In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview Dr. David Brady about how to overcome Fibromyalgia and his new book The Fibro Fix. We talked about the history of fibromyalgia diagnosis, the causes of fibromyalgia, the difference between "Classic" Fibromyalgia and "Pseudo" Fibromyalgia, treatment strategies, supplements for Fibromyalgia, and much more. If you have Fibromyalgia or know someone who does, this is one interview you definitely don't want to miss.
Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "The Dr. Hedberg Show." This is Dr. Hedberg, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. We have Dr. David Brady on. And if you look at the history of "The Dr. Hedberg Show," we've actually never had a repeat guest. And so, Dr. Brady is gonna be the first repeat guest. Our last podcast discussed the GI map stool test from Diagnostic Solutions. So, I urge you to check that out.
So, for those of you who don't know Dr. Brady, he really is the foremost authority on properly diagnosing and treating fibromyalgia, which is what we'll be talking about today. He's been featured in top media outlets like "Elle" and "NPR." And he's also published in leading peer-reviewed medical journals including "Open Journal of Rheumatology and Autoimmune Disease and Integrative Medicine," a clinician's journal. He's published chapters on fibromyalgia in definitive medical textbooks, including "Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients" and "Integrative Gastroenterology." He has presented at prestigious medical conferences, including the Annual Symposium of Functional Medicine and the Integrative Healthcare Symposium.
He is in private practice at the Whole Body Medicine in Fairfield, Connecticut. And Dr. Brady is also the Director of the Human Nutrition Institute at the University of Bridgeport, as well as the Chief Medical Officer of Designs for Health and Diagnostic Solutions Laboratory. So, Dr. Brady witnessed his own mother suffer through the ringer of the medical system. So, Dr. Brady is uniquely passionate not only as a doctor, but also as a patient advocate.
So, his website, more specifically for his book, we'll be talking about today is fibrofix.com and then his practice website is drdavidbrady.com. So, Dr. Brady, welcome to the show.
David: Dr. Hedberg, thanks for having me back. I didn't realize I would be the first repeat guest, so that's quite an honor, and thank you.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. So, I'm looking forward to this. Let's really dig into fibromyalgia. And so, you know, you witnessed your mother going through the medical system and then you became very interested in fibromyalgia. Is there any particular event that really got you interested in this condition?
David: Well, I got an interest in sort of integrative medicine, as we would call it today, or like just routes of care and ways of looking at healthcare conditions, particularly complex chronic conditions that were not the, you know, real standard orthodox way of doing things or standard of care probably because of that experience with my mom growing up. I mean, my mother battled breast cancer most of my childhood, and double mastectomy, got radiation and chemo, and all that stuff back in the '70s when it was even more brutal than it is now.
And she found some of her best outcomes and best quality of life, unfortunately it was toward the end, with some providers who were doing more sort of integrative complementary medicine type of stuff. So, it really opened my eyes to that. And even though I originally went and became an engineer and worked in aerospace and stuff, I always had a sort of a desire to come back to dealing with the human condition, and I had originally thought I would use my sort of engineering background, and biomechanics, and things like that, and to go into research, you know, in biomedical research.
I had the engineering background, I was looking for ways to get the medical, clinical background. And I looked into a lot of different routes and books, more reasons than we probably have time to go into. Mainly one of the really good biomechanical background, I ended up first on the chiropractic college. And when I was there, I really took a left turn.
I had some mentors there that were really into, you know, dealing with chronic complex internal disorders from a different way, you know, and it came from some of the old chiropractic nutrition sort of influence. So, there's a lot of interventional nutrition, dietary and lifestyle medicine changes, botanical medicine, and kind of what we would today call like naturopathic medicine. But I was immersed in it when I was down there. And even in my hospital rotations and all of that, I was always looking at disorders from, you know, how can you do this in a different way? I mean, how can you treat this without nine drugs, right? Or if you're gonna use the meds, how can you make them, you know, work better and how can you complement them?
So, that got me into functional medicine and clinical nutrition, and then I went back to, you know, medical school and studied naturopathic medicine, and the rest is history. But the fibromyalgia stuff really started when I got out of chiropractic school and first went into practice because I started getting these patients' neck that were really difficult patients, you know. And what I learned about fibromyalgia in chiropractic school and later even in medical school is not very much. What I did learn turns out it was wrong. It was often talked about by the presentor or lecturer in sort of a questioning way or almost a condescending way, you know, is this really real? Is it all made up in people's heads? You know, all that kind of baggage that went along with it for so long.
But when I got out into practice, I realized these people are real, they're not making it all up, they have better things to do with their lives than to make this all up, but they also weren't all the same. There was a lot of different stuff I felt coming in under that label. And I thought even with the little I knew then that it was very dirty diagnosis. By that I mean, it was really a whole lot of different things all being called the same thing. And, you know, in medical school, one of the first things you'll learn is proper diagnosis you have to cure. So, unless we can accurately figure out what these people really have and stop just calling it all the same thing and, you know, well then we'll never gonna find the right treatment.
So, I realized that I was willfully and adequately prepared to deal with these patients. And I realized, even though they had a lot of achiness and they complained of muscle pain or they have fatigue, and they had anxiety, and they couldn't sleep or they didn't feel like they ever sleep even after they did, they have a lot of drug problems, I realized even back then this is not a muscle problem, right? This is not a musculoskeletal thing. This is a central nervous system issue.
And so, I started studying it on my own, literally going into the medical literature which as, you know, back then it wasn't as easy as doing a PubMed internet search. I had to go to the medical library. I had to dig through card catalogs. I had a blow dust off journals. I had a copy of them with borders, you know. That's what it was. And I read everything I can get my hand on. I found a sort of compatriot, some kindered colleague soul, kind of, person that was also really into myofascial pain working stuff, named Michael Schneider. He was a chiropractor then. He went to become a PhD. He does a lot of incredible integrative medicine research, more on musculoskeletal disorders at the University of Pittsburg.
But we started, kind of, getting together on this quest, and over time we became experts ourselves, not only by reading and teaching ourselves but by actually reaching out and meeting the world's experts in fibromyalgia, and then we went on to, you know, do a lot of publishing, do some research, wrote lot of textbook chapters, things like that. So, we, kind of, made ourselves experts over time because it didn't happen in school, I can tell you that.
Dr. Hedberg: Right. And I do remember that first paper I think that was published in "JMPT," I remember reading that, and it gave a really great overview and, you know, diagnostic algorithm. It is a different way to look at fibromyalgia than I had been exposed to. And then there was a follow-up paper, I think, and Dr. Pearl was an additional author there.
David: Right. Yeah. 2001 was the first one, and 2006 was the follow-up paper to that first paper. Yeah. So, it's a while ago.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, yeah, but it's still applicable even today, everything that you guys wrote back then and...
David: Well, it is. And that was an interesting...you know, we realized that most doctors, and even today this is true, doctors getting out of medical school, chiropractic school, wherever, are coming out willfully and adequately trained in fibromyalgia and many of these, you know, hypervigilance central sensitivity driven disorders. They just don't know how to deal with them. They have a lack of knowledge, but not a lack of arrogance. So, they end up telling patients, you know, that's all in their head. And since they don't have the answer, there must not be one kind of thing and that's unfortunate.
So, we tried it and we recognized that. And we tried to publish in primary care journals, and journals that chiropractors would read, and journals that other kind of, like, primary care people who see people directly, you know, off the street as the first point of contact with a health provider, to try to get them to understand a little bit more how to properly tease out what is the real what we call classic fibromyalgia, this hypersensitivity, hypervigilance type of disorder versus what most of the people who get told they have fibromyalgia have,
