Jodi: Hi, I am Jodi Cohen, your host, and I’m thrilled beyond Measure to share my dearest friend Dr. Christine Schaffner, who is a board certified naturopathic doctor. She has helped hundreds of thousands of people recover from chronic or complex illness. Her specialty is chronic illness, and we’re going to talk about some of the hiccups there and through online summits, her podcast, what’s your podcast called now?
Dr. Christine: It’s called The Spectrum of Health.
Jodi: Spectrum of Health podcast, and her network of imminence health clinics and her renowned online programs. Dr. Schaffner goes Beyond Biological Medicine, which we’re going to talk about pulling from all systems of medicine and healing modalities and helping patients reclaim their wellness and reveal their brightest light. Welcome, Christine.
Dr. Christine: Oh, it’s so fun to get to talk to you in this space today, Jodi.
Jodi: One thing that I love about you is that you’re actually in the clinic in all of your clinics helping people every day and really noticing the blind spots that a lot of people miss. And so I’m hoping to delve into one of those blind spots. A lot of people use our parasympathetic oil start to balance their nervous system, and sometimes it’s just a smooth ride and sometimes they have a bump, they feel a little worse, they get a headache, they break out, and they’re not quite sure what’s going wrong. Is the oil causing this or is there something else at play? So I’d love you to talk a little bit about what you think might be happening.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you saying that. I love patient care and it’s really profound and rewarding work. It’s hard work, but I wouldn’t trade it in for anything and my patients teach me every day. So everything that I try to share when we have these types of conversations is really what I’m observing. And then we’re all trying to figure out why and how and what’s going on. And I really appreciate what you said.
The comment about using your oil, which everyone loves, and I know that you have people apply it around the vagus nerve often, and a lot of people start to experience a state that they haven’t maybe experienced in a while, and that’s the parasympathetic state when the body starts relaxing and is able to do the work. And if you have been stuck in this overactive sympathetic state for so long, your body is’ in an inhaling and repair mode.
So you’re kind of, as you like to say, shifting the gears. And then if you’re shifting the gears without looking at all of this stuff that starts to happen, you could think if you’re just looking at it from that lens like, oh, I have a headache. This is making me worse. I don’t want to do it again. I would say no, not at all. This is a really great insight of what do we need to start looking at deeper?
And we can talk about this from all sorts of different ways, but I think I want to start with setting us up with this idea of what we would call the living matrix. And the Living Matrix is really James Oshman. Dr. James Oshman writes about this, and I always refer to him because brilliant. And if you like to read and get his big energy medicine book or get him on Kindle and you can dive into these concepts more deeply, and it’s just this really interesting idea when we study anatomy, we think of the body in all these different compartments, but that’s not how the body works at all.
We’re a highly interconnected network. And what he’s saying is that from our skin, through our interstitium, through our fascia and our connective tissue, through our extracellular matrix, and then basically micro tubulin and structural proteins cross over the cell membranes, connect with the cytoskeleton of the cell and go over the nuclear membrane and connect to the nucleus, which is where our DNA is. And that is where we can affect epigenetic expression. That is all an interconnected highway.
There’s no separation. And that when we’re affecting the body in these ways, we can have profound changes deep inside the body. And I just will plant a seed too that I feel that as my learning grows, I think about the living matrix not only starting here, but we have a field, a biofield that surrounds us, and then we have the unified field that surrounds that. And so there’s the deeper you go and the more observing that you have, there’s this field of information and energy that surrounds us that we can also access within our healing.
And so not to take this too down a far another rabbit hole, but I just wanted to paint that picture. And so when you’re talking about what’s happening, I like to just dial into one of those concepts there that what we can call the extracellular matrix, which is in the living matrix. And that is really where I focus my treatments. And I think that’s a lot of where things go awry in our body.
That’s a lot of where we see the toxicants build up, where we see the pathogens thrive, where we actually have trauma stored in the water within that space. And so when we think about the space, I mentioned already this highly interconnected network, but the extracellular matrix, think about the cells and just think about all of this fluid bathing the cells, and then think about structural proteins like collagen and elastin and hyaluronic acid.
And then think about immune cells like fibroblasts that make new structural proteins and mast cells. We’re seeing all of this mast cell activation and different immune cells. And really what is critical to our health is that this space stays healthy and is able to drain well on a regular basis. And what I didn’t mention, I also want to acknowledge is that there are autonomic nervous system fibers within this space.
So this is a space that our nervous system is surveying and in communication at all times. And so when we think about it, your body’s getting into parasympathetic switching in the vagus nerve is a big part of that control system. Acetylcholine, flooding that space. You’re starting to relax, things are starting to maybe start to move, but what if there’s so much stagnation because of, again, the overactivity in the sympathetic state and you the modern world, we’re all too stressed out.
We’re never making time for healing and repairing. And so especially if this is new to you, you shift and then, oh my goodness, your body’s like, wait, I need to clean up so much and I don’t have the tools and support to do that. And so that’s when we can see what we would call detox reactions or in the Lyme community, we call them heimer reactions when we’re starting to clear pathogens as part of this process. And that is a signal that we need to look deeper. And I’ll pause. We can talk about solutions and why, but I am happy to clarify anything I just rambled about.
Jodi: I really loved the water analogy. And you’re sending a ripple, and if that has nowhere to go, it kind of just stays stuck in stagnant.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, and one of my mentors, Dr. Rob Cass, he owns a product line called Physica, and he wrote in one of his books really are lymphatic therapies because I’m happy to talk about this at this point. Our lymphatic therapies have the opportunity to affect epigenetic expression. And we were like, what the heck does that mean? So what that means is, again, when you think about the anatomy books in this space and the extracellular matrix in this fluid, they’re often these green capillaries that are drawn in and these capillaries are lymphatic capillaries and they drain the space and make sure that it’s moving.
So then once it answered the lymphatics, that’s where our immune system engages with anything that it needs to mount a response to. And it brings also waste out of that space, aside from just environmental factors, normal metabolic waste needs to be recycled continually and move through the body.
And if there’s stagnation there or stagnation with a buildup alongside of metabolic waste and environmental toxicants and pathogens, that’s when we see a degradation in structural proteins or actually communication proteins as well, or the immune cells getting more hypervigilant or more irritated and create a chronic inflammatory state or the cell membranes start to weaken or the cells can’t communicate, and that’s where disease begins. Dr. Alfred Inger basically said, disease starts in the matrix, and that’s what he meant.
So we have to drain the space by making sure that our lymphatic system is draining, and we can talk more about that, but really, I know you and I have many of these conversations over our walks, really when we’re restoring health, we’re restoring flow in the body, right? Restoring, removing stagnation, removing roblox to self-regulation and restoring flow. And really where we focus a lot on is the lymphatic drainage and lymphatic flow. And we can talk to today if you want, flow those two things alone, get a lot of people better because that’s where I think a lot of the issues in the modern terrain lie.
Jodi: Yeah, I’ve heard Chet of Quicksilver Scientific say he oversimplifies, but he basically says the garbage flows from the cell to the lymph, to the blood, to the liver, to the gallbladder, to the gut, to the toilet. And that analogy implies that it just moves that there’s no bottleneck.
And I love because what you’re pointing out is it doesn’t just go from the cell to the lymph. There are steps there and there are things that can go wrong. So if you could maybe take that and unpack it a little bit more and explain what’s happening and what people might do to ensure that it does flow the way we want it to.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, absolutely. And I love Dr. Cade’s work, and he’s educated me a lot as well. And I think you really greatly shared just now the overview. And one thing I want to take a step back and on top of the lymphatic system, just to not assume that people understand that it’s highly interconnected to our circulatory system.
So we know that we have our heart that basically oxygen rich blood leaves our heart and it gets distributed in our body through arteries, and then the arteries get smaller into what we call capillaries. And in that capillary space is the tissue space, which really is what I was just sharing with extracellular matrix and fluid leaves the capillaries and a lot of it returns to the venous system to be recycled and returned to the heart, but a lot of it stays in that extracellular matrix and becomes interstitial fluid or prelim.
And so why I mentioned that is that we have to have really good blood flow to help have healthy lymph flow. And unfortunately, again, in the modern terrain, we’re seeing an increase of stagnation in the circulatory system.
And there’s a lot of things in the monitoring that create what we call rule low or the stacking of red blood cells that make them harder to move through the circulatory system. I have a friend, Dr. Beverly Rubik, who’s a biophysicist at uc, Berkeley, and she actually even studied being a six feet within a wifi router for 10 minutes. She did the dark field of that blood. And it’s already stacking, we probably know of the virus that is also affecting basically coagulation already. We know toxicants pathogens. So I want to not neglect that because I’m feeling that’s more important now than ever. And so starting there, when we think about the trickle down to have healthy blood flow, always hydration movement, no brainer.
And then I’m using more and more proteolytic enzymes. I love lumbo kinase and septate and those things. I also use different herbs like ginkgo and Hawthorne, and you have a circulation blend that works well as well. And so I want to just remind people that we’re only as healthy as we have flow and what starts with blood flow in the body, and then we need to get the lymphatic system moving. And so the lymphatic system is more reliant on our movement and our ability to just lead a healthy life to keep that moving. And so really foundational therapies for that are going to be, again, movement hydration. We know about dry skin brushing, of course, there’s the gu shas now that are fun to use. There’s also rebounding, there’s vibration plates. Our friend Kelly Kini distributes a Flo Preso that I use in my office all the time and is amazing.
I know you have one too, but it’s like compression infrared, which is also going to help create exclusions on water in the body, which creates more flow in the fluids in the body, and then it adds energy through nano vibrational technology. So that’s one piece of equipment, but there’s also really skilled manual lymphatic drainage practitioners who really, if you’re really sick out there and if you’ve tried a lot of things and you’re not getting better, I would consider working with a skilled therapist to help get that system moving.
And so those are just some things off the bat. And then I use a lot of either internal herbs or I also like using topicals, and I’ve created some products and you’ve created some products that we can actually apply through the skin and that get basically absorbed through the dermis, absorbed through the interstitial and make their way to the lymphatics to create movement in the lymph. And so also often the formulas have a immune effect so that there can be, if there are chronic pathogens in the lymph, there’s also supporting our body’s immune system to clear that and have some type of either antiviral or antimicrobial activity there. So those are things to think about the lymph. I’m happy to just pause there for a moment.
Jodi: Yeah, I was going to ask you, so I have a lymph foil, but can you talk about your lymph flow blend and what it was designed for and why you created it and what it does?
Dr. Christine: Oh, great, thank you. So my good friend and mentor, Dr. Marco Ruggiero formulated this with me and he’s brilliant. And he studied, he started working with children with autism and finding that they had a pooling of fluid in their brain or glymphatic fluid that wasn’t draining. And that led to a lot of the neurological symptoms.
And he is so smart that he kind of looked downstream and said that a lot of them also had congestion in their cervical lymph nodes. And if, again, the lymphatic system is this highly interconnected network, so if you have a stagnation in one area, it can create stagnation in another. And so he looked downstream and said, Hey, we got to really open up the neck and the cervical lymph nodes to help with draining the G lymphatic fluid, especially at night. And so that was really kind of what inspired him.
And he created, there’s a few key things about the cream, and one is that it is a transdermal delivery with one of the things that makes it so powerful and able to get into the tissues is that it has chondroitin sulfate in it and it’s microbial derived, so it’s not an animal source of chondroitin sulfate. And it essentially, chondroitin sulfate is one of those prot glycans in the extracellular matrix, and I think a lot of modern stress degrades the chondroitin sulfate and affects the basically electron reservoirs in the body to deal with inflammation. So essentially it’s kind of delivering and healing that part that of our basically matrix that is so affected in the monitoring. And then there is a probiotic blend that the probiotics produce a peptide called macrophage activating factor, and that’s name, it helps to recruit our macrophages to help clean up what we’re seeing.
And then it also has a vitamin D three and oleic acid. So there’s a liposomal component component, and I left out a really important part about chondroitin sulfate is that the more we learn about this too, I think it’s also, again, we’re creating movement. We’re healing and repairing. We’re supporting our immune system, but we’re also creating more structured water in the matrix to create more flow. So I think the more I’ve worked with the cream, the more I have insights you think about why it works, and then you kind of evolve your understanding. I think it’s really increasing exclusions on water in the lymph, and then the lymph can move more.
And so people do have this experience with anything. When it works, it works, and for some people they need other strategies. But this has been a very successful product for us in that people really feel it and they feel it right away. And so we have people put it on their neck at bedtime to help with their brain health. If you have any areas of pain or stagnation or congestion, you can apply it there. Scars are big disruptor for lymphatic drainage and can affect the fascia and affect the autonomic nervous system and all of that. And so sometimes we have people put it on their scars to help but create movement in that scar tissue. So that’s been a really fun tool that we’ve used over the years. Yeah.
Jodi: I like that on the clavicle too. I do want to ask though, I mean we’ve kind of talked about Trojan horse remedies when you do them trans dural and wrap them in fat, can you speak about delivering those healing remedies as opposed to just ingesting them as a supplement?
Dr. Christine: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great point When you think about it. I mean, anyone who’s listening to this, they know about essential oils. They know that the topical route is a really great way to affect our physiology. We know this even in conventional medicine with transferal hormone patches and so forth. And I think in our population it’s many, many fold, but a lot of my patients have compromised digestion.
And when we take something orally, which we do a lot of course, oral things, it has to do all this work to get absorbed and for our liver to metabolize and to get it throughout the body. So it just takes time. And if you have a impaired digestive system or impaired liver metabolism, it’s just not going to be as effective. So that’s one kind of constant thing to think about.
And then again, going back to what I said in the beginning, if we’re highly interconnected and we literally can affect our epigenetic expression by doing things in the field or on the skin, why not use that as a route? Because again, it’s just going to get delivered through this communication network in a faster and more elegant way.
Jodi: No, I love that. I love that. And it’s a great product. I really recommend people using it. And you were mentioning we have this new fascia oil. The other thing that I love that you do is you layer so eloquently, you really, it’s like you help people stair step to help by just putting all the right remedies in their path for them to elevate. And you don’t over, I’ve been to practitioners that gave me 50 supplements at once. You’re very thoughtful. So I’m curious how you combine lymph and your lymph flow with fascia .
Dr. Christine: Support. Yeah, yeah, totally. No, thank you. And on one of our rocks, one of the things I know the fascia blend is a new blend for you, but it already we’re getting great feedback in the office, and I think they actually work really nicely together that you can actually, for people who want to play around with both, that you can actually put some of the essential oil with the lymph flow cream and play around with how that feels. Essential oils. We’re working with the same principles and concepts that I just shared with the lymph flow and transdermal remedies. And so I feel this is where we need so much support with all that we’re up against right now and why we’re seeing all these chronic illnesses. And just to pick apart one really pervasive toxicant, we know glyphosate, right? Glyphosate is unfortunately pretty ubiquitous in our environment now, and we know that glyphosate is a glycine analog, and glycine is one of the three amino acids that make up our collagen, which is a lot of what our fascia is made up of.
It’s the most abundant protein in the body. And so essentially, glyphosate can be interrupted where there should be glycine in our, and so then we’re basically getting integrative non in this huge communication highway in the body. And so I believe that that is part of what’s disrupting the communication network.
And then while we’re seeing all of these more connector tissue disorders, autoimmune illnesses that are affecting the connective tissue and so forth, and then I do feel like the more that we have tools to heal and repair and restore communication in the fashion, the connective tissue, what’s going to lead us to health. So I feel like, I mean, there’s so many things to break down and focus on when we’re looking at recovering someone from a chronic illness, but I think this is foundational.
Jodi: I just got such a full body. Yes. You’re so right. Oh my goodness. Well, no, life is a fairly, I mean, they kind of rolled it out in the 1990s, so it hasn’t been around that long, but I am sure you’re right.
Dr. Christine: Well, we’ve seen an explosion of certain illnesses in disease trends since that time, and Dr. Stephanie Seff and her friend Dr. Nancy Swanson, and look at the disease curves, and with the rise of glyphosate use, we’ve seen the rise of all of these chronic illnesses. So I do a lot of muscle testing in my office, and it’s just another lens that we look at the body and we look at glyphosate and everyone is affected, unfortunately. And I have one little case anecdote. I have a woman who’s seen me that has scleroderma, which is a connective tissue disorder. And so in theory, it is your immune system attacking your connective tissue and collagen and creating inflammation, and it creates a stiffening in the body and the fascia.
And what I thought of is I had to do the flug presso, so I had to do compression of her lymph in the collector urine with glyphosate testing, and she gave one of the highest glyphosate tests that I’ve seen. So that kind of, again, this is just clinical anecdotes, but it kind of just made me think down this line more and more. And we could talk all day about glyphosate, and I know that it’s gotten so much more press now, so I’m so happy about that. But we’re still daily, all the after effects, even when it hopefully one day isn’t used as widely, it affects our microbiome and our liver, Cy B four 50 system and our pine young land. And it is just really like everybody’s system affects, unfortunately.
Jodi: Well, no, and I’ve heard you speak about the perfect storm, the combination of the metals, the glyphosate, the EMF, it’s like the toxicants just keep getting more and more intense. I’m glad you’re creating products that are bigger guns to help, and it makes sense why drainage is so important because the issue is the toxicants that are ingenious in terms of how they lodge in our system and hard to get out.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, they really, yeah, as you said, they’re deep within the body and they’re really disrupting the communication on a profound cellular level that unfortunately has the effects that we’re seeing way too commonly.
Jodi: Yeah. Well, I mean, if anyone can tame that it’s you, my friend
Dr. Christine: Team effort. Yeah, team effort. But yeah, I mean, our tools are only having to evolve more and more. And that’s where, I know I like to talk about this, but it’s this combination where I really feel like how we can really recover the planet and recover our health and really see different trajectories doing all of these treatments to really restore the terrain, but also not only combining the best of what we would call bio regulatory medicine and the best of functional medicine, but also bringing in this whole other lens to see the body. And that’s through the lens, I believe, through looking at the physics of the body and the biofield and how we can actually create faster, stronger, hopefully more long lasting changes within us no matter what we’re up against.
Jodi: No, I love it. And that’s all very flowy, which is, it is. It’s very energetic. It’s very soft. It’s much more gentle. And before we wrap up, I’d love it if you could speak a little bit about the bile and bile flow and kind of what you bump into and what helps.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, absolutely. And just as much as people have congestion in their circulatory system and their lymphatics, the bile flow is definitely, I would say nine out of 10 of my patients have congested bile. And so for everyone who just needs a quick refresh, so right, the liver cells make bile, bile then exits the liver cells into make its way to the gallbladder. And then what’s in the bile is not only cholesterol and fats and then emulsifiers to help digest her fat, but it’s a route of elimination, right?
This is a route that our liver is removing metabolic waste hormones, mycotoxins, toxin, and you can see if you’re overwhelmed and overburdened. And then on top of maybe potentially genetic propensities not to basically maybe have optimal phase one or two metabolism or what Dr. Che or Kelly Holderman talked about with phase 2.5. You even have a hard time getting that bile out of the cell into the bile ducts.
There can be a lot of steps that go wrong. And then what we can see is that that stagnation in the liver creates buildup and then that can again affect liver metabolism. We look at liver enzymes to look at liver health, and if your enzymes are up, that means that you’re breaking down liver cells, and that can happen if your bile isn’t flowing.
And so I think about it, not only is it really important for our digestion and digesting healthy fats, but it is essential to removing toxicants. And then part of how our physiology normally is created is that we reabsorb a lot of bile acid to help recycle that pathway. And if you’re not eliminating these toxicants and there’s stain in the gut because you have, you’re constipated or you have a microbiome that is also really dysbiotic and creating more problems, then you can continue all that hard work that the liver did to try to get rid of things.
You can be reabsorbing, and it’s just kind of like auto intoxication happening. So bile flow in conjunction with binders is really important as a route elimination. So I use a lot of quick silver products, so I love their liver sauce and their bitters. I love hor tca, I like phosphatidylcholine. Just the bitter and cold cow herbs are very helpful. And then binders to help shuttle and bind what’s coming out of the bile through the stool, making sure you’re having healthy elimination, healthy bowel movements.
And then if you have congested bile ducts and congestion in the bile, you can be more prone to fungal overgrowth or parasitic overgrowth in the bile ducts. So that can be, again, another insult to that pathway. So also just as much as getting it to flow, you want to also support decreasing microbial activity in that area. And so we use a lot of suppositories because suppositories can get up into the portal vein and get into the liver better.
And so I try to target more antifungal and antiparasitic herbs in the liver and in the bile ducts to help reduce bile stagnation as well.
Jodi: And you have that great class, the bile flow class liver flesh. I hope you do.
Dr. Christine: We did that in the past. Yeah.
Jodi: Well, more exciting things to come.
Dr. Christine: Yeah. So casone packs are a great way to support your liver and your gallbladder using your essential oils over the liver and the gallbladder that can also stimulate flow. So the vagus nerve is really important for flow. All of these things are really, really important.
Jodi: Yeah. You mentioned saunas earlier too.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, saunas always good. Yeah. Saunas are helping to get toxicants out through the skin. So the more that goes out of the skin, the less has to go through the liver and kidneys, so it can be really supportive.
Jodi: That’s wonderful. And is there anything we haven’t talked about that you wanted to share?
Dr. Christine: I mean, I guess the only last piece is as we touched on a little bit, that there can be just as much as there’s toxicants and pathogens and all that in the space, there can be stored emotions and stuck emotions. And this is a really big part of where we store emotion in the body. So as you get things moving, you also have the experience of old memories or just different emotions moving through your body and facilitating that with essential oils or flower remedies.
Or if you’ve been through a lot, I would really encourage you to work with a provider who understands how to really work through that trauma and not to do that alone through either EMDR therapy, also even hands-on lymphatic work or myofascial work that can move stuck in stored energy in the connective tissue and in the lymph. And so yeah, I do think that’s a really big part of the healing process.
And it’s ultimately, our physical body is a barometer of our spiritual and emotional state. So I think it’s a side note, think that’s actually probably more of the work that needs to be done and the physical body just helping to facilitate that awareness and release and letting go. And that’s really when you start to see movement in the body.
Jodi: You were the one that told me that when you kind of physically detox, you emotionally detox and vice versa.
Dr. Christine: And our patients teach you that. And I’ve seen also to encourage people to help facilitate it goes kind of, they’re all interconnected. So if you’re stuck emotionally, sometimes you need to start moving detox pathways. But if you’re stuck detox in detox ways, maybe need to start moving emotions. It’s kind of this, everyone’s going to be unique and different, but they’re all interrelated. And that’s why we now write in Chinese medicine. The liver is anger and resentment and frustration, and we feel that right when your liver is stagnant, we know what that feels like, especially women when their hormones are heightened and their liver is stagnant, they can have around their cycle, irritability, frustration, weepiness, all of that.
Jodi: Yeah. PMS is just liver anger. I love that.
Dr. Christine: Yeah, pretty much. Right.
Jodi: Oh, great. And I imagine so many people are going to want to learn more from you. How can they find you and how can they work with you?
Dr. Christine: Oh, thank you. So I have a website, dr christine schaffner.com. So that’s where my podcast and you can find out more about me. And then my clinic in Seattle is called Eminence Health, and we have offices in California and we do a lot of telemedicine. So I work with a really wonderful team of providers and practitioners, and we do this work every day.
Jodi: Yeah, I highly recommend you. Thank you so much for your time and your brilliance and all these amazing products you continue to create.
Dr. Christine: Oh, thank you, Jodi. Thank you for the opportunity.
