Transcription of Dr. Bethany Hays for the show Vitamin D/Sunshine #46
Dr. Lisa: On today’s the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we’re discussing vitamin D and sunshine. And we thought there probably is no better person in Maine to come in and talk to us about vitamin D and vitamins than the founder of True North and this is Dr. Bethany Hays. Thank you for coming in today.
Dr. Bethany: Thank you for having me Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Now you and I have this background, you’ve been … since you were sort of in my life very early on as a resident when you were teaching and delivering babies and I delivered some babies with you. So you’ve been out there as a teacher for a while, now you’ve kind of jumped ship from OB/GYN to functional medicine. Tell me what that is, what is functional medicine and why is it important to health?
Dr. Bethany: Well, functional medicine is upstream medicine. It’s medicine which we try to find the causes of people’s symptoms and problems rather than just treating the symptoms with drugs and surgery. So we’re really going upstream and asking people not to get in the water, instead of throwing drugs and surgery at them as they go over the waterfall. I think of it as the way healthcare should be done and the way medicine is going to be practiced in the future.
Dr. Lisa: But you went from a very surgically oriented sort of, I don’t know, maybe skeptical field into this relatively new part of medicine. Why did you make that decision?
Dr. Bethany: Well, I was trained like most physicians to first of all do no harm and as I got into my medical practice, I found myself not needing that requirement. So I began looking for who had the best outcome and the best results and my first step into this field was actually to pay attention to what midwives do because they were the ones who had the best outcomes in terms of normal birth. That led me into complementary and alternative medicine where there were ways to take care of people that weren’t as caustic, weren’t as dangerous as some of the drugs.
Then I found functional medicine which completely satisfied my need to understand things all the way down to the molecules. And so I … it’s not that I don’t love the surgical subspecialty but I found that when I practiced functional medicine, there wasn’t any surgery to do. So I ended up giving up surgery because I didn’t think I was doing it often enough to keep my skill set up and so here I am doing sort of outpatient medicine, helping people stay healthy.
Dr. Lisa: And you’re doing outpatient medicine at a very special place in Falmouth, True North, which has now been around for a decade to your credit and to the credit of people at True North. What is True North for those people who are listening, who aren’t aware?
Dr. Bethany: Well, True North is a non-profit 501C3 and we’re in experiment to see if health care can be done differently. So we’re trying to help people stay healthy and to provide people with a kind of healthcare which we think we’re not getting as often now because of the pressure on physicians to see lots and lots of people in a very short period of time. So at True North, all of our practitioners work together to help people get healthy. But we take the time that’s needed to really understand and listen to you and then figure out what’s going on upstream and help you to stop those problems.
Dr. Lisa: Speaking of upstream, let’s talk about vitamin D, I mean we’re talking about up and the sunshine and vitamin D, this has become very hot. Well, sunshine again, hot topic in the last few years. Why has it become important and what didn’t we know about it before that’s now emerged?
Dr. Bethany: Well, I think for a long time we thought vitamin D was just involved in preventing rickets which is a bone disease. Now, we’re finding that vitamin D is actually more than it is a vitamin, it is a hormone that is intimately involved with many, many processes in our body that keep us healthy. So vitamin D is involved in the immune system and how the immune system functions keeping your immune system from getting overactive. Overactive immune systems cause inflammation which is really one of the major causes of lots of downstream illnesses that we think of as related to ageing.
Vitamin D is critically important in brain function so we know that vitamin D is involved with Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis. There are a bunch of diseases that we now know we see more often in people who live in the far north. So people who live up here in Maine have some of these diseases more often than folks who live down in the sunshine. The question is, what do we do to keep healthy vitamin D levels when we live up here?
Dr. Lisa: I know interestingly that functional medicine was talking about vitamin D 10 years ago, eight years ago, right around when True North was founded, at the molecular level. Way before this conversation started happening in mainstream medicine.
Dr. Bethany: Yeah that’s one of the great things about functional medicine is they’re really out on the leading edge of the research and trying to get that research to clinicians faster. We know that a lot of the research that’s coming out doesn’t get to doctors for … well, the New England journal said an average of 17 years. There’re actually a number of things that didn’t get to doctors for 30 years so functional medicine is working hard to get that information to physicians earlier.
Dr. Lisa: Now vitamins A, D, E and K, they’re all fat soluble vitamins which means that we can’t pee them out … we can’t … if we take too much of them, they can’t be excreted.
Dr. Bethany: That’s right.
Dr. Lisa: What are the dangers associated with too much vitamin D?
Dr. Bethany: Well, if you get too much vitamin D, it causes calcium to be deposited in places you don’t want calcium. Like for instance, in your kidneys, to produce kidney stones or in your blood vessels to produce hardening of the arteries. So it is important to know your vitamin D level, to not overdose yourself with vitamin D. There’s some tricks to that that are going to require some intelligence on the part of people who are taking vitamin D and people who are prescribing it. For instance, if you have a very activated immune system such as people with autoimmune disease for instance. Then you can actually be activating vitamin D and have a relatively low 25-hydroxy vitamin D which is the form we test but have a very high activated vitamin D level. This could be dangerous.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out what their vitamin D levels are?
Dr. Bethany: Well, it takes a blood test and you can come to True North and order that blood test on yourself and take the information back to your physician. We have a program called Patient Directive Lab. One of the patient directive labs that we’re offering is a 25-hydroxy vitamin D. If you get that test done at True North, you’ll get a letter from me explaining your results and asking you whether you’d like to have that information go to your doctor.
Dr. Lisa: Give me examples of other types of tests you think everybody should know the answer to.
Dr. Bethany: Well, right now we’re also doing HSCRP which is a marker for inflammation. As I said earlier, inflammation is something that we know is involved with lots of the disease of ageing. Another test that we’re doing is homocysteine and homocysteine is a test which gives you information about your B vitamins status. Homocysteine is associated with associated with heart disease and Alzheimer’s and a number of other illnesses. We think it’s something you should know about, do you need more B vitamins. Since most people don’t get enough vegetables, they’re not getting enough B vitamin and we want them to know that so they can change their behaviors.
Dr. Lisa: Just switching gear a little bit, I believe you’re from Texas, is that right?
Dr. Bethany: I am, do you hear that accent?
Dr. Lisa: I just came back from Texas where I did a little grandchild therapy and why Maine, why come here, why stay here? I mean Maine is a place where obviously we don’t have as much sunshine as you do so.
Dr. Bethany: Yeah well, I didn’t calculate that in when I made the shift. But I came to Maine because I wanted to live in a place where it felt like I was on vacation all the time. When you turn 40 you start asking questions like, who am I? And why am I on the planet? What am I supposed to be doing here? And that lead me to ask the question, where in my wildest dreams would I like to live? And Maine was one of those places. So when the job showed up here in Maine, I jumped shipped and moved to Maine, I have not regretted that decision for one instant.
Dr. Lisa: It seems as though you’re not the only person who’s drawn to Maine. As a healer, can you speak to why that might be? Do you have any thoughts?
Dr. Bethany: Well, I think there are unique places in the United States that draw healers. I don’t know why that is but it’s just there are little nodules of great healing that happen in a number of places around the country and Maine is one of them. For me there is a dramatic shift that happens when I cross the bridge at Kittery, it’s like Maine, I am home, this is a great place. I see that shift with my children, with my mother, the Texans come up here in droves in the summer because they feel that extraordinary energy of this very beautiful place. I think a place that is as beautiful as Maine and where the population cares about that and takes care of it, is a place where people are interested in healing and so healers gather there.
Dr. Lisa: Vitamin D is sort of a beautiful analogy of the individual nature because nature actually provides the best source of vitamin D, isn’t that right?
Dr. Bethany: It does. One of the important things to know about vitamin D is probably it takes a combination of vitamin D as a supplement which gets your vitamin D level up higher and then vitamin from sunlight which gives you forms of vitamin D that are particularly useful in our bodies. So if you’re a lifeguard, you can get enough vitamin D from the sunshine but most of us are working, so we’re not outside all day long. So we really either need to make a concerted effort which we should do in the winter time up here to get out in overhead sun. It has to be noon day sun in the winter time or to take a supplement and then you need to know how much supplement to take and that means you need to know what your vitamin D level is.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out more about self directive labs, True North, the work that you’re doing, vitamin D levels? What are good resources?
Dr. Bethany: Well, you can go online to our website at www.truenorthhealthcenter.org, you can call us on the telephone 7814488. We’d be happy to give you information about our self directive lab and our empowerME program at True North which is really a program designed to help you learn how to keep yourself healthy and live a long happy life.
Dr. Lisa: If people … once they’ve done this self directive lab, if they’d like to have an appointment with one of your many practitioners, that’s also an option as well?
Dr. Bethany: Absolutely, we’d be happy to help you out. We’d also be happy to give you information that you can take back to your own physician. But we do have some extraordinary physicians at True North that are doing fabulous work and there are a few of us that are practicing functional medicine and are particularly interested in this project of keeping people healthy.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we’ve been very happy to have you here in the studio. You have much experience, thank you for all the work you’ve done with True North. We’ve been speaking with Dr. Bethany Hays, co-founder of True North in Falmouth, Maine and I would like to say pioneer in the future of medicine as it stands, functional medicine. Thank you for coming in today.
Dr. Bethany: Thanks so much Lisa.