Vagus Nerve 101 – Melanie Weller
Guest: Melanie Weller
Podcast Release Date: 8/8/2021
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Steve Washuta: Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast I am your host Steve Washuta, co-founder of Trulyfit and author of Fitness Business 101. On today’s podcast, I’m speaking with Melanie Weller. Melanie is a physical therapist by trade, but she has transitioned her career into focusing specifically on the vagus nerve. She works with her clients to discover issues with the vagus nerve, which she sees both physical and also psychological issues stemming from problems with the vagus nerve.
We go over what the vagus nerve is, technically speaking, anatomically speaking, what specialists would deal with this in theory and in practice, common issues whether that is seizures, gastroparesis, vasovagal syncope, and other common signs and symptoms of things related to problems with the vagus nerve, and where innervates in scientific studies are behind its effects.
We also go into pushback here, because some of this is a little woo-woo. Well because the science just isn’t all in yet. Right? You don’t know what you don’t know. So if it hasn’t been fully studied yet, we’re not really sure of all of its effects. But there are a lot of studies already there that Melanie does talk about. It’s an interesting topic.
She is a physical therapist, who has a background in understanding the body and seeing her clients. She really cares and she’s trying to make a difference. I know she does make a difference with our clients. This is good information here, and really for podcasts, we like to spend all of traditional and maybe semi untraditional health and wellness and go over it right. That’s what we’re here to do.
We’re here to give the listeners information about topics. I interview experts on said topics. I will always push back a little bit and ask those hard questions for the listeners. Melanie was fantastic. I hope to speak with her down the road, with no further ado, here’s Melanie. Melanie, thanks for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Why don’t you give the listeners a bio-professional history of who you are and what it is that you do?
Melanie Weller: Sure. Thank you so much for having me here today. My name is Melanie Weller, and I suppose the easy answer is that I’m a physical therapist. I’ve done that for about 25 years and I was an athletic trainer before I went to PT school. So I’ve been working with people’s bodies and their injuries for the better part of 30 years. I have recently, in the last 10 or 15 years, have really branded myself as a stress management expert.
My background is in treating complicated chronic pain patients for others that haven’t found the answer to what they’re looking for. So I’ve spent a lot of time treating people that don’t fall into a diagnostic box don’t meet the normal criteria or don’t respond to it as expected. So where I’ve come with all of this, it’s really the result of learning why people fall through the cracks.
These are aspects of people that are very hard to study because they’re not so consistent, you can’t really collect data when people have varied responses. One of the threads that link dysfunction in all of us is the Vegas nerve and so really treating the Vegas nerve as a pinched nerve has been the core of my approach to patients for a very long time.
I have extended that to really talking about the vagus nerve and bridging the story and the body as well because we’re really wired for story and not for facts and so when we communicate with patients in a more fact-based approach while it can be really useful it’s not nearly as powerful as communicating with them through a story
Steve Washuta: Well, that’s a very interesting take. Do you still practice physical therapy, and can I ask is it standard to use the Vegas nerve and some of the jargon and the lingo for physical therapists, or is this specifically you?
Melanie Weller: I will say it’s not an industry standard. But if you get a physical therapist or an osteopathic doctor or a chiropractor that has a background, that’s more osteopathic in nature, that is not that at the very least treating the vagus nerve as a pinched nerve at the base of the skull is a common practice among people with that kind of a background.
Steve Washuta: Okay.
Melanie Weller: I have extended it to a whole-body system and matched more biomechanical tests to what I call compression points, and then anything else I am aware of.
Steve Washuta: Before we get into the specifics, let’s kind of hop backward here. Can you give a vague definition no pun intended of the vagus nerve, and you can get technical, you can talk about where it originates. I guess most of the people listening to this podcast are personal trainers, so they’ll understand maybe some of the nuances but maybe not sort of all the technical lingo that you’re used to.
Melanie Weller: Sure, yeah. So the vagus nerve goes all the way from your brainstem down into the pelvis. It’s the biggest part of your parasympathetic nervous system. So the parasympathetic nervous system is what balances the sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight and flight responses. So the vagus nerve is your grace under pressure.
It’s your pleasure. It is what makes you feel calm. It’s what makes you feel safe and secure. It’s, in the big picture at the interface, your vocal cords, your heart, and your digestive system, it sends lots of information and sends almost all of your organs sending information up to your brain and it mediates inflammation mediates sweating.
So that’s something that you know that you’ll that personal trainers are certainly well acquainted with and some people sweat a lot and some people don’t sweat so much. You know, and some of that can be reflective of their Vegas nerve function but certainly, as a physical therapist, my interest in it really started because it mediates inflammation.
You know, and certainly, I was dealing with people that had you know, the vast majority of my patients had some kind of inflammatory process going on. It uses the same neurotransmitter that your muscles do so you get these really beautiful musculus musculoskeletal shifts that result in a personal trainer and physical therapist’s terms, better length-tension relationships, so you get stronger contractions.
Steve Washuta: What are the first signs, you would say are common symptoms of somebody who has an issue, whether again, you can speak to if it’s compression or if it’s some sort of larger issue going on with a nerve,
Melanie Weller: Where we’re probably all most familiar with our Vegas nerves being dialed down and not working as well, is when we go to do public speaking or something that would make us similarly nervous if that makes you nervous. We get a lump in our throats and our palms sweat and our hearts race and our stomachs feel funny. That all happens because the vagus nerve gets dialed down, and our fight and flight responses get dialed up. So a lot of stress and anxiety symptoms are really a manifestation of how well or not your vagus nerve is functioning. There are many less obvious components of it like you wouldn’t necessarily think that having a tight calf muscle might be a symptom of a compressed Vegas nerve, but I’m here to tell you that it absolutely can be.
Steve Washuta: I know that, let’s say like gastroparesis and things of that nature also likely.
Melanie Weller: Yeah definitely constipation and diarrhea can both be dysfunction of the vagus nerve, then there’s always a that’s a more complex issue for a lot of people where you have to have a dietary approach and whatnot to help support the vagus nerve function.
But I absolutely got a lot of referrals from registered dieticians to help support their patients through getting their digestive systems working better, better nutrient absorption, vagus nerve also signals hunger and satiety. It helps you absorb water.
We cannot absorb vitamin B 12 without our vagus nerve. Sometimes when people aren’t getting really good nutrient absorption, you’re taking a whole bunch of supplements, but you aren’t getting a notable change or, you know if you’re somebody that’s getting monitored for iron absorption or B 12 levels or something like that and aren’t seeing any changes that can be because you’re not getting the absorption of what you’re taking in.
Steve Washuta: Now, I guess you would say mechanistically are they looking at some of these things like you know, seizures or guests or presets or like you said all these issues and then working backward, the research or they are they actually Locating there’s such an issue with the nerve and then they can foresee the events that are coming down the chain if that makes sense.
Melanie Weller: Well, because the vagus nerve innervates, some many parts of the body and influences and part it doesn’t directly innervate, and I’ll speak to that in a second. The research shows that for many issues when they put electrical stimulation on the vagus nerve to help it function better that you get dramatic changes in the body.
That’s a really hot topic in the research, so Vegas nerve stimulation results in healing of the mitochondrial defects in the cells that go with heart disease, and specifically ischemic heart disease: the lack of blood flow. When you pair Vegas nerve stimulation with an auditory stimulus, it literally remaps your brain at the highest levels and absolutely with seizures, they do use vagus nerve, they will, neurosurgeons will sometimes implant Vegas nerve stimulators for people with seizures and patients can have really profound results.
Melanie Weller: For me, and I’ll just say beyond that, without the electrical stimulation, there’s research that shows that how well your vagus nerve functions has predictive value for how long patients with pancreatic cancer will live. In women with complete spinal cord injuries, they can achieve orgasm with Vegas nerve stimulation, at the cervix, and so that’s really exciting for that population to be able to. Just hink about how our Vagus nerves are really wired into our pleasure pathways, as well. I don’t have a license to operate, that’s not part of my practice, but I understand biomechanics really well.
Melanie Weller: We know through the research, that stress and trauma always affect the voice in the breath. I would love to see seizure patients, who I don’t see usually. So like, I don’t have a good sense of how my work would affect them. But I would love to see what their bodies feel like because I have some sessions. We know that stress and trauma always affect the voice in the breath. We experienced that when we experienced a trauma or something cold, we stop breathing, we breathe faster, and our vocal cords and our diaphragms are horizontally oriented in the body.
Melanie Weller: When in certainly an extreme case of stress and trauma, some people will lose bladder control or maybe even bowel control and our pelvic floors are horizontal in the body as well. So we really embody stress and trauma on the transverse plane on the horizontal in our bodies. Nobody gets stressed or traumatized and walks away with a really beautiful arm swing sashaying down the hall, we all freeze up, keep our arms close, we stop rotating. So I find rotation a very reliable and meaningful measure of the level of stress somebody’s body is in. When somebody is locked down in rotation at multiple levels their situation is more severe. The most severe cases that I get are usually around suicide ideation and suicide planning and hallucinations.
Melanie Weller: Like those are one I’ve seen things most locked down. Anxiety will lockdown to a certain extent, you know, depression locks it down a little bit more. When you start thinking about suicide, it’s as if you’ve lost road rotation really systemically and you have a minimal amount and that’s something that really takes a skilled eye to tease out because we’re all masters of compensation with movement. So yes, you have to really understand the biomechanics to tease that out very specifically, but I’m really looking for people in the mental health field to partner with for this and research because I think it can be could be a really meaningful mental screening for the number of times I’ve seen it serve me.
Then people with conditions that haven’t responded to traditional, or even alternative medical intervention, you can really help there. I will say not only are their physical shock absorption so low that they get a chance to heal because fundamentally, from a biomechanical standpoint, when you lose rotation, but you also lose a ton of shock absorption in your system. It also helps with mental shock absorption and emotional stock shock absorption, and they all seem to really go together.
Steve Washuta: It seems like this is a very, I would say, esoteric topic, right? It’s very in-depth, there’s a lot that goes on, and it touches all these different areas. That could be a sort of a double-edged sword. Right, you talked about neurosurgeons having a role in this. You know my wife is in sports medicine, a pediatric doctor, and she deals with some of these things, physical therapists, I mean, the list goes on and on.
Now you’re even getting into how it goes into mental health, which we’re going to talk about the second I think, there’s a blessing and a curse, because it crosses over on all these different health and medical fields, that it’s hard for anybody to be an expert on it. You are a champion in that. I think that’s great because everyone else only touches a little bit of this.
Can you now explain the implants, procedures, or the guests or price? I know, we didn’t hit on this, but the vasovagal syncope, I’ve read a lot about it, can you now talk about the mental side, which you were getting to- and all of the things that it goes into, as far as signs and symptoms and what you believe, can be helped or noticed by these issues?
Melanie Weller: Yeah, so Vegas nerve stimulation has shown to be really helpful in depression and PTSD, in particular. I’ve read some research that talks about how the vagus nerve is really even integral to psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. So, you know we certainly understand that between gut health, and things like that, that a lot of disorders are really rooted in sending that information from your gut, up to your brain that’s influencing that behavior.
At some level, you know, it’s not going to be the only component, but that’s part of that, a big significant part of that pathway. Once the gold standard measure of Vegas nerve function is called heart rate variability. The variability is really the- if you imagine what it’s like when an EKG or what a heart rate graph might look like, it’s really, the heart rate variability is kind of the distance between the peaks, and what you’re looking for. There are age match norms that are established for this is when it’s more coherent, you want it to be really organized.
You can imagine that somebody who’s anxious, or has anxiety, diagnosis or situation is would have like an erratic heart rate variability, some beats will be close together, some beats will be further apart, that it’s going to be a little bit of a Messier graph. Somebody who’s depressed might have a very flattened graph, like their amplitude, over the person with anxiety is going to have a really high amplitude to the graph, the person with depression might it, especially when it’s more severe, it’s going to look a little more flattened, and not have that same amplitude.
So these are all things that have been established through research and case studies and, whatnot. But the research doesn’t really look at the mechanics of the body with it. I will contend that you know, and we have amazing research, but medicine tends to have a very top-down approach like we’re going to start with the brain and work and influence the body that way. The cognitive or verbal parts of our brain send information at 40 bits per second.
Our bodies and the nonverbal parts of our brain send information at 11 million bits per second. When we are cut off at those horizontal thresholds in our body, our brains can’t get good information on that 11 million bits per second superhighway. That’s why I really think that the mental can give better output.
Steve Washuta: That’s really interesting information on the HRV. I had no idea that those two things were interconnected. We actually had a specialist, Kevin Rocauti, on an episode a few months ago, who’s a cycling coach, but he’s an HRV specialist. He was talking about how it was important for him when he was working with a cyclist and other people, when they woke up in the morning, they looked at their HRV, before they made decisions based on what they were going to do that day, because it would have a huge impact on them physically, and also psychologically,
Melanie Weller: Absolutely. It’s also deeply connected, you can’t really say the vagus nerve is well under, because of how it’s researched around with PTSD and depression and things like that. We know, it’s very intimately connected to our moods. When I talk with patients that have been struggling with something for a long time, and I talk about what’s going on in their lives, and certain patterns and whatnot, one way that I will frame it is that their body’s been screaming “No” for a very long time, and they haven’t been listening.
Athletic performance, it’s fantastic to use the heart rate variability to determine if it’s going to be a good day to train, or if your body’s in need of rest because it will give you some of that information. That’s not where I use it. But I do have colleagues that have been using that, and especially in conjunction with the brainwave technology to get the heart rate variability and brainwave information, and that they’re really able to help athletes develop better training programs. But that’s when you have good numbers.
That’s the way the kind of that your body’s saying yes. So then you can go do stuff. But we’re also culturally really pushed to ignore and defy what our bodies are telling us.
Steve Washuta: Now, a lot of this seems very, I would say scientific mechanistic, right, you see that “this is wrong, and this is wrong”, and then we fix it using B, and then C happens. Some of it I’m going to play devil’s advocate here can seem a little woo-woo, right? Is this really all interconnected? How can we tell if there’s not an actual, you know: A equals B, and C, more algebraic? How do you combat those detractors who say that this is a little bit woo-woo?
Melanie Weller: I will say the proof is in the pudding, at some level, you have to first realize my background is treating all those people that have not followed that formula that has not responded to the A plus B equals c thing, if they did, they would not have found their way into my office are true. We are so much more than our physical bodies, and we know that stress is 75 to 90% of all diseases and dysfunction, that those are medical statistics that are out there, we do not talk very specifically about what stress really is and what it means. That’s really part of what I love to do with patients.
Because when you have the realization that, oh, my pattern is that I’m trying to be the hero and everybody else’s story at the expense of my own. Or my pattern is that I’m satisfying everybody else’s desires, at the expense of my own, and there are lots of patterns that you know, but I have a have created kind of a system for determining this and correlated it with the vagus nerve compression points where the restrictions are in the body, then people get better, and they don’t come back to me they stay better.
That’s the best part of all of it it’s kind of like merging the medicine and the psychology piece of it together. I will admit that I get people that are very often very self-reflective because by the time they’ve come to me, you know, they either hear about me and like they liked that aspect, and they’ll come to me just for that or they have been around the block with as medical conditions.
So they’ve had a lot of self-reflection and women especially will often get referred to psychiatrists or psychologists before they get referred to a physical therapist for a physical body symptom. I invite the research like I fully admit that I am pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and that I’m treating in a way that absolutely has an algorithm.
But we’re all very creative about how we lay down dysfunction in our bodies. We don’t all do it in the exact same way. If you just think about people on a very superficial level, there’s so many different personalities and so many different experiences that shape who we are, that we’re not a bunch of robots, and that’s really where medicine kind of falls short. I went to PT school, I graduated right at the advent of all the medical professionals creating evidence-based guidelines, which is great, so we should know that what we’re doing works.
One of the challenges that I’ve seen, in people that were educated after I was, is that the process sucked out some of the creative and critical thinking that goes with it. I’ll admit, I was educated, I went to the University of Southern California, I had a super progressive PT, school education. But, you know if you have a knee problem, for example, and if you’re lucky end up with a good physical therapist and a traditional clinic, they’ll screen your ankle on your hip to see what’s going on above and below. A trainer will certainly pick that up too.
But for example, your diaphragm, the muscle you breathe with inserts into your hip flexors. If your diaphragm is not working, right, you’re not going to get enough hip extension, when you walk. That’s going to translate into stress, somewhere, it could be low back pain, it can drive patellar patellofemoral, alignment to where you get somebody who’s quite literally stuck in the fetal position, but they’re out in the world walking upright, and the amount of compensation they have to do to achieve that is enormous.
The lack of this, looking at people as a whole, is a big shortcoming of medicine in general. I will say, even beyond that the lack of a cohesive cosmology that kind of connects what’s happening in our bodies, to our personal lives, to our work, lives to our families is a huge gap that keeps a lot of people from finding success, or makes it certainly much, much slower. If you look at the statistics on chronic pain, and addiction, and even on our mental health and our loneliness epidemic, we are, we’re not getting ahead on that.
We have to do something different. So I fully recognize I am pushing the boundaries to connect things that have not maybe widely been connected and to start creating and inspire new research and new science and create things so that at the end of the day, we are all individuals, we’re not robots. I don’t think it’s not an either-or like because we’re humans, we’re going to respond to certain things very similarly. But you also have to treat the person that’s in front of you. As a clinician, any really skilled clinician will tell you, that’s where the magic is, is meeting somebody where they are, and really seeing them for what’s going on.
Steve Washuta: Yeah, I have to piggyback off that point, and we talk about it a lot in this podcast is that there’s not enough done, where we’re working specifically with the individual looking at their problems you just talked about.
They have a knee issue. Some people say, okay, it’s the foot, some people go, well, it’s the hip, or is it the hip causing the knee, which is, in turn, causing a foot problem or the foot causing the knee which in turn causing a hip problem? Is it more than that? Right? Is it because of their diaphragm and their breathing? But even to take it a step further, is their diaphragm problem because they’re not sleeping properly? Or because they’re not eating properly?
Right, there’s a wholesome approach to looking at each individual but the problem is like you said, things are blanketed now and everyone wants to just look at it, we need one quick short answer. “Okay you do have any issues, do these six exercises that will strengthen your hip flexor and your knee issue will go away”. Well, it’s not that easy.
Melanie Weller: It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple, right? I’ve many times decompressed somebodies Vegas nerve at the base of their skull and suddenly their knee pain goes away. My favorite reaction is when they’re a little confused that it doesn’t still hurt. Then they’re angry that it was that easy to get better because they don’t think it should have been that easy.
You know, I think we do make it really hard. I think we spend a lot of time narrowing it down to one thing, I call that reflexive reductionism, but we do try to make one thing cure everything, you know, “these six extra exercises are going to be the solution for lots and lots of people.” I’m not gonna say exercise does amazing things, it’s an absolutely important part of a solution in a lot of cases.
But the game I’ve played with myself for years and years, which really started kind of out of necessity to keep myself sane as a clinician, because when you get people that have chronic conditions and have pain in three or four different places, you can chase biomechanical dysfunction, and pain all day long, and kind of make yourself a little crazy. The game I always played was, what one, two, or three things can I do that make 1020 or 30 things better for this person. I’ve just gotten better at this game. This is what I want to show other people how to do we don’t know with research, we don’t find questions. We don’t find answers to questions we’re not asking.
You know, and I think we need to ask different questions. The way that I see it, the body is our bodies mimic the cosmos and the way that I use storytelling like it is very esoteric, but it’s all rooted in science, you know, that there are that the science supports that type of intervention, it’s just never been systematized to use with patients before.
Steve Washuta: Yeah, and obviously, that’s important. We talked about the scientific studies, we talked about how you know, where things innovate, and how things are connected? Can you maybe discuss your procedures, and if you don’t want to give everything away that’s fine. But if I come to you, and I think I have an issue. And you think that issue is associated with my Vegas nerve. What would be a step or the first step in what you would take with one of your clients?
Melanie Weller: Yeah, no, I’m absolutely I’m happy to share some of that. Actually, if people go to my website, Melanie weller.com. And sign up for my email list. It will send you an hour-long course. That teaches you how to evaluate yourself and treat yourself with a lot of the tests that I use.
So one of the first tests that I do with people. Is to see if they have an elevated first trip. Your first revs are in your upper traps, they’re right at the top of your shoulders. The vagus nerve exits the base of the skull with some other structures as well, including your spinal accessory nerve.
So if your vagus nerve is compressed. Your spinal accessory nerve will get compressed to. And the spinal accessory goes to some of the muscles that attach to your first couple of ribs. The test for that is much easier to follow in the instructions in the video. But I’m going to do my best here to sit upright posture. Or you could do this standing as well. Do not multitask. While you’re doing this, you’re going to turn your head as far as you can comfortably to one side. So just like you’re going to look over your right shoulder, your left shoulder. So you’re looking over your left shoulder, for example.
The next thing you’re going to do is lead with your right ear. The ear that’s facing forward. You’re going to bring your ear closer to your chest without slouching your back at all. And so some people if you hit a brick wall up there pretty early. Like in the first 10 or 15 degrees. You’re stuck, your first rib is elevated and that’s a biomechanical test. That’s been half the research that it’s you know that it works. So that shows that your first rib is elevated and you can compare it right to left. A lot of people will be asymmetrical. Some people will be stuck on both sides. But you want to have a decent. You probably want to imagine that maybe your head comes forward like 45 degrees or so. Something like that.
If it’s normal to tense there. Especially at where your neck and your shoulder meet. And that little angle, then you probably have some first rib dysfunction. One of the easiest ways to give your vagus nerve more space at the base of the skull. Is to grab on to the triggers of each ear. The trigger is the little tab at the front of your ear. That if you didn’t want to hear me or hear somebody else. You would press to cover your ear hole and go Lalalalala. So if you grab the triggers of each ear. Pull the right one to the right and the left one to the left. You’re going to pull really gently, this isn’t about muscling it at all.
All of the techniques that I learned from osteopaths were all with five grams of force. So which is the weight of a nickel in the United States. Very, very subtle force, but at night you’re giving what the research will call a low load. Long-duration stretch, which is what really gives you better collagen transformation anyway. But you hold that for 45 or 60 seconds and then retest.
The Vagus nerve, for example, is perhaps more restricted at the level of your heart. You might get more benefit from a different from the heart exercise. Than from the base of the skull exercise because that’s just closer to the root of the problem. But you can eat and you can really take any motion that you find limited. Or gives you an ache or a pain and whether that’s lifting your shoulder up certainly limit limited. And range shoulder motion is one big sign for me. Limited internal rotation is a huge sign of vagus nerve compression. Poor respiratory mechanics, which play off of each other significantly.
Steve Washuta: I just want to make one thing clear, you’re saying the vagus nerve compression is secondary. The assigned poor internal rotation means. That there’s something else going on in the body that is compressing the nerve. Like a high rib, for example? Correct?
Melanie Weller: Correct. Well, I will say a high rib is even more of a symptom than the problem. The problem is really the biomechanics at the base of your skull. Or the facial tension that goes at the base of your skull.
You think about how many people carry stress at the base of their skull. Behind their necks that you know, you get stressed. Get tight behind your neck and certainly, your shoulders start creeping up towards your ears. Your vagus nerve exits the base of the skull between your temporal bone and your occipital bone.
Grabbing onto your ears to pull them to the side via the triggers of the ear. Is the easiest way to grab onto your temporal bone to start stretching it. A little bit away from your occipital bone. The osteopathic research all shows that your cranial bones are not truly fused. That there you do have connective tissue in the sutures in that you can influence their mobility. There’s a whole field of craniosacral therapy around that. Even if you’re going to go with the cranial bones, don’t move. There’s connective tissue all the way through there anyway. So you can at the very least affect the facial relationships in that area.
Steve Washuta: Are there studies that are being poured into this? Do you think that there is a particular medical specialist. Whoever that may be, who will be using these things in 5, 10, 15 years? Or do you think it’s always going to be taboo? That you will have to be sort of slightly outside of traditional in order to use these?
Melanie Weller: Well. I think that this material certainly lends itself very easily for primary care. Physicians to give handouts for patients in orthopedics. Because physicians they do that already. There’s no reason that if they’re going to give you a handout to tell you to do straight leg raises. Or squats. You know hip abduction or something like that for your knee problem.
There’s no reason they can’t throw a few vagus nerve decompression exercises on that as well. I think from the hands-on point. It’s I would love to see it much integrated, you know I think by the time 15 years comes around. It will absolutely be more integrated into physical therapy and occupational therapy. Osteopathic manual medicine. Because the speed at which outcomes accelerate is so great. In my experience with these exercises. That my greatest hope for research going forward is that that translates for others too. It certainly translates for the students that I’ve taught.
Everybody loves better outcomes because you have a shorter length of care. Also fewer frequent fliers in your medical system. That aren’t not circling through coming back with the same problem a few months later. So, I do think that medicine is going through a lot of great.
Or I will say, a lot of growing pains. But I do think that there’s absolutely potential to have it you know. To establish those outcomes on a large post improved outcomes. On better outcomes on a large scale and medicine. You know, I talked a lot about looking through the lens of mythology. Talk about how medicine is, we know, medicine is chopped up into all these pieces. We have so many specialists and rightfully so. Because it’s a lot of information for anyone person to hold.
But we use dismemberment metaphors in our language all the time. We say we’re falling apart, we can’t get it together. Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered. It’s really just mirroring, you know. Whether we’re mirroring the medical system, or the medic medical system is mirroring us. Or its own thing. Medicine has its own wound being chopped into pieces. Medicine needs a paradigm that really starts to unite. Because when you get people to go to multiple specialists. The communication is always there
So we need to language a thread through all the specialties to make medicine better. And certainly in the United States. In many other countries, we have great medical systems in many ways. But we can also do better. There are large chunks of our population, you know. Certainly with chronic pain and addiction, especially those that are falling through the cracks.
Steve Washuta: Melanie, this has been great information. I really appreciate your time. Let’s let the audience know where they can find more about you. Specifically your program or maybe even where reach out to you directly for questions.
Melanie Weller: Yeah, absolutely. I love it when people reach out directly to me. All of my contact information is on my website, which is my name Melanieweller.com. All of my social media Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are under my name, but the handle is embodyyourstar.com
Steve Washuta: Awesome. Melanie, thank you so much for joining the Trulyfit podcast. Hope to have you on down the road speaking about this morning.
Melanie Weller: Thank you so much, Steve.
Steve Washuta: Thanks for joining us on the Trulyfit podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review on your listening platform. Feel free to email us as we’d love to hear from you.
Thanks again!
