The Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast

E140: Outsmart Chronic Pain with Food, Movement & Mindset ft. Dr. Robyn Klepko

• Kerry Reller

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Welcome to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay Podcast with Dr. Kerry Reller! This week, I am joined by Dr. Robyn Klepko, a chiropractic physician, functional medicine doctor, and nutrition expert. In this episode, we explore the root causes of pain, from lifestyle and diet to toxins, trauma, and mindset. Dr. Klepko shares her personal journey, patient stories, and practical insights on how nutrition, supplements, chiropractic care, acupuncture, and gut health testing can dramatically improve quality of life without relying on opioids.

Tune in to learn natural and evidence-based strategies for managing pain, reducing inflammation, and building a healthier future.

00:29 – Introduction & welcome to Dr. Robyn Klepko
01:37 – From lifeguard to functional medicine: Robyn’s journey
04:35 – Why chiropractic and nutrition became her calling
06:01 – Pain as a teacher: finding the root cause vs. masking it
08:08 – The opioid epidemic and conservative care first
10:09 – The pain–diet connection: elimination diets & patient stories
15:45 – Natural pain relievers: omega-3s, curcumin, labs & CRP
21:01 – Gut health & pain: SIBO, candida, H. pylori, stool testing
25:15 – Chiropractic, cupping, shockwave & acupuncture in care
35:41 – Dr. Robyn’s 3 steps for daily pain relief

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Kerry:

All right. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Get Healthy Tampa Bay podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kerry Reller, and today we have Dr. Robyn Klepko. Welcome to the podcast,

Robyn:

Hello, thanks for having me!

Kerry:

And you are relation to the other Dr. Klepko we had on the podcast recently.

Robyn:

Yes.

Kerry:

All right, so why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Robyn:

Yeah. So you heard last week you watched the podcast or listened to it Dr. Ryan Klepko is my husband I'm, Dr. Robyn Klepko. I'm a chiropractic physician, functional medicine doctor with a master's degree in nutrition and human performance. And so kind of combined all that together integrative care, depending on what the patients need. I do have a love and a passion for learning, so I do a lot. But primarily right now from a chiropractic standpoint, I focus on pregnancy and pediatrics. Functional medicine. Kind of treating any kind of chronic condition. But then also I do a lot of acupuncture.'cause acupuncture works a lot with like root cause. And then nutrition is, is my big thing.'cause I realize you can heal the body from the inside out. So a lot of what I do is nutrition.

Kerry:

Very nice. You sound like a, a degree collector like myself, but like you said, you'd like to learn more, which is, you know, kind of what we're supposed to do in this profession, right? Keep learning and adapting and integrating the things that we do learn. Learn. Yeah. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your story and how you kind of ended up where you are.

Robyn:

definitely. So my story, I started off in the fitness industry, so I love fitness. My first job actually was a lifeguard, but in there they asked me to teach water aerobics. So I was like I don't know anything about it, but okay, I can do water aerobics. So they sent me off to get training through the American like Water Association and then also through the Arthritis Foundation and water aerobics. And I was like, okay. So I started teaching water aerobics. But really the arthritis class was interesting because I had all these older people come, but I remember one specific woman coming with a wheelchair. Wheelchair and then a walker and people would help her in. She did my class and then within a couple weeks she was walking and she wasn't even using her walker or anything. I'm like, what in the world? Like there's something to this, like what's happening and all we're doing is in the water working with joints. So that was the first thing that got me thinking like, okay, there's something more to to this, you know? But from there I really got into just health and fitness. And so I went on to get certified as a personal trainer and then in group fitness, teaching group fitness classes and in teaching group fitness. I still remember one day I was teaching a class, red Mountain Resort. If anyone looks in Utah, one of the top 10 destination spas. I loved working there. But somebody came up after and asked me about like something that was hurting and a pain, and I was like. I dunno. And I realized I love what I did, but I knew I wanted to go on to get more education. Now I will say from a young age I had some experiences with people close to me with medications that just turned me off from it. And I'm like, what can I do naturally to help people, right? So they don't need to go to these medications. So I was looking and planning on going into physical therapy. So I went off to get my bachelor's degree in exercise science and rehab. And I was looking and applying to physical therapy schools. But. When I was personal training, one of my patients was a chiropractor. And he goes, you're not gonna be a physical therapist, you're gonna be a chiropractor. And I'm like, what? What is this? So I was looking up on the website and I came across a quote that said The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and the cause and prevention of disease. And that just like stuck with me. I'm like. That's what I've been looking for this whole time. It was on a chiropractic website. So I looked into chiropractic schools. I was going to Brickham Young University at the time for my undergrad, and they have recruiters come out from schools and one of'em was Logan University in St. Louis, Missouri. And they showed us they had chiropractic, but they also had a master's degree you can get in other things like sports science and nutrition. So that's what kind of took me there. And then long story short, I went out there because I liked their masters in sports science and I was into, by that time I was doing triathlons, marathons, the Ironman, then getting into bodybuilding. So I'm like, I'm gonna get a master's, I'm gonna help these athletes. But the beginning of school, we go through the list of the top 10 leading causes of death in America, and eight of them being chronic diseases. And I'd read quote saying that of this the main root cause is lifestyle and diet. So in school I switched over, I said, I can help athletes or I can help fix this big epidemic in America and focus on the foundation. And so that's why I switched and got my master's degree in nutrition.

Kerry:

Very nice. I mean, I think it's a great story and the way that you, you know, had different things exposed to you throughout the, the way makes you kind of end up where exactly where you're supposed to be. And I mean, I've, I've heard that first quote before and I think it's a part of a lot of what is missing in like traditional medicine practices. And I think that's what's so nice about having this integrated approach and maybe like, hopefully there's more overlap in the future with functional medicine and traditional medicine and chiropractic medicine as well. So I think we're getting there, but I think,

Robyn:

are, and that's why I see a lot of people are more open and connecting, which is good.

Kerry:

Mm-hmm. So you mentioned this lady with arthritis. You mentioned, you know, healing, you know, from within and other things like that. And we, we were gonna talk about pain in particular and what is so special about pain that you want to share today?

Robyn:

Yeah, good question. So when I had the opportunity to be on the podcast, I was like, what should I talk about? And I was looking up our practice and we realized that September is National Pain Awareness Month. So in the chiropractic profession, this is huge.'cause a lot of us are going to the capitol and going to fight the epidemic on opioids. Right. And so when it comes to pain right now in America, the first go-to is prescription medication and opioids. I was looking up at some of the statistics and it said in 2023, approximately 105. Thousand deaths were from drug overdose and of that 80,000 were from opioids. And so that's nearly, you know, 76% of those deaths coming from opioid or pain prescription. But the research also shows if you know, some kind of natural physical medicine, but specifically chiropractic is your first line of defense before going to a medical doctor or primary care physician that slashes those rates in half and decreases people using those medications. So that's what there're a lot of pushing is like, Hey, we should be the primary care when someone comes in with pain, chiropractic is specifically spinal pain. But when I studied pain there's, there's pain everywhere in the body, right? And so when we look at the pain, the question is, what is pain? I always say pain is a teacher, right? Pain is not necessarily always a bad thing. It's an indicator to us that something is going on. So whenever someone has pain, I like the analogy, it's kind of funny that we give, but let's say your fire alarm is going off and you hear it, right? If we go up there and we just try to tape it with duct tape and block the noise. We don't know what's causing the fire, right? Or if we go up there, we're gonna take out the battery, so we're gonna use drugs or surgery. It's not finding where is the fire, what's happening, right? And so that's what we do with like functional medicine, nutrition, chiropractic is deeper, is what's going on with pain. So as opposed to trying to block the pain, that's what we wanna do is get a little bit deeper to find the root cause of the pain.

Kerry:

Yeah, I mean I obviously being on this side, I know the opioid epidemic is something that we are trying to address head on. I think in this is interesting, but in my trainings to update, you know, my certificate that I have to do for the DEA. They, I don't remember anything about chiropractic care in the training, so that's interesting. Yeah. We definitely, you know, physical therapy and things like that for sure, but. I thought that was interesting and plus I would hope that since they are trying to get ahead on that, the numbers are decreasing and not increasing, but it's very interesting, your statistic about how it is cut in half if they seek you know, chiropractic care

Robyn:

Yeah. Yeah. And looking at that one thing that it is interesting seeing the different backgrounds of like, you know, going to med school, chiropractic is kind of comparable to like naturopathic school. Some do schools teach a little bit more similar, but we're taught different things in the up break outbreak. Right. Interesting thing. And just to note, so if you go to chiropractic or a naturopath school you're gonna hear statistics even different. So in our school we were taught up telling that the number one cause of death in America is actually prescription medication. And that's not how they look at it from the CDC, right? So that's, it's different ones. They go back to a study and we got the study when they looked at and kind of where it's at, but it's like, oh wow. But when you look at the CDC markers, they list of course cancer first, or sorry, heart disease first, then you got cancer. And then the third one, unintentional injuries actually does include opioid or drug overdose. And so technically drug overdose and opioid is listed in the third leading cause of death in America. So we see those things kind of, kind of differently with where it is, but ultimately it's like, okay, what can we do to get to the root cause of these pains so we can fix it from that natural standpoint?

Kerry:

Yeah, so you mentioned like a pain diet connection. So how does nutrition pay play a role in pain?

Robyn:

Yeah. Perfect. So that's one that I kind of dived into beginning of school, and I'm gonna tell a fun little story. When I was working on my internship, I kind of did an internship functional medicine one where someone comes in and as opposed to just, you know, looking at things from a musculoskeletal standpoint, we look internally. And so I had. Student and I knew him, so he is like requested to come see me. He was about to fail outta chiropractic school because of migraines. He was missing too much classes. He was missing exams. His migraines would come on. He would get the OR and he would throw up. Right? So just everywhere. And we're in chiropractic school, so someone should be able to fix this, right? We're known to help with headaches. So he saw every chiropractor he wanted to see neurologist and all of this stuff, and nothing was helping. So he came to me. So I said, let's look at your diet. Let's do a food log. And he is like, no one's asked me what I'm eating. I was like, okay. And I looked at it and I was just shocked, like, how are you even surviving? And a lot of students, right? But there wasn't any Whole Foods, it's all just processed foods. So I was like, okay. Let's stop and let's eliminate the top known triggers that cause inflammation and headaches. Just to go forward to today, from what I've learned to experience headaches is a number one cause of pain, right in going to prescription drugs. When you look at food, there's a direct correlation between headaches and something called glyphosate, neuroendocrine disruptor. Glyphosate is used on all genetically modified foods, most importantly being gluten corn, soy and sugar beets. So we looked at his and we kind of removed the top, so it's called an elimination diet. We removed him a hundred percent and guess what? His headaches went away. No headaches, no migraines, no throwing up, making it to classes. But then a true elimination diet, you, you challenge it. So you wanna find what the trigger is. So, you know, this is your expertise with allergies, but this is a little different'cause it's food sensitivities, you know, there's not always immediate, it's the delayed onset. So for him though, he added back in gluten and the headaches came back, the migraines and throwing up. And so we, from early on, I saw, oh my gosh, there's this connection between what you eat and where the pain is. So that's where it started and I got into studying like a anti-inflammatory diet and what that is. And then sorry, a lot of talking, but one other story. That was the first story with the patient, right? So I'll kind of tell you my story. I, after I met my husband got into power lifting and that's lifting max out as heavy as you can. So I did injure my back and I ended up with disc herniation. So I have two disc herniations. On the report it says severe spinal canal stenosis. And I'm like, ah, shoot. Like I need to use my body for everything. But I got to one point. And for those that have experienced pain, they, they know what it is. You don't want anyone else to experience it. I've been there where. It's the worst pain of your life and when you get to some pain, it is the pain where you're like, do I still want to live? Right? So I gotta that point where I was laying in bed and I couldn't move, but I, laying there was still painful and in my mind it was so much pain. I was like, I don't, I don't do medications. You hear all the negatives and I was like, I don't care. Gimme whatever. And so I got on the phone with some doctor that was gonna prescribe and I got the natural pain medication. I took it. And for me, it didn't help. So I had to stop and think, okay, what have I learned all these years? Right? So I stopped and I went back into my own medicine cabinet, which is all the supplements, taking my natural anti-inflammatories that got me better so that I was moving. But at the time doing functional medicine and studying for my own patients, I was doing all these food sensitivity tests and I wanted to see are they real? Do they work? Are they fake? So I did like four or five of them on myself. So one of'em I was doing on this time and it's different than a typical IgG immunoglobulin food test. It's the MRT test, the test, the mediator response test, the test for foods that cause inflammation in your body. So, you know what activates inflammation? And for me, the top of the list in the red was corn. I love popcorn. I make it from scratch. So do my parents. I grew up on that, so I was like, okay. So I eliminated it. And I just realized my back pain went away. Completely gone. And this is pain like I, I wake up with all the time disc pain. Like once you have a disc, people think you have pain. So I was like, huh. And then later I went in to do the trial. I tested it back in. Immediately the back pain came back. So that's one just to show that yes, there are common food triggers, right? So following an anti-inflammatory. Is going to help with people's pain. You can eat your way out of pain, but everybody is different. So you can do testing to find out what specifically is causing inflammation in your body to kind of help with that and get rid of pain. So we do a lot of that in the practice as well.

Kerry:

I, I mean so many things there that are important. I mean, one, I think migraine is a classic example of that. It's very much related to lifestyle and not just foods, but like even sleep and stress and hormones and things like that. So you know, I think that is a great way to, you know, sit down and fix someone. You have to look at that from that approach. Right. So that's awesome. And then you were mentioning like the anti-inflammatory diet. I didn't know if you wanna expand on some of the supplements and things that you were talking about that can help with inflammation and support healing.

Robyn:

Definitely. And'cause we go to a world, so many people, it's like, oh, what do you take for your pain? And we, you know, we go to the NSAIDs if you want, get into a whole nother functional medicine world. And we talk about what that does to your gut, right. But here it's like, oh no, there's natural things that you can, so that's the number one things that we sell in our practice. Top one, if we look from a supplemental standpoint, is going to be fish oil, right? Your Omega-3. So when you look at inflammation in the body, and you can test that too, you see the ratio of omega threes to sixes or nines, a lot of the six and nines can be pro-inflammatory. So food-wise, your processed seed oils. And that's made for all the processed foods. Those are pro-inflammatory. So those are ones like you can eat all the fish oil, but if you're still eating all the bad to get that ratio is gonna be very hard. So you do want to eliminate the processed bad, but you wanna add in your omega threes. The clinical dose for pain is a minimum of two grams of ePA and DHA combined. We use a specific brand, which is one of the top four fish oils that has a pro Omega 2000. So two capsules is a little over two grams of EPA and DHA. So that's what you're looking is like the EPA and DHA. If someone's in acute pain when they come in, I double it. I do four grams to get them out of that acute pain. So fish oil's the top. The second one, the research is all over on it. Turmeric, also known as curcumin. So turmeric is one of the top ones. There's a million of those out there. And so I always tell people it does have to have a carrier to help with absorption. We carry two of them in office. We tear carry a pill form and a liquid form. Some people do better with one of the others. Our pill form actually uses Fenugreek as a carrier. That one I found works really well for people with joint pain. Like our arthritis patients come back and love that like candy'cause it helps get rid of that inflammation in the joint. The liquid one I use a little bit more when I do blood work and see that high CRP looking at the chronic inflammation it does a little bit better with like kind of global and bringing that CRP marker down. So, fish oil and turmeric are gonna be your top products to help, which is are your natural pain relief. In our office, we're gonna do a little special putting all those 20% off for pain awareness month, right? In September. But when you look at diet, that's the key working on diet. So what you wanna do is eat more of the good, eliminate the bad. So if you like fish, eat fish, that's where the fish oil comes from, right? If people eat fish every day, they don't need to come in and buy fish oil from us. You can get it from your food. So you wanna eat the fish. And then I do, I have a presentation I've gone through on nutrition, and this is one just kind of highlight with food. I'm working on writing a book called The Qualitarian Diet that looks at the exact same foods, but one can be pro-inflammatory and one can be anti-inflammatory because in our, you know, in the 21st century with everything added. So just an example, I'm going to give beef. Right. A lot of research shows how bad beef or red meat is for you. All that research is done on beef that's given genetically modified corn, given antibiotics, given growth hormone, and so looking at that, it's very pro-inflammatory, but they did research showing if you have cows that are grass fed, it actually is anti-inflammatory. It has omega threes in it. So you can get omega threes from your red meat. So I am a big fan of organic grass fed ground beef. You can get that from Walmart, you can get that from Aldi's, like all over. And it still has a lot of nutrients, still giving you your iron and everything to help with supporting your body. So looking at your good healthy proteins, if you're not a fish person, you've got your flax seeds. That's kind of can turn into your omega threes your precursor to them. And then of course focusing on eating like your vegetables, your healthy fruits. They are antioxidants and everything else is gonna help with pain support and keeping out the sugar and keeping out the processed grains to support. So kind of a general anti-inflammatory diet.

Kerry:

Yeah, well, I think you kind of hit all the highlights. That was very good covered. One thing I love commenting about the seed oil thing is that it is just so hard to find products without that stuff in the store. Like even, you know, you think you're getting like a good hummus and I'm like, ah, you turn it over and sure enough there's seed oil there. And then I think there is good lab testing. I mean, even that LabCorp and Quest do that, we traditionally do that has that Omega-3, a omega six ratio that people can do. Now whether insurance pays for it or not is another situation. So I don't overate all that much, but I know that it definitely exists there. And like you mentioned also like CRP, that's another inflammatory marker that we do look at. That can give, tell the, you know, the whole story too. And we know that it's another cardiovascular risk factor as well. So clearly getting that down by, you know, nutrition is one of the best methods to do that, so That's awesome. And then another thing you said was like, kinda everybody is different, and that's really, really important too because like you said, some people may have, you know, more of a response to one thing and have problems with it, whereas someone else might have tolerated it just fine. So getting to know yourself and maybe doing these kind of things that, you know, maybe bringing back in or eliminating it and seeing how you do is really important too.

Robyn:

Speaking to that standpoint, one thing, and like we said, not one day is true for everybody. Next to blood work, the next most common thing I do is the gut testing and the stool testing. Couple key markers in there. One checks calprotectin. That's the marker of inflammation in your gut, kind of primary marker for inflammatory bowel disease, right? So when we've got the inflammation, you know, you have to low those anti-inflammatories. But also one thing that I look at and test for. Sibo, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and candida. So with these like sibo, if you tell someone to eat healthy, guess what? If you have sibo, those things, even like onions, garlic, and healthy things are gonna cause them to bloat. So sometimes your pain and issues can come from some healthy foods. So that's where you might have to follow an anti candida diet or a low fo mop diet. So the diet, you know, one thing that's good for one person can be a poison for someone else. We always, everyone says fiber is good, fiber's good, but not you, sibo, right? It's going to just cause that inflammation and pain and make everything worse. So you really gotta find the root cause of what's going on, especially if the pain is coming internally or digestion. Like one of the top reasons I find for abdominal pain is helicobacter pylori infection. So we have to go in there and treat the infection to fix the issue with the pain.

Kerry:

Mm-hmm. It's funny you mentioned, I call it SIBO, but everybody says it differently, but small intestinal bacterial overgrowth it was like the theme of the week this week. Typically, insurance doesn't necessarily always cover the test, so I'm always like, you know, you can submit this for reimbursement if I order like the, I think it's Trio Sure, or whatever test, but you know, it's not necessarily going to be covered. So it's very unfortunate because I feel like that diagnosis is like really exploding. I can't tell you why like, or how many patients I'm seeing all the time with it and they're kind of at a loss, right? Because they've like seen gi, they've seen several other providers or doctors and they are not really getting anywhere. And I'm almost always saying, well, you know, have you seen kind of a functional medicine approach to this too? So there's another doctor that I've had on the podcast who has, is a GI doctor, but she also has functional medicine. I think she teaches some of the functional medicine courses. And we had a deep dive on sibo and it was very educational, but it's definitely, I feel like growing and it was probably'cause of over antibiotic use and many other reasons. But yeah, I it's been the theme of the week this week, so.

Robyn:

Yeah. Yeah. And with that, just for listeners thinking on that, when someone comes in here, the hardest thing about somebody going to a functional medicine doctor is in their mind, we're stuck in conventional medicine insurance should pay for everything, right? You're right. Insurance does not pay for these add-on tests. So if they have the money, great. If they don't, it's like, oh my gosh. Like, where can that be? So there's a couple ways you can look at SIBO One. I love our GI map stool test'cause it shows if methane or sulfur high, like the ones, specific ones that are common in sibo. So if you see a high methyl bacterium and they have bloating, okay, that's, you know, likely sibo. So you might not have to go do the full breath test'cause there's, it's a hard test to do anyways for a full SIBO test. But then two, if someone comes in here and they're like, I can't afford anything at all. Well, guess what? Let's do one week of a low FOD MAP diet. See if your bloating goes away and in and of it's own That's one way. If you eliminate all the foods that feed SIBO and your bloating goes away, then likely we do have it. That's not gonna fix it. Diet alone, obviously we need to treat it, but you can do that kind of as a test to see and then go on and treat the sibo. And then of course reintroduce those foods. Does it cause bloating, does it not? So the testing's definitely there. It's great if we can do testing on everybody. But sometimes you have to look at finances. Okay, what can they afford? What can we do best to help each patient?

Kerry:

Yeah, no, I definitely use that approach often as well. But sometimes I want answers, so, yeah. But so those are, those are great things. I don't wanna get sidetracked because we're trying to talk about pain, not that abdominal pain doesn't exist with sibo, but so how does, like chiropractic care and the things that you do and specialize in kind of help treat and reduce pain as well? What other things do you do?

Robyn:

Good question. So from a chiropractic standpoint, early on in school, we are thought taught the three Ts. The three Ts are the cause of subluxation, of pain, of any kind of issues when people come in. So the three Ts are thoughts, trauma and toxins. So we've already touched on some of this a little bit but when it comes to pain, it's crazy how real this is. So one, I'm sure you've read, there's millions of books out there on the connection between the mind and the body. Right, but the mind and pain as well. So that's one thing that I don't wanna forget to, to talk about'cause some people come in and you know them. Sometimes we call them vampires because they drain our energy a little bit. They're stuck in the pain model. They're stuck in the negative. They're stuck in, I'm here. I'm here. So we have to change the frame of thought, right? If someone doesn't think they're gonna be able to heal, their body likely isn't going to right, because they have to change. So there is a direct correlation between thought. So that's one thing that we look into a lot in our office. I'm like, what can we really do to help with that? One thing that we implemented and added in is brain tap meditation. If you've heard of Brain Tap, Dr. Patrick Porter started it. He has a training between like clinical hypnosis and meditation, but we have a whole series on pain. And so it's kind of meditation to train your body to let go of pain. And you know, there's been a lot of research on like pain in specific areas, correlating to different emotions and even acupuncture. Every organ system is related to an emotion. So that's one, just to think about thoughts correlate to pain. And then the second one we talk about is toxins. So when someone comes into pain, just an example I have from a couple months ago, I had a patient come in and she had the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. And if we know fibromyalgia, it is full body pain. They give the diagnosis if you have a certain number of pain spots, but from a functional medicine standpoint, it just means you've got chronic inflammation. Right. So the question is, why do you have chronic inflammation? So we have to dig a little bit deeper. Her one, we found a few different things. We found the gut toxins. We found leaky gut. Leaky gut causes global inflammation. But then also here in Florida, very common for everybody is mold. And we found mold. So interesting thing coming from the toxin standpoint. We detoxified her, worked on the mold and her pain is completely gone. She doesn't have fibromyalgia anymore'cause she doesn't have any pain. So that's the, you know, thoughts, toxins in The last one is trauma. So trauma is going to be any kind. Injury to your body, and that's where traditional chiropractic thrives, right? So if your pain is coming from a muscular skeletal standpoint, not necessarily an internal standpoint, that's where we're really looking on the hands-on care. Right. So chiropractic adjustment is huge for any kind of spinal pain and extremity pain. People don't know. We adjust every joint in the body, so not just spine. We adjust the wrists, the thumb I adjust ears. We adjust the knees, the feet. If you go to feet, go to my husband, he specializes. He has like I think he has like 20 different adjustments for the ankle, for every single bone. So the adjustment sends in no pre or nociceptive ation to the brain kind of connecting that, releasing, letting go of pain and those inflammatory markers. So chiropractic care, of course, is huge depending on what's going on. All different kind of chiropractic treatments. But the other hands-on therapies that I really love, one of my favorites is cupping therapy. So there's a lot of great research with cupping. I use cupping, both therapeutic and diagnostic in the office. What I mean by that is when you do cupping, I start with a little bit of cupping massage. You people have seen those red marks. That means you have a lot of inflammation. That means you need it. When I see those red marks, I am leaving them the door with like the tumor and the fish oil, and we're gonna work on cupping until that goes down. So cupping is a huge one. And then the newest thing that we got in the office and is up and coming, everyone's using now is shockwave therapy. And so shockwave therapy has a lot of research. It's, they call it shockwave, but really it's sound wave, acoustic sound wave goes deeper into the tissue. It's. It saves a lot of people from surgery'cause if you have any kind of torn ligament tendon, as long as it's not a complete tear, there's a lot of research with it going deeper and healing. We got it because my husband, the power lifter has a torn shoulder labrum. And he did on himself. He's like, oh my gosh, like we have to have this in the office with how much it helps. So shockwave is a huge one. And then some people, when I try everything on them and it doesn't help, acupuncture is usually the one that gets it. So we do acupuncture or, in acupuncture and Chinese medicine we call it ashi points today. They call it dry needling. Where you dry needle into those pain points, right? So when you've got those deep muscle adhesions, we will actually needle directly into them. Or if someone has like a stubborn like piriformis pain that is not going away I will get the big needles go all the way down into it and kind of release that. So acupuncture is, is a nice tool that we can go to for some of those chronic pains where nothing else can really help.

Kerry:

So you do both acupuncture and dry needling, like in the same setting or same instance, or are you, are they kind of I guess separate cases?

Robyn:

Yeah, good question. It's funny'cause I, they, when people ask to explain the difference, it's like, okay, they both use the same needles. But acupuncture works with meridians in the body. So if I'm doing acupuncture in someone, I put them in our acupuncture room. I call it our acupuncture experience. They lay down zero gravity. We do the acupuncture points, we set'em up with brain tap meditation. We set'em up with red light. And we have a mister and we have this, the smell, and they're in there for 21 minutes, relaxing. So acupuncture, you put'em in, you leave them in for at least 20 minutes, where dry needling or ahi points, working on the pain points. We don't do all that. We're just gonna needle. And the common one, it's called like surround the dragon. So we're gonna find that knot, we're gonna surround it, and then we might stimulate them. We're gonna move them. We're gonna activate, we're gonna work them out. And the cool thing with that is your body tells you when it's ready. If you've got big muscle spasms, the needles won't come out. They will stay until they're ready to come out. They'll hold onto it. So on that one, you know, we don't just, we don't just leave'em, we'll usually work stimulate the points and then we, we bring it out. So we won't do both usually the same. Either we're doing acupuncture or we're doing, you know, more of those OCI points and dry needling.

Kerry:

Do you, these are mostly for things for the musculature, not necessarily like for spinal issues, correct.

Robyn:

Correct. Yeah, you do it with the muscle, but I mean it's huge on like, you know, either lateral canalize, epicondylitis, so elbow issues like, but anywhere there is a muscle involved, it's for muscle. So you're not really gonna do drain needling if you're not working in a muscle.

Kerry:

Awesome. Okay, so what happens if kind of chronic pain is not addressed? It's a big one. I

Robyn:

Yeah, that's a big one. Well, when you look at today, and I think I saw somewhere the statistics, but like the number one reason for people to have poor life, miss of work and just poor quality of life is that that chronic pain. So today we're doing better with helping people live longer, but we're not doing better with helping their quality of life as they age. Right. So. What's the point of living longer if you don't have a good quality of life and if you're stuck in pain and you can't get out and do things'cause this, this chronic pain and you, you talk to people that are in pain. They're down, they're depressed sometimes they don't wanna live anymore, right? They can't get out and do things. They can't enjoy things they can't enjoy, their family. It's not the quality of life that you have, and it's not what we're, why we're designed to be here. We're designed to thrive. We're designed to be happy. We're designed to live. So that's why I tell people, if you have pain, pain is not normal, right? Pain is a teacher. If you have pain, there's something going on. And if you haven't found the root cause yet. Then you're, you, you know you're missing it. We can't just be masking that there's something going on that we can go to, to do it. So we wanna change the quality of your life. And I will say I am lucky. I've got some good genes and my husband and I flew out two weekends ago to Montana to see my grandparents to celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary. My grandma's 95, my grandpa's 93. And fun story the first time I ever went to a chiropractor, I went to Montana to go skiing or snowboarding and I flew up in the air and landed and I came home i'm like, my back hurts. So my grandpa's like, let me take you to my chiropractor. And I was like, what? Dunno what this is. I thought he was a voodoo doctor'cause he was applied Kinesiology, chiropractor, we did all this muscle testing and turn things on and off. But I love that because my grandma, grandpa. They're independent, they live at home. They have no pain. My grandpa's always been into, you know, the natural care if something's wrong, he just went to his chiropractor. But they're loving life and that's what it is. When you get to that age, like you don't want to be in a nursing home. You don't want to have to have someone help you with activities of daily living. You don't wanna have to be stuck in pain. You want to enjoy life. And now like I cousins baby's first birthday party. So my grandparents are there for their great granddaughter's birthday. You know I was able to go, I still remember both my grandparents hundredth birthday parties that I went to and they were out and moving, and so that's how it's supposed to be. You know, we don't want the chronic pain. We're not supposed to live with it. There are people around to help. And I will say there are places for everything, right? And so, like last time here you interviewed Dr. Mike Massey. When people are in acute pain, we need to get the pain down. We, we shouldn't live with that, but then we need to address the a root cause. So sometimes yes, people might go to NSAIDs and use stuff to help with the acute pain, but if you continue on and you don't fix the root cause, your body's never gonna heal. And then you're just gonna get worse. And so that's the big thing. If there's pain, you, you gotta fix the root, the root cause so you can have a good quality of life.

Kerry:

you have some definitely good genetics there. That's awesome.

Robyn:

Lucky.

Kerry:

75 years. That's amazing. All right, so what is one simple step that someone in pain can take today to feel better?

Robyn:

Good question. And since in chiropractic we do the three Ts, I'm gonna give you three.

Kerry:

Okay.

Robyn:

Think positive, you're not stuck. If you're in pain, you have to believe you can get out of it. I had someone come in and they brought her, their daughter and she's like, no, this is just what it is. And I'm like, if I can't change her mindset, no. So you need to think positive. You can get out of pain, right? Eat clean, and that would be my top one. Think about it. A live food, dead food. If you're eating processed food, it's dead. It doesn't have enzymes, it's gonna cause inflammation in your body. Eat a live food that mother Nature gave you so you know, eat good. And then the last one is move, exercise. If there's one thing every morning, get up, go outside and go for a walk. See the sun. Help your cortisol levels like support, you know? So think positive, eat clean, and move every day and you can improve your pain or help it.

Kerry:

Yeah. You know, we did have a recent episode on like an anxiety and depression. It was kind of the same thing about the thought process, like kind of what you resist, persist, and kind of the same thing of learning to change your thoughts so that you can actually, you know, feel better in general. So I, it, it definitely felt I was hearing a parallel there, so it was cool.

Robyn:

Well, speaking of that, I just have to say, the research shows that exercise out beats any medication for depression. So with that, it's like exercise movement. And then guess what? There's a direct correlation between depression and vitamin D deficiency. So go out in the sun and exercise, see the sun. Like there's so much you can do from a natural standpoint to help with those things. So yeah.

Kerry:

Awesome. So where can people find you if they wanna work with you or find your practice?

Robyn:

Yeah, we're located at nine 18 Curlew Road in Dunedin, Florida. So we are right next to Publix in the large Caladesi shopping plaza right before you get to Honeymoon Island. Our practice here is called the chiropractic Spa 2016 I did start drrobyn.com, which is Integrative Health and Wellness, so I've kind of merged the two together. So you can find me online at drrobyn.com. Spelled out Robyn with a Y or the Chiropractic Spa.

Kerry:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I think everybody learned a whole lot, so I, you know, can't wait to release this episode and everybody can find you and we'll put all that information in the show notes and thanks again.

Robyn:

Yes, thanks for having me.

Kerry:

All right. Tune in next week for next week's episode.

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Dr. Kerry Reller

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