Autoimmune Disease and Fertility (Episode 339)

Full Transcript: Episode 339

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Today I’m sharing my interview with Aimee Raupp. I’m excited to welcome her back. For those of you who are long-time listeners, you may remember my first interview with Aimee back in episode 76, shortly after she wrote her book, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and so I’m thrilled to have her back on the show today. So let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode with Aimee.

So I’m excited to have Aimee Raupp back on the podcast. In case you don’t know Aimee, she is a renowned women’s health and fertility expert, celebrity acupuncturist and coach, and the best-selling author of the books Chill Out and Get Healthy, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and Body Belief. Aimee works virtually with clients all over the world. She is also a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in private practice in New York and Connecticut — of course, one city wasn’t enough. Aimee holds a Master of Science degree in Traditional Oriental Medicine from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Rutgers University. And she’s the founder of the Aimee Raupp Beauty line of handcrafted organic skincare products that are optimized for hormone harmony.

So I’m excited to have you back, Aimee. We’re going to be talking about all kinds of important things related to fertility and immunity, and so thank you so much for coming back to the show.

Aimee Raupp: Well, I’m honored to be here, Lisa. Thank you so much for all that you do. So thanks for having me.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, thank you. I love watching all the great things that you do. I love that you have your beauty product line, because it’s so important to get rid of the toxins and have a really good, trusted brand. So maybe before we jump into the topics of the day, let us know a little bit about what you do generally, and maybe you could share a little bit about your recent book, Body Belief. That’s the most recent book.

Aimee Raupp: That is the most recent book. It came out, I guess it’ll be two years in March, so about a year and a half ago. That book is written really about autoimmune diseases and how you can heal them naturally and radically shift your health. I came to writing that book kind of as everything unfolds in life. So when I wrote my second book, Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, talking about fertility and women’s health, what I started to notice in the research for that book was all of these unexplained infertility cases, and how there was a lot of links to autoimmune diseases. I went into it a bit in Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, but I kind of realized it really needs its own book. My publishing house, however, didn’t want a fertility-specific autoimmune book, so we made it more general, but it really applies to women mainly with endometriosis, PCOS — those both fall into the autoimmune category — women with Hashimoto’s, women with celiac disease, or any other autoimmune condition that’s also having fertility challenges. There’s a lot of women having unexplained fertility challenges though who don’t know they have an autoimmune condition.

So anyway, that’s where Body Belief came from, and also, doing the research on autoimmunity and then the prevalence of it — I think the incidence of autoimmunity has quadrupled over the last 30 years. It affects women 75% more than men, and women in their prime, fertile years, 20 to 45 — that’s where it’s affecting them. One of the main reasons for that, it is believed, is from the fact that we’ve introduced over 100,000 chemicals into our environment in the last 40 years. Those are all endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which is also the basis of why I created Aimee Raupp Beauty, because I couldn’t find things that were as clean and non-toxic as I’d like them to be. My whole premise with Aimee Raupp Beauty is if you can’t eat it, you shouldn’t put it on your skin, so it’s basically like food for your skin. Everything I use is organic and wildcrafted where we can find it, and I actually still make all of the products myself. I don’t outsource it — I still control all of it, and I feel really good about that.

I mean, that’s kind of the backstory on me. I’ve been in clinical practice for almost 17 years now as an acupuncturist and herbalist, and again, seeing so much of this chronic disease, and I think a lot of it is also linked to autoimmunity, and really seeing how that’s impacting women, their health, their hormones, their fertility. My latest book really supports all the things I’ve learned over almost two decades of working in the clinic with women, and all the research — I was a research scientist, I have a biology and chemistry degree, before I became an acupuncturist, so I really like to nerd out on the data, like you do too, and bring it all together and give women the most holistic approach, and the way that they can empower themselves. There are so many things we can do to really shift our internal environment and our external environment to support health and harmony in our bodies, and if you are dealing with autoimmunity, to really regulate your immune system, especially as it pertains to fertility, so that there’s less inflammation, and your body is just more hospitable to a pregnancy. We know inflammation directly impacts hormonal health, so much of it is getting to the root of that and rectifying it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I love that, as you’re talking — it’s your career, your interests, your books, your product line — have all unfolded based on the needs of the women that you serve, and I just love how that works organically. And also, you found some interesting research when you were writing Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and I remember interviewing you about that. But the focus of our conversation in that book, I believe, was really shifting the narrative on women who are older, because we know the stats, we know there are challenges, but that’s not the end of the story. So it’s interesting that out of the research you did there, you kind of followed it — this is what a rabbit hole. What happened?

Aimee Raupp: It was like — you write a book on fertility or hormones, and then all of a sudden my practice just grew, and I started reaching women all over the world, which was a huge blessing and an honor. I started seeing these really complicated cases. I’m often even in the clinic, and they’re the sixth acupuncturist they’ve seen, they’ve been to five different functional docs, they’ve read all the books — they know more than me sometimes. You just start seeing these cases, and you actually start to see a common thread that isn’t being addressed, because I don’t even think it’s being looked for.

So I feel really grateful that I had that research background, and I started to see that data. When I interviewed Dr. Hugh Taylor, who heads up Yale Reproductive Medicine, for Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, he does a lot of research on plastics, on BPA, and how they impact in utero development, and then the child’s ability to procreate 15, 18 years down the road. I said to him, off the record, “The research is really compelling that if endometriosis is the cause for 40% of fertility challenges, and PCOS is maybe another 30 to 40%, and then there’s this unexplained category — would you venture to say that all unexplained fertility challenges are actually rooted in an autoimmune condition?” And he chuckled and said, “Young lady, you are really onto something.” He said they’re actually screening everyone in their clinics now for Hashimoto’s and celiac, because the correlation between fertility issues and Hashimoto’s and/or celiac is so high.

And that’s how we’re trained in Chinese medicine — we treat what we see, we’re detectives, we peel back every layer. That’s what I started to do with these clients — look at the whole picture of health, and where do I see potential autoimmune red flags, where the immune system is giving me a heads up that things aren’t in harmony in the body, and then how do I go about treating that, versus just focusing on efficient ovulation, and actually making the internal environment as hospitable as possible. When autoimmunity is triggered, it’s just not a super hospitable environment — the body is on radar and ready to reject anything that’s foreign.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: It’s such an interesting concept — when you’re fully healthy in all the areas, everything just works, it’s like the puzzle pieces click. I think we should jump into autoimmunity, and for listeners who aren’t that familiar with it, could you describe what it is? You mentioned that it’s related to Hashimoto’s, PCOS, endometriosis, and not everybody would have heard those links before.

Aimee Raupp: I want to read the definition from Body Belief, because I did write the book that way. From a Western scientific standpoint, autoimmunity occurs when your body’s immune system begins attacking normal, healthy tissue. Your body’s immune system exists to destroy foreign invaders — it’s there to protect your body from bad bacteria, viruses, and any other potentially harmful pathogens that aren’t supposed to be in your body. It’s imperative to your survival to have a properly functioning immune system, since your body is exposed to potential invaders all the time. But in a body with autoimmunity, your immune system begins to attack and destroy the same tissues it’s meant to protect.

Hashimoto’s is a great example — that’s autoimmune thyroid disease. Your thyroid is the master of all your hormones, it regulates your entire body, keeps you in balance and harmony, and when autoimmune thyroid disease kicks in, your body actually creates antibodies to the thyroid and begins attacking its tissue. That sets off this whole cascade in the body of heightened inflammation. There’s this foreign tissue, even though it’s not foreign — you’ve been living with it your whole life, and now all of a sudden it’s decided it’s foreign, and that sets the stage for the body starting to attack other tissues. So when it comes to hormones or fertility, we see autoimmunity can attack sperm — you can have sperm antibodies — it can attack ovaries, it can attack embryos, uterine lining. Endometriosis is an autoimmune condition, we know that. PCOS — some say it is, some say it isn’t, it has autoimmune characteristics. Type one diabetes is an autoimmune condition, and PCOS has a lot of diabetes-type overlaps.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: For endometriosis, could you elaborate a little and share that autoimmune connection for women hearing this for the first time?

Aimee Raupp: I work a lot with Frank Lipman, a medical doctor, and he always says to me, “Don’t scare them.” This is all very treatable and fixable, and if anything, it’s super empowering when you realize the connection. So calm down — I think a lot of women dealing with Endo or PCOS or unexplained fertility challenges are happy to basically get a diagnosis, something to fix. What we’re trying to fix is the inflammation.

What endometriosis is, and you probably know this if you have it, is endometrial tissue that’s growing in the wrong areas, outside of the uterus. Because of that, the body starts to attack it, because it’s a foreign object to the body, in the wrong place. We call it in Chinese medicine “inverted menstruation” — it’s almost like the menstrual blood going up and creating these cobwebs between the bowels and the ovaries and the uterus. It also calls in estrogen, so it responds cyclically as well — the tissue gets really inflamed during certain parts of your cycle, and your body creates this autoimmune response to it, because it recognizes it as foreign.

You’ll often see Endo patients — a lot of them have Hashimoto’s, it’s pretty common to see the two together — or something like Raynaud’s, or Celiac with Endo. They say autoimmune conditions usually travel in threes. It’s really hard to get an endometriosis diagnosis, typically you have to do a laparoscopic surgery, so for many women it’s guesswork. If you have painful menstruation or painful ovulation, maybe clots with your period, or if the HSG really hurts, that’s usually an indicator there’s something hanging onto the fallopian tubes. So for the Endo community, rather than diagnosing yourself with an autoimmune condition or attaching to that label, it’s more, “There’s inflammation in my body, there’s foreign tissue, or tissue that is normal but in the wrong places, and what can I do to assist my body in clearing out that abnormal tissue and reducing inflammation.”

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I love the way you described that. One of the things — when you said “don’t scare them,” I mean, it’s pretty terrifying — like, 80% of the population will have an autoimmune condition of some kind. So keep that in mind. I wanted to ask your thoughts, because when you were talking about it, the word that went through my head was “immune dysregulation.” I feel like that can be helpful, because it doesn’t sound like your body is destroying itself — it’s literally not working the way it was intended, so it’s disregulated.

Aimee Raupp: It’s disregulated. Some people will say it’s hyperactive — it’s not really, it’s actually doing its job, it’s attacking what it thinks is foreign, so the immune system is working just fine, it’s just — there’s a little chaos in the body, an internal hostility, and we can combat that. Between diet and lifestyle, and supplements and herbs and things like acupuncture, it’s very achievable to calm that chaos and regulate the system. Just like I say in Yes, You Can Get Pregnant — I don’t like the word “infertility,” because I don’t believe any of you are broken, I don’t believe it’s like an on-off switch, it’s more like you’re on a spectrum. It’s the same kind of thing with autoimmunity — you’re on a spectrum, and you can shift yourself into a place where your body is more hospitable than not. It’s not that you can cure autoimmunity once you have it, but you can heal it, you can shift it, and you can live with it in peace and harmony.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’d love it if you did that same walkthrough with PCOS — you mentioned the diabetes connection — and then also Crohn’s, and premature ovarian failure, so it really paints the picture for everyone.

Aimee Raupp: With PCOS it’s a slightly different pathomechanism — the body decides part of the pancreas is a foreign invader, and starts to attack it, creating insulin resistance, which sets the stage for blood sugar issues, which can then lead to hormonal imbalances and PCOS-like symptoms in many of these patients. With someone who came to us with type one, it’s absolute that they have an autoimmune condition. With PCOS, there’s more the insulin resistance that we’re managing, but there’s research showing the body could create antibodies to the pancreas and to areas of the ovaries, causing abnormal function in the ovaries — where maybe in PCOS there’s a ton of follicles developing at once, but that’s really just in response to the insulin resistance. Once you manage that, you can regulate the system.

It would be the same with Crohn’s, where it’s just targeting different tissues — in Crohn’s it’s targeting the intestines, and you’re getting inflammation and the inability to digest or absorb your food, maybe blood and mucus in your bowel movements. The why behind why certain tissues get targeted over others is obscure — I’m assuming there are genetic predispositions we haven’t figured out yet — but once that cascade is set off, the likelihood of targeting other normal tissues is very high. So if I saw someone with Hashimoto’s, and maybe she was having fertility challenges, and some pain with periods — I think the longer we live in this state of autoimmunity, the higher likelihood it is that other tissues are going to begin to be attacked. So you might see a girl with Crohn’s who then is starting to have fertility challenges or miscarriages, and it’s the same thing — I go after what I see. If I had someone passing blood and mucus in their bowels, that would be the first thing I fix, because that’s how I backtrack, and the fertility is secondary to that — it’s about the vitality first, and then fertility comes second.

Same type of thing — something sets off the cascade, and the largest opinion in the Western medical field is that these endocrine-disrupting chemicals are what’s setting it off, and the longer you live in that exposure — and I tend to see it now with my clients’ genetics, certain single nucleotide polymorphisms where they just can’t process out some estrogens that are in the environment — the longer that pipe in your body gets more and more clogged, the more the inflammation, the autoimmunity, takes on a life of its own. So the longer you live with it, the more intense the symptoms will be, but you can backtrack it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s totally making sense. It made me think of something — a few years back I attended a conference in Toronto and got to see Dr. Joseph Pizzorno speak. He was talking about diabetes, and he shared research showing it wasn’t the fact that you were overweight, or even that you ate sugar — the highest correlation was the level of toxicity in the individual. That was mind-blowing, because our culture says it’s your fault, you ate bad food. I’d love to hear your comment on the level of toxicity and how that relates to autoimmunity.

Aimee Raupp: I picture it as this tube getting filled up — people just aren’t methylating properly, they can’t clear it out as efficiently. I’m a really sensitive person myself — I can walk into a perfume department and get a blazing headache. If we look at the MTHFR mutation, 60 to 80% of the population have at least one copy of the gene, so 80% of us are compromised in getting rid of toxins in our body. We don’t know the exact why behind why some women wind up with Endo and some with PCOS and some not at all, but it’s this accumulation over time that sets off an inflammatory cascade in the body. Maybe you’re in leaky gut, so those toxins are getting back into the bloodstream, and the body decides everything is a potential invader — it’s very heightened, and it starts attacking, and that sets off the inflammatory response you always see in blood work with autoimmune conditions — high homocysteine, high C-reactive protein, natural killer cells if you’re looking at fertility.

From a Western perspective, environmental toxins are by far the biggest contributor to that, and another environmental toxin people don’t associate is stress — that’s a huge toxin. There’s physical inflammation from our food, our toxins, the air we breathe, the chemicals we’re exposed to, but then there’s emotional inflammation too — same thing, the pipe is getting clogged with all this pent-up stuff, and eventually, like a compost pile, it starts to decay and smolder and create heat in the body, and that’s the inflammation we’re trying to put out in autoimmunity. It’s something you can manage and heal, but for many people it’s a complete overhaul — the food you’re eating, the chemicals you’re exposed to, and then the emotional layer.

What is going on with autoimmunity is basically the body stopped recognizing itself — it doesn’t know who it is anymore. There’s a layer where forgiveness needs to happen, and reconnecting to where you lost yourself, and how you nourish yourself. It’s resetting that connection, and the healing does take place from there. For some people it’s a big overhaul, for others it’s not so big, because there’s still inflammation in their body even though they’re doing all the “right” things, so typically that’s the emotional inflammation — there’s still a disconnect on some level.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s really profound, and it’s going to stick with me — that your body literally doesn’t know itself, because it’s not distinguishing correctly what is self and what is not self.

Aimee Raupp: That’s exactly it. There’s a lot of books out on autoimmunity and the physical piece of that disconnect, but no one has talked about the emotional disconnect and how that relates. You see it clinically, and you see the clients know it themselves too. Nothing’s to blame, but the takeaway is — you deserve to feel connected to yourself, you deserve to feel at home in your body again.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’m glad we went here. Part of the reason I brought up the toxin aspect is because in the Western medicine paradigm there’s often this idea that it’s genetic. I did an interview a while ago with a researcher about toxins, and it’s some of the scariest research — when you were in utero developing, your mother may have been exposed to BPA or something like that, and that can interfere with the normal development process, which can then predispose you to Endo. So I think it’s important to talk about that environmental aspect — it’s terrifying, but also empowering, because it gives us something tangible we can act on.

Aimee Raupp: Even in that case where the exposure happens in utero, that’s what we know now about genetics — they’re not set in stone, it’s just your predisposition. Some people have to work harder than others, but I still think it’s shiftable toward the healthier side of the spectrum.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’d love to hear your description of how this links to fertility, and then the promising aspects of what you’ve found in your practice that can help calm this response.

Aimee Raupp: Pregnancy is the only foreign invader our body doesn’t kill off, and we don’t fully understand why — it’s basically a parasitic infection that our body decides to host, and it’s a very curious system to immunology. The embryo releases signals that say “I’m here,” and there’s some familiarity because it’s the egg the woman created, but the sperm is foreign. When autoimmunity is present, the body is just less likely to accept that foreign invader, even if it’s 50% yourself.

Fertility is a luxury — it’s an overflow of abundance of chi and blood, your body’s saying “I’ve got the goods, I’ve got the time, I’ve got the energy, I can make this life.” When you’re dealing with a hostile attack in your body all day long, it’s like, “I don’t have time for this,” and it might not prioritize the menstrual cycle. We might see anovulation, or Endo or PCOS comes in, because things are so chaotic to begin with. All of it is healable and fixable — I see a lot of women get and stay pregnant. What I do is similar to what you do — a clean-up of bath and beauty products, cleaning up the toxins in your food, that’s the baseline. And then supporting detoxification of the body, cleaning up the diet, certain supplements, acupuncture, stress management, proper sleep, all those things to support optimal immune functioning — and the emotional piece too, reworking belief systems, which is why the book is called Body Belief. Your beliefs dictate your behavior, and your behavior dictates your health. What I often see with women trying to get pregnant is they start to hate their body, they’re disconnected, angry — “everybody else is getting pregnant, what’s wrong with me” — and there’s interesting neuroscience research showing that if our beliefs are hostile, our body does physiologically start to respond to it. So it’s about getting to a more peaceful space in your body. I have a whole checklist in Body Belief of red-flag symptoms — skin stuff, digestive stuff, joint pain, brain fog, miscarriages, especially of chromosomally normal embryos — that’s a huge indicator to me that there’s autoimmunity going on. Some women need those red-flag symptoms to resolve and a couple of months living in that better state before they get pregnant, and some — probably where genetics play a role — can introduce a pregnancy sooner, because their body says, “This is my homeostasis, this works for me now.”

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I love this perspective — it’s holistic, looking at both the physical and emotional. I feel like in the Western medicine paradigm, it’s really “your body is broken, we need to fix it,” an outside force has to fix your broken body. But from this perspective, your body is actually highly intelligent, and it’s not convenient for your goals whatsoever, but it’s responding the way it is for a reason.

Aimee Raupp: It’s learning to listen to it. Many women will come and say, “I’m just not getting pregnant,” and the fertility doctor says it’s their egg quality, or their AMH is too high, or they have fibroids — and then you dig deeper and it’s, “Oh yeah, I have diarrhea four times a day, I have eczema all over my skin, I have no energy, my thyroid is all over the place.” No one’s looking at this holistic picture, even from a Western perspective — the fertility doctors really just look under the belt at those fertility hormones.

There’s data to support that inflammation in your body is going to compromise your egg quality. With endometriosis, there’s a lot of research showing that if you have Endo, you’re not going to have good egg quality, because all the estrogen needed to develop and ripen that follicle is going to the Endo tissue instead. We have to calm that down. With PCOS, there’s chaos and inflammation, too many follicles developing at once, sharing all the nutrition — we have to regulate that first, and then egg quality will improve. That’s what women search for the most, “how do I improve my egg quality,” and it is really important, but you have to calm the inflammation so the resources can go where they need to go, because right now the body is thinking about how to survive.

Your fertility isn’t exclusive of your health — you have to look at all the parameters. Ovulation is a very clear sign that your body has everything it needs, there’s an abundance of things, and my hormones do what they’re supposed to do — it’s a sign the body is working. With autoimmunity, the body is still working, and working quite well — it’s just also saying, “This isn’t a priority for me right now, I’ve got to fix this thing first.” And being pregnant with full-blown autoimmunity isn’t always best for the baby in utero either — my goal for my women is to go in and have a healthy pregnancy and bring home a healthy child, one who is set up with a healthy immune system that’s going to serve them through their life.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And it’s helpful to have a healthy mom to take care of that baby’s healthy immune system as well. I was wondering if you wanted to touch a little on the thyroid in particular, because so many women struggle with it, and what I’ve seen — when you have a woman with an uncontrolled thyroid issue, consistently low temperatures, low metabolism — that doesn’t go along with pregnancy. I’d love to hear your thoughts specifically on thyroid and the autoimmune component.

Aimee Raupp: Your thyroid, from a functional or Western perspective, you want that TSH between a one and a two ideally — most labs say up to a four is considered normal, but that’s too high. You’ll see it on the BBT, in the progesterone levels. In Chinese medicine, most of the time the diagnosis for a woman dealing with fertility challenges is “cold uterus” — the blood flow to the uterus is compromised, it’s not getting warm, and we want the child’s palace warm and cozy, which directly correlates to what the thyroid is doing, because the thyroid maintains body temperature and helps with homeostasis. When the body is too cold, it starts to go into survival mode and shut down. Ovulation happens when the body feels safe enough to host a life, and if the thyroid is out of whack, you’re just not going to see that efficient ovulation, or progesterone getting to where it needs to get.

So I’m always looking at a complete thyroid panel — TSH between a one and two, maybe a 2.5 max, and it can be a little under one — free T3 and free T4 right in the middle of the range, and obviously you want to see no thyroid antibodies. I’ve seen women get pregnant with high thyroid antibodies, usually in the hundreds, not the thousands, but I want to calm them down for sure. I’ve been doing this so long that I’m the one who asks for antibody testing and finds the thyroid antibodies, even if they’ve been to seven fertility specialists, because Western medicine doesn’t treat Hashimoto’s any different from regular hypo- or hyperthyroidism until the thyroid crashes — meaning until the antibodies have completely killed the thyroid — because their treatment is still going to be thyroid support, Synthroid or levothyroxine.

On the alternative side, we see it as — gluten and dairy proteins are quite similar to the thyroid protein, and so is soy, so anytime you eat gluten, dairy, or soy, it’s going to trigger more autoimmunity against the thyroid. So with Hashimoto’s, I say treat gluten, dairy, and soy like allergies, now and forever. A lot of times we change the diet, and the thyroid regulates, and people wind up needing less medication, and the body becomes more hospitable to pregnancy. It does depend on the blood work — a lot of docs will give pushback on doing a complete thyroid panel, and even if they see the antibodies, it’s not a very different approach for them from a Western perspective. From an alternative perspective, there is a different approach — tighter around the belt with the diet and the exposures to toxins.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Speaking of practitioners, this is one of the most challenging aspects — not every woman can work with you or me personally, and for all the women who are having struggles getting their doctor to do testing, one particular challenge is that there’s still a lot of people who aren’t clear on the different paradigms of healthcare. If you go to a Western, classically trained practitioner who isn’t coming from a functional perspective, you can’t really expect them to be advising you about nutrition and doing the full panel looking for antibodies. It’s not to put one down over the other, but you’re going to get a different level of treatment with a Chinese medicine practitioner versus a naturopathic doctor versus a chiropractor.

Aimee Raupp: That’s a really good point. I often say to my clients, compartmentalize a little bit — know who you’re going to for what, and what their area of expertise is. If you have a fertility doctor and you’re doing IVF, you’re going there because they’re really good at getting those eggs out of your ovaries and fertilizing them, and they have a good lab, and they’re going to transfer — that’s all you need them for. You don’t need your IVF doctor to believe that you can improve your egg quality or regulate your autoimmunity. Some women do need a reproductive immunologist on top, and some of them are fertility doctors as well. You need someone in your camp who can help interpret the data from all sides and bring it together.

Not everybody has the bandwidth for treating all the people in the world, so finding a functional medicine doctor, or an integrative doctor, is who you kind of need in your camp — it depends on where you live. Naturopathic doctors, some of them can run labs; acupuncturists in California can run labs; in Connecticut I can run labs for patients, but I still can’t prescribe, so we still need to find some people — their gynecologist, their GP, or a functional medicine doctor. If you’re in the States, you can use kits like Let’s Get Checked or Everlywell for thyroid panels to get the data, but you’re still going to need a physician to support you in that. Most fertility docs know the research that a TSH above a 2.5 is not conducive to pregnancy, and they will support you thyroid-wise. It is complicated, and I do think you need an advocate on your team — it can be done, but sometimes it requires three different doctors in your camp.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for laying that out — I have this conversation a lot, I get emails from women all over the world asking if I know someone great in Australia, or San Francisco, and it’s interesting, because for some reason we don’t necessarily think to search for functional practitioners in our area the way we would search for anything else. What I’d add is — look for someone who specializes in the particular issue you have.

Aimee Raupp: And the Facebook groups too — if you suspect you have Endo, Nancy’s Nook Facebook group is one of the best resources for women all over the world, and so many of my clients find practitioners there. Post in these forums and ask — it’s often great to get referrals from someone in your community, even a virtual community. It sometimes takes a little time, but my patients do always find the right team. There’s a bit of faith and trust you have to have too. It’s a lot to take in for the first time, and where do I start — but squeaky wheel gets the grease, you have to keep asking, and be your own advocate. It’s time to take back the power here, versus expecting your doctors to lead and give you all the answers.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: When you decide to take back control of your health, it’s not an easy road at all. It’s not flowers and sunshine when you’re sitting in someone’s office and they’re not giving you what you need, and you have to go find someone else — it’s sometimes expensive.

Aimee Raupp: Not saying it’s easy, but it’s worth being persistent. And when it comes to fertility treatments — some women say IVF is so expensive, they can’t afford a functional doc too, but if you get all this right going into that fertility treatment, you might need one IVF cycle instead of three, so there’s savings there. Or you might not need IVF at all. It’s a pay-now-or-pay-later kind of situation, and where do you prioritize yourself, and realize this is an investment in myself. It’s never inexpensive and always painful to pay those visits, but I think really worth it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: It’s just a different paradigm, a different way of looking at the body, healthcare, and even your part in it. Aimee, I could talk to you all day — it happens every time. As we draw our call to a close, I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I really appreciate you taking us through this in as much depth as you did. One of the aspects you brought up — there are tons of books about autoimmune conditions, mostly about diet and specific ways to eat, but the emotional aspect you brought into it is something different you don’t hear every day. I’d love for you to end on that note, and share what you would want every woman to know about autoimmunity from that perspective.

Aimee Raupp: If we know the core of autoimmunity is self attacking self — tissue attacking, or our immune system attacking tissue in our bodies that’s normal — I think it’s worth stepping back and asking, “Where am I attacking myself?” and where can I be kinder and more hospitable to me, and to where I am in my life. There are layers I always seem to unpack — forgiveness that needs to happen, often toward ourselves, or toward our choices, or the forks in the road, and processing grief and anger. Those are the big emotions I see. So check yourself, reconnect, and start to listen to the conversation you’re having in the privacy of your own mind. We have something like 50,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of them are the same, so it’s not that hard to figure out what you say to yourself all day. Start to listen, write them down, and ask yourself, “How can I say that better?” How would I say that to my child, my partner, my best friend — would I say it with such hostility, or can I choose different words? It’s about reframing — we can’t scream positive affirmations at ourselves all day and expect them to stick. The universe knows what you feel, not what you say, so I want you to actually believe in the affirmation, and notice where you’re contradicting yourself with it too. How can I be nicer to myself, in the choices around eating, sleeping, relationships — what am I doing to nourish and support myself every day?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I love that, Aimee — this has been so amazing, thank you so much. Let us know about your books, particularly Body Belief, since we talked about that today, but also Yes, You Can Get Pregnant, and where we can get them, and more information about you and where we can find you.

Aimee Raupp: Everything’s on my website, it’s aimeeraupp.com — pretty easy — and you can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook. I go live every single week on both, sharing knowledge and wisdom, and I have a ton of great free content to support women on their fertility journeys. If you just head to my website, everything is there for you.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome, well we will link the website, your books, and all the places. Thanks so much for being here, Aimee.

Aimee Raupp: Thank you so much, Lisa.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/339. I hope that you enjoyed my interview with Aimee — what a fantastic deep dive into autoimmunity and how it impacts fertility. I was completely enthralled and fascinated by this conversation, and it again highlights the importance of seeking support when you are struggling with fertility challenges or health challenges in general, because there are many different modalities that look at essentially the same condition in a variety of ways.

Over the years of interviewing practitioners of different modalities, I’ve heard comments like, “I don’t believe in unexplained infertility,” because many practitioners would want to do a lot of testing across a lot of different aspects of health, not least of which being autoimmune issues, underlying infections, or gut issues — a variety of factors that are often overlooked by Western allopathic medicine. So thank you so much for tuning into the show today. I hope you enjoyed today’s show — make sure to tag Aimee and me on social media if you liked the episode, and certainly share it if you know somebody who could really benefit from what we talked about today. I just want to thank you all for being part of the Fertility Friday community, for continuing to help me spread the word about fertility awareness and the connection between your cycles and overall health. So with that, I’m going to let you go have a wonderful week or weekend, whenever you are listening to today’s episode, and of course, as always, until next time — be well, and happy charting.