healingrosie.com that's our website and get linked out to everything. You can get linked up to the Facebook group. They're on Facebook and just search for Healing Rosie. Well that's pretty, it's kind of how did the west side and we've got lots and lots of resources. That lab tracker will be available at healingrosie.com/bioptimizers and your community can go download that and have a tool that you can take to your doctor or the Epstein-Barr, the four Epstein-Barr labs that I mentioned that I didn't know existed are listed on there along with all the other optimizing serum labs that it can be really helpful so that you can learn what's going on in your own body and start taking your health back.

Wade Lightheart: Misty, this has been a great interview. It's been enlightening and I want to commend you on just taking such great action on your own journey and leading by example of that. You don't have to accept what someone might have told you, that you can go and do your own research and find out, and from someone who didn't have a background in this, energy to know so much and learn so much, and then go out there and create a community, it's a great service that you're doing. And I want to applaud you for that. And I want to encourage our listeners, particularly our women listeners who probably can relate to some of these stories or might have someone to relate to. Check out the community, check out these links, go find out, start having conversations. Because so often we take our health challenges as some kind of personal thing that we've got to keep away from the world or whatever.

Wade Lightheart: And that is a recipe for disaster. And it's represented or certainly a recipe to not get the kind of help or the type of information that you could really transform your life. And so I really appreciate that you're doing that. Check out those links. They all gonna be in the show notes votes. So get on there, check it out. Misty Williams Healingrosie.com. Thanks so much for joining us today on the Awesome Health Podcast. Really appreciate you here and now hope to connect with you real soon, at one of the events that we both go to.

Misty Williams: Thank you so much Wade. I appreciate it. This has been awesome!

041: How to Be Your Own Health Advocate, with Misty Williams

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