Diagnosing Root Causes of Fatigue and Hashimoto's Through Functional Medicine

A lot of fatigue, inflammation symptoms, body pain, things of that nature, and was really getting nowhere with the doctors, so I thought I would try a different approach, and functional medicine sounded like the next best option. I would recommend him because he's listening to your symptoms, and he has... In my opinion, he has more background as to what could be causing those symptoms. Definitely great for working with people with autoimmune conditions. You know, oftentimes we don't realize that we have more than one autoimmune condition, and he was able to diagnose that in me, so that was great. He seems to be very connected with the patients, answers questions, and is available to consult with the secure messaging, so that's been great as well. So it's been a good experience for me, so that's mostly why I would recommend. My name is Laura. I am from Manteca, California, and I'm a veterinary technician. So before working with Dr. Ian, I have had the experience of going through many doctors trying to find out causes and reasons, diagnosis for the symptoms I was having, a lot of fatigue, inflammation symptoms, body pain, things of that nature, and was really getting nowhere with the doctors, so I thought I would try a different approach, and functional medicine sounded like the next best option. Things that I've tried in the past that have not worked would be traditional medicine. For instance, I have a autoimmune thyroid condition, Hashimoto's thyroiditis. I've worked with an endocrinologist. I've tried the thyroid medication that's generally prescribed for these types of conditions and really was not finding any relief to my symptoms. I've also tried supplementation of different things such as B12, oil tablets, and different kinds of vitamins just to see if I could find resolution to some of my fatigue and problems. I decided to go to Dr. Ian to try to see if I could get resolution because he is very knowledgeable, and it's very apparent when you watch him. Social media is how I found him, so I did watch him several times before deciding to reach out for a consultation. He has a different approach to traditional medicine. He's testing for different markers in your blood work. He is actually listening to symptoms of patients rather than just going for the regular standard of traditional medicine, and that was what made me feel comfortable. I think the biggest surprise for me when working with Dr. Ian was figuring out how important gut health is to the rest of our bodies, what's triggering our autoimmune conditions such as leaky gut and things like that. I was not aware of that before, so that was really surprising to me that we really need to take care of that before we can get on top of anything else. I noticed a change, I would say, first with doing the diet that was recommended by the dietician that he works with. I would say pretty, pretty immediate. Getting rid of a lot of the processed and unhealthy foods and doing the elimination diet was pretty eye-opening as far as how food makes me feel, so I did feel different right away. But it did take several months to get to where I was noticing weight loss along with that. Wasn't my goal. The goal was to feel better, but that also came along with the diet, so that was great. And recently, in the past couple of months, he also diagnosed me with pernicious anemia and has started me on B12 supplements, so I'm starting to notice a difference there and an, you know, upswing in my activity level and energy. So it's still a work in progress, but it's been good because this hasn't been diagnosed by any other doctor. So I am starting to see progress because he listened to my symptoms and was aware of what it could be.