Misty Williams  00:01

Hey, sister, this is Misty Williams, founder of healingrosie.com. And I’m so excited to welcome you to Rosie Radio. Tune in to find clarity, direction and hope for your healing. New episodes drop every Tuesday, we created this show to empower you to regain control of your life and feel like yourself again. Yes, sister, it is possible. 

Misty Williams  00:20

I am thrilled to have my friend Ashley interviewing with us today because there is a piece to this whole puzzle that has been baffling to me as a patient for the last decade. And it relates to really uncovering the upstream stressors. And even after having conversations with really amazing experts in our space about upstream stressors and what they are, it still was challenging for me as a patient as someone who was not a practitioner, to figure out how to properly eradicate things. 

Misty Williams  00:49

And my experience also was that a lot of really great practitioners that I worked with weren’t necessarily experts in toxicity. So while they could help with some of the symptoms, I was dealing with really eradicating those symptoms, wheelhouse and, that can be challenging in its own way. So I wanted to talk to Ashley because she has been working with Dr. Pompa for quite a while. She’s a practitioner for him and knows a lot about detoxification and how to really deal with these upstream stressors. And today, we’re going to dig in to that whole juicy conversation. 

Misty Williams  01:17

My goal for all of us is to complete this interview feeling a lot more clarity around what we need to do to uncover the upstream stressors, how do you properly test what are the upstream stressors? 

Misty Williams  01:29

We’re gonna get into that? And then how do you properly test for them? And then how do you go about eradicating these stressors. So we’re going to Firehose you like crazy, this is gonna be one of those interviews where you’re probably gonna want to hit pause, and rewind or maybe listen to a few times and take some notes.

Misty Williams  01:42

It would be impossible for us to really do this justice in an interview format, meaning there’s a lot of nuance to how you go about detoxification that we’re not going to be able to get into in this conversation. But I want you to be empowered with enough of the know how that you can properly vet practitioners and find someone to help you on this journey and have some clarity as the person who’s ultimately responsible for your health on what you’re looking for. 

Misty Williams  02:04

So you know, if someone could really help you with detoxification so Welcome, Ashley. I’m so glad you’re here. 

Ashley Smith  02:08

Hey, what an intro. Thank you for having me. 

Misty Williams  02:11

Yeah, well, let’s just dive right in because we have a lot of ground to cover here. And I want to start with this idea of upstream stressors because as I’ve mentioned, in other interviews, I have these diagnoses and Demetrio says premature ovarian failure. I have nodules on my thyroid. I’ve dealt with hypothyroidism. I’ve labels basically, like here’s all the things that are basically off in my body, and then there tends to be in our space, a lot of biohacking. I guess we could call it health hacking. 

Misty Williams  02:39

Well, when you have that condition, here’s some things that you can do to give your body extra support. And what I found over a decade is that I benefited from the extra support. But I was still always having to deal with these symptoms. I was still having to deal with the disease and do these crazy lifestyle modifications, diet eliminations, all the things to manage the condition, which isn’t the same as healing it to end. 

Misty Williams  03:03

The last few years, I have really been trying to dig my teeth into this healing thing. I think I’m making some good progress. But I say trying because it’s challenging when you find out that a lot of the really smart practitioners in our space that can teach you a lot about a lot of things actually don’t understand this upstream stressor challenge that we’re having. 

Misty Williams  03:21

And I want everyone to be aware of the root causes of probably why 90% of us are dealing with any symptomology at all, it’s because we have these upstream stressors that are making us sick. And I’m excited for us to just start unpacking that. So maybe we could just start out with you giving us an overview on what the major upstream stressors are?

Ashley Smith  03:41

That is such a good question. And it is always important to look at the cause. Right? So we as holistic practitioners, we don’t follow the band aid approach. We don’t do symptom management. And that’s what the medical model is, symptom management, you go to your doctor, you let them know what’s going on, they might run some labs, and they just give you something for it and your symptoms might subside for a little while until they don’t they come back even worse, and the doctor might adjust your medication from there. 

Ashley Smith  04:06

And so what we do differently is figuring out well, why do you have these problems to begin with? Now these are often if you have, let’s say your hypothyroid or you suddenly have autoimmune conditions that pop up, those aren’t your problem. Those are symptoms of the bigger problem. We want to ask, well, what is the bigger problem? What is causing you this autoimmune flare? What is causing your epigenetics, your genes, to turn on? We all have these gene expressions that can be turned on or off due to lifestyle. We want to ask these questions and a lot of practitioners miss the mark. 

Ashley Smith  04:39

And so a lot of the upstream root causes, all the upstream stressors, that I see all the time, are heavy metals, right. One of the biggest sources of heavy metals are amalgam fillings that are in your teeth. Sometimes we don’t even know we have them. They can be buried under a crown. Sometimes you’ve had it for so long. You barely even know it’s there or your dentist says “oh!, Mercury’s totally safe or the fillings I use, they’re fine. It’s more dangerous to remove them than to leave them in. It’s just so small. So that is huge. 

Ashley Smith  05:10

So I believe anyone who has any amalgam in their teeth needs to get that removed by a skilled biological dentist who’s practices safe Mercury removal. Now, if sometimes we never have amalgam fillings, but we still might struggle with high mercury, a lot of times that could just be passed on to us in utero. So if your mother had a lot of amalgam fillings, and especially if you were the firstborn, there’s a good chance that you were born with a toxic burden that might not have presented itself to you until further along in your life, but it’s not going to detox itself. So we still need to get it out of you. 

Ashley Smith  05:44

Mold is another big one. So a lot of people either currently live or have lived in moldy environments or worked in moldy environments, or spent a lot of time in buildings that are filled with mold. And so again, we bioaccumulate something like mold over many, many years. And again, we don’t know it’s there until our bucket literally spills over. And suddenly, we’re dealing with all kinds of health problems that we don’t want to just manage the symptoms. 

Ashley Smith  06:12

We want to figure out what is this here, and a lot of times, there’s several things going on. It’s the metals and the mold. And it could be Lyme. Lyme is a big one. It could be stored viruses and bacteria. Things that maybe we’ve had. We have a lot of bacterial infections or viruses as a child, just store in your cell membrane, just like other toxins. And it can be environmental. It could be glyphosate. It can be even what you might eat organic food, but maybe your neighbor sprays roundup on their lawn, and you’re breathing that in every time you go outside. 

Ashley Smith  06:44

So it’s really just getting to figure out the chemical, the emotional and the physical stress. And when I say emotional, too, it’s a lot of past trauma, a lot of things that can also sort of be stored in our bodies. And so we have this analogy where you just keep adding the stressors. Adding, adding, and adding over your lifetime, eventually, it’s going to spill over. And that’s when you deal with these major health symptoms or conditions or diagnoses from your doctor, that just feels like it happened overnight. But it really took a while to get to that point. And then we need to undo it figure out what you know what tipped it over. 

Misty Williams  07:20

So let’s kind of unpack each one of these stressors. You started with the dental stressors, which I think is a very significant part of the conversation, I actually found out that I had an infected root canal, when I started engaging with all this kind of stuff that had to be removed, they did check my cavitations actually cut into my mouth, and I didn’t have cavitations. But as I’ve been hearing you talk more about how to properly X ray your mouth for that. There’s a part of me that feels like they really not have cavitations.

Misty Williams  07:48

There’s ways of going about things. So I’d like for us to start with dental infections, and then we can move to metals and mold and even chemicals. And let’s talk about how to properly test for each of these things. And then let’s talk about the components of a great protocol, like what do you actually do,

Ashley Smith  08:03

right? Absolutely. Now, a lot of clients when they decide to do things this way, like a more of a holistic whole body approach, they have probably done tons of bloodwork, right? The doctor is like” Oh!, it looks normal, you’re within normal range. You’re fine.” But you know, you’re not fine. There’s something else going on. So sometimes a test, a more holistic version of a test that actually looks for what we want to see in a lab can be great. 

Ashley Smith  08:29

However, we store so many toxins deep in our cell membrane and in our brain. And testing often tells you what you’re excreting; it doesn’t necessarily show you what is stored. So testing is very useful. But sometimes you want to maybe present work with a skilled practitioner who does this kind of work. And have them look at your health history. Have them talk to you about what you are struggling with, sometimes you almost need to just get into a cellular detox to start pulling things out. So they are exposed, then maybe do a little testing as things are not so deeply stored. 

Ashley Smith  09:05

So if you start on day one, I’m testing you all over the place. I’m not doing my job, because I’m actually probably having a test for a bunch of things that aren’t going to show up in a lab. So we kind of want to uncover we don’t almost want to peel back the layers a little bit before we start to see things that become more obvious to us like “Okay!, now you came to me with this, but now I’m actually seeing things that are indicative of mold. And based on what you’ve shared with me about how you lived in a moldy home for 40 years. And you were cleaning it by yourself without protection. It’s very likely that we’re dealing with a mold issue here. And so there are some really good tests that will give us sort of a baseline. But sometimes you can just start detoxing.

Misty Williams  09:49

I want to add a point of clarification on this. The reason why you wouldn’t test right away is because your body does everything it can to get all these toxins out of your bloodstream out of your kidneys. All the pathways of the body, when the toxicity is in those pathways. It’s very toxic so your body does everything it can to store those. 

Misty Williams  10:11

And in my case, that’s one of the reasons that I’ve struggled so much with my weight going up and down and like not being able to keep it stable is because I’m storing a lot of toxicity. And my body is trying to save my life actually, by doing all that storage. But just so that people understand what you mean, when you say you wouldn’t want to test right away, it’s just because it’s hard to get to the thing that’s stored, and that’s sort of like biopsy and you’re fat or something to see what’s in there. The normal fluids of the body that we can test to see what’s in it aren’t going to display so. 

Misty Williams  10:43

So starting with some cellular detoxification, as you just described, could be a good start. And I would say I did my mold test after phase two of true cellular detox. So in the TCD program I had everything stirred up pretty well, so that we could actually see what was going on in my body. But that’s a really good takeaway. 

Misty Williams  10:57

So let’s go back to the dental stuff. Let’s talk about how you test for dental infections and stuff going on with your mouth.

Ashley Smith  11:02

Well, dental infections, that is something that your dentist, your skilled biological dentist know. Unfortunately, there’s a small list of dentists who we trust, but that list is growing because I do think the industry is catching on slightly. But you do want to, if you suspect dental infections, or cavitations, or infected root canals, really, the only way to know is to get what’s called a cone beam (Cone-beam computed tomography systems) scan CBCT as the other word for it. 

Ashley Smith  11:31

It’s the only way to actually see what’s going on. It’s a 3D image, it’s not the same as a 3D X-ray, it’s actually a machine that goes all the way around your head, when you’re done. This puts it up on a screen to look at it. It actually the whole image moves like that they’re milled, they’re moving the whole image like that. So if your dentist is telling you that they’re doing it, but it’s just a flat image on a screen, it’s not the right test. 

Ashley Smith  11:51

And they really need a very skilled eye to see those I was standing next to my dentist and she was looking at mine. And she saw things that I couldn’t have possibly seen. Of course, I’m not a dentist, but she was like, “See this hole here. And I’m like, I don’t see that”, then I think if you’re not trained, you’re not going to see it either. 

Ashley Smith  12:05

So you really want to probably not only find a biological dentist who is trained in either like a smart procedure, which is a safe Mercury removal, that’s probably one of your best bets to find someone who even goes a step further to look for hidden infections and cavitations in your mouth. Because they’re hidden for a reason, we often don’t have the symptoms.

Ashley Smith  12:26

People might have these root canals. Now 100% of root canals are infected. That is a fact. And so people will think, Well, my root canal isn’t bothering me, it’s fine. My dentist said it’s great. It looks amazing. Well, it’s fine for now, But the infection could grow. Eventually, that could be one of those things that tip your bucket over later. 

Ashley Smith  12:44

Cavitations usually come from extraction. So if you ever had wisdom teeth removed, which who hasn’t really, or any other kind of tooth extracted, it leaves behind basically a hole. And once it heals, that hole actually can stay filled with bacteria or infection. And it can just sort of grow over time. And the only way to see it is through this 3d image.

Ashley Smith  13:05

We want to get in there and clean it out and seal it up with like some ozone and laser and some PRF. This is going down a big dental rabbit hole, of course, but you need to find a dentist who believes things this way that your health really does start in your mouth. And you can’t heal a body, if you don’t heal your mouth,

Misty Williams  13:26

I want to add a little clarification on the cavitation thing, as I understand it, when dentists extract teeth, they often leave ligaments behind. 

Ashley Smith  13:33

Yeah, 

Misty Williams  13:34

When those ligaments are there, your body thinks the tooth is still there, so therefore you don’t properly heal that pocket. And that’s really where the cavitations come from. It’s the improper removal, the cheaper you don’t get everything out. So just people understand why you get cavitations. That’s the primary cause of cavitations. There might be some other nuanced things that can also contribute to cavitations in the mouth. But when your mouth doesn’t heal, that bacteria gets trapped inside your jaw. And then over time, it can actually eat away at your jaw and cause all sorts of issues. 

Misty Williams  14:05

Here’s your jaw and here’s your brain, right? You’re talking about infections that are really, really close to your brain. Like if you could pop up on the top of my head, like right beyond my nose, you would see my pineal gland, right? I mean, it’s like right there. It’s not protected by the blood brain barrier. You said that so you think about the vulnerability that we all have of infections being so close.

Ashley Smith  14:28

it’s here, but your lymph nodes are here too, right? So there’s studies that show that women with breast cancer, as it turns out, they have a cavitation or an infection on that side of their body. It happens very often so.

Misty Williams  14:39

So you definitely this isn’t one of those things where like, “Wait!, do you have symptoms?”. I think when you have symptoms, it’s a dangerous time. Let’s be proactive and get it out. 

Misty Williams  14:49

Okay, I want you to clarify on this cone beam stuff because not all Cone Beam scans are created equal and not every dentist that can do a cone beam necessarily knows how to properly read that. So how do you vet for the right cone beam and a dentist that actually can read the code?

Ashley Smith  15:03

I have a working list along with Dr. Pompa, we’ve been creating this list of dentists who we have personally vetted, either with ourselves in our own families or with colleagues, who we’ll call the dentist and say, do you do this? Do you use that? Do you use this, and if it’s no on any of them, they do not make it into the list. And so a lot of them though, we have arrangements where they’ll work with you virtually. 

Ashley Smith  15:23

So you might be able to go to a clinic, you can maybe even go to a local radiology office. They know nothing about cavitations, they just do the scan, because they were told to do it. You can get the file and send it in to one of our dentists who can do a virtual consult with you let you know what’s going on. And then from there, you have to decide, maybe this, maybe one of our dentists can help you find someone locally who can actually do the procedure, because it is surgical, it’s really the only way you can take care of cavitations. 

Ashley Smith  15:50

Maybe it’s something you want to consider to travel, and maybe it’s not too far away, and you can actually go and just do it right and have peace of mind that it’s going to be handled properly. But you really want to be very careful about who you go to, because I’ve heard of a lot of cavitation surgeries not working, they don’t stick, they don’t use all the proper things to seal you up afterwards.

Misty Williams  16:11

What are some of these proper things?

Ashley Smith  16:13

Well, there’s three main things, if you’re getting cavitation surgery that need to happen. One is, after the surgery, you want to get ozone. So you want to definitely kill any lingering infection with the ozone, they really want to get in there. Basically, you’re opening up the wound, like let’s say your wisdom teeth sights, I just had this procedure done a year ago. And same thing, no symptoms, but I just felt like I’m gonna get a comb beam. And it turned out I had four really deep cavitations. 

Ashley Smith  16:36

So they opened you up, they basically pull out all of the visible infection, and then you want to kill whatever they don’t see, with ozone, then you want to seal it up a laser, so you’re really sealing it up. So you’re like basically causing rapid healing on the site right there. So when they stitch you up, there isn’t a chance of trapping anything there. Everything has been basically killed right there. 

Ashley Smith  16:58

And then you want to do something called Platelet-rich Fibrin or PRF where basically, they take some a blood sample of yours. Before the procedure, they usually just take it from your arm or something, they spin it in this machine. And what it basically does is it creates fresh stem cells that they inject right into the site when you’re done with your surgery. So you’re just getting this like amazing stem cell treatment from your own body. 

Ashley Smith  17:18

So those three things if they do all three of those things, and if you call a dentist and ask do you do ozone, laser and PRF and they know what you’re talking about, that’s a really good sign. That you’re probably in pretty good hands, if they know what those things are, why they would be used.

Misty Williams  17:32

Awesome. Yeah. Okay, dental stuff. That was very great information. I hope everyone is taking notes. Because this is the kind of stuff that’s hard to find out as a patient, I can tell you talk to practitioners, and they just want you to be their patient, and then you don’t really know if you even have a good practitioner that really knows what they’re doing. So this is super helpful. 

Misty Williams  17:48

Okay, let’s keep moving on here. Let’s talk about mold. People that are watching probably have heard me in other interviews talked about my experience with being diagnosed last summer with mold. That diagnosis was the result of me going to my practitioner and saying something is off. And we have got to figure this out. And I want to run every test we can to figure it out. 

Misty Williams  18:03

There was a couple blood tests that we ran with an inflammatory markers that were through the roof. we didn’t test. We did the mold, micro mycotoxin test and Great Plains, and found the mold, and I’ve been working a detox protocol since then. So talk to us a little bit about mold. Mold is one of those things that can be hard to test for, as you kind of alluded to when you first introduced this topic for our listeners. 

Misty Williams  18:26

So let’s talk about how to properly provoke. Do the provocation so that you can actually pick mold up on a test? And then what does a good mold protocol look like? And then I have a couple questions that oh,

Ashley Smith  18:37

yeah, of course. So yeah, mold is one of the more difficult things. I’ve talked to you about your own health stuff. I know, it’s so frustrating, and you think you’re onto something and then suddenly you’re not and it’s very difficult to test for. 

Ashley Smith  18:50

Now for me, I’m just going to tell you, when I’ve tested for mold before because I had the classic symptoms, a lot of sinus issues. If I go into a kind of a damp room, I flare, I definitely get puffy and my nose runs. And I feel very sensitive to things like that. So I was like, Sure. And I feel like I’ve lived in places that were just moldy, tested negative several, several times. I’ve done all the tests. 

Ashley Smith  19:13

When I had my cavitation surgery, they sent a sample of what they scraped out of my cavitations to pathology and it came back filled with mold. So even if my mold tests had shown me I had mold, removing the source is the most important thing. And so I wouldn’t even attempt to put somebody through a real mold detox until we know that they’re not still living in the mold. Because it’s like drying off in a shower, right? Like you’re just not going to make much progress at all. So you need to make sure you’re out of the environment. 

Ashley Smith  19:41

You might not even know sometimes. If you can get one test, sometimes I want you to test your environment more than I want you to test your body because if it’s in your environment, it’s in your body. So we want to make sure, Is your home free of mold?. Okay, great. Then let’s figure out if the mold is in your body from maybe somewhere else you lived or were exposed to then we can start pulling it out other ways you’re wasting your time. 

Ashley Smith  20:01

But for me, I couldn’t have possibly gotten the mold out with anything. If I didn’t remove the physical source that was stored in my jaw, and then from there, I was able to actually flawlessly start detoxing it because the source was removed. And so we really want to figure out what’s the source, is it in our home, is it from a prior living situation, it’s just super duper important. So that’s like one of the first pieces of the puzzle. 

Ashley Smith  20:25

But like you experience Misty, it definitely requires the right kind of tests, there are several mold tests, some of them are really, really good, but they’re still not perfect, there really is no perfect test for anything I wish that there was. But we really want to figure out what we’re dealing with here, right. And again, we need to provoke it, we need to make sure it’s exposed. The thing about cellular detox that I specialize in is it never causes new issues in your body. I say this all the time. 

Ashley Smith  20:52

But it is exposing issues that you’ve had all along that maybe you knew about, maybe you didn’t, but we’re not causing any pain, we’re just exposing things, we’re getting them out of hiding, we’re making sure that they have nowhere to bury themselves in your body anymore. And then we can properly get rid of these things.

Misty Williams  21:09

Can mold hide?

Misty Williams  21:10

You just said mold can hide in cavitations. I am aware that mold can be in breast implants. There’s a lot of women in our community who have dealt with breast implant illness, and they have lots of mold issues from their implant. So that’s another thing that can be, not necessarily from your environment kind of thing, so if it’s in your mouth, it’s in your breast implants. Are there any other major thing like that, that people should be aware of that mold could just be?

Ashley Smith  21:30

Mold loves heavy metals, and hides around heavy metals. So even if like, let’s say, again, you don’t have like amalgam fillings in your office, maybe you did at one time, and you do have stored mercury in your cell, the mold loves, like hiding there and getting all cozy there. So yeah, heavy metals are sadly if somebody has some sort of metal, like implant in their body, like the mold can really like live around it. So just being aware of any sources. But yeah, mold really loves those metals. 

Ashley Smith  21:57

We live in a toxic world. So there’s a lot of exposures to heavy metals and it’s not just mercury, it’s lead. It’s gadolinium. It’s aluminum. It’s all kinds of things that we grew up with and didn’t really know how bad it was.

Misty Williams  22:09

So how do we provoke if we are ready to do some testing for mold? What does provocation look like so that we actually pick up what’s in our body?

Ashley Smith  22:18

Well, it depends on the test, not all of them need a provoking agent, the only provoking agent, I tend to use is DMSA. And that is actually for like a bigger test that I like to run. That’s heavy metals. And but it can also give you an idea of what else you might be dealing with there. So DMSA is a really good provoking agent. And basically, it’s better for metals than for mold. But it will tease things out of your cell. It’ll kind of crack your cell membrane open and pull things out. So they’re exposed and then the test works better than, again, you only pick up on tests what you’re actually excreting and not what is stored. Yeah, okay.

Misty Williams  22:54

So mold. We talked about provocation and testing. What’s your favorite test for mold?

Ashley Smith  23:01

I’m the Great Lakes is a pretty decent one. Yeah, it’s a good one. Okay.

Misty Williams  23:06

And then what does a good mold protocol typically look like? Obviously, you got to first eradicate whatever’s in your environment. Number one, yes. And so once you’ve done that, and your environment is mold free, then what is a good mold protocol typically look like? 

Ashley Smith  23:19

Oh, gosh, it could be many, many months. And we like to rotate things, but it’s a lot of binders. Now, a mold protocol would never just be done all by itself, we want to set a foundation, because again, there’s a lot and there’s always a cofactor. It’s never going to be just the mold. Mold is going to attach itself to something else. So we want to do a bass line of a cellular detox, it’s gonna pull out metals, environmental toxins, all kinds of things. 

Ashley Smith  23:44

And then add in a mold protocol, maybe after a couple of months, and you’re really doing just a lot of heavy binding, but you’re doing the cellular detox, to basically support the body, you want to support the detox pathways, you need to make sure that your liver, your kidneys, your lymphatic system, everything is working. 

Ashley Smith  24:03

Because if you detox improperly, you’re just going to recirculate, you’re just gonna pull things a little bit, they’re going to recirculate and they’re going to just get reabsorbed, which is worse than just leaving things alone. And we don’t want to do that either. So we really need to make sure your body is equipped to release things like you said earlier, sometimes these things are stored to protect us. 

Ashley Smith  24:21

So your body doesn’t naturally, you think it would want to naturally get rid of these things. But sometimes it’s keeping things as a protective measure because it thinks it’s saving your life. So we want to support the body and almost build this trust with yourself and your body that we’re going to let these things out now. 

Ashley Smith  24:35

But we’re going to also make sure we have all these catcher’s mitts in place by properly binding and rotating. We use a lot of butyrate, like a sodium butyrate, potassium butyrate, things that can really just get in and attract the mold out of the cell, but there’s a constant rotation because if you do the same thing for too long, it’s going to stop working.

Misty Williams  24:55

So binders are part of the protocol. I remember When my practitioner started me down the protocol, she wanted me to do a lot of lymphatic support. So I’m doing jumping on the rebounder. I’m doing dry brushing. What can we do to get that lymph moving, I’m doing sauna. Taking her to die while I’m in the sauna. What are some other things that are frequently part of a good detox protocol for mold? 

Ashley Smith  25:21

Great,

Ashley Smith  25:21

Great point there. Yeah, you want to keep the lymph moving, you want to also keep the liver really nice and healthy. So coffee enemas are wonderful saunas, like you mentioned. And we always want to take binders, when we are doing a manual manipulation of detox. So anytime you go into a sauna, or do a coffee enema, or even get a deep tissue massage, where you’re really pushing some stuff out, it’s good to go in with some binders, to kind of just catch anything that might be triggered loose in your body. 

Ashley Smith  25:21

Dry Brushing like you said, castor oil packs, there are some manual manipulation techniques where you can just do like a tapping technique and all your lymph nodes and just to kind of get your lymph moving, Epsom salt baths. So doing supplements are great. 

Ashley Smith  25:47

But we also want to just do the manual stuff as much as possible and really supporting the gut. We really need a nice, intact gut lining, a really nice healthy gut lining so we can even assimilate all of the things we’re trying to put in our bodies. So if your gut is a mess, we really need to heal the gut, as well. 

Misty Williams  26:19

It’s not something that you would do before you started doing binders.

Ashley Smith  26:21

Yes, I do got work right away. And we also want to look at the diet diet. It sounds so simple, but it’s not there can be so many stressors in the diet, it’s just another one of the stressors that we want to remove are food stressors, and so eating things that might be triggering your symptoms, it could be healthy things, but we want to figure out what you might be eating or how often you’re eating or not eating enough. I mean, that could be part of it, too. So digging into diet is huge.

Misty Williams  26:48

So I’ve had several women in the healing Rosie community reach out to me recently because they know they have a toxicity problem and a mold problem. Their big challenge is they’re working with doctors or their bodies are really sensitive, right, and they’re working with doctors, and they’re experiencing so much hoaxing from the detox, that it’s shutting them down. They obviously so uncomfortable, some of the symptoms that get stirred up from detox for people that are really sensitive, can be debilitating, right. 

Misty Williams  27:16

So then it’s like, how do I find someone who knows how to deal with someone who’s really sensitive? It seems the pattern that I’ve seen in speaking with practitioners that I think are really good in this space, including Dr. Pompa. but there’s others, too. The strategy behind dealing with someone who’s really sensitive is to go very slow. 

Misty Williams  27:35

I would love for you just to talk a little bit about maybe your experience with patients that are super sensitive, and how do you and what can the patient do to take some initiative around modifying their protocols so that they’re able to actually detox it’s not a “either or proposition” for them.

Ashley Smith  27:50

Absolutely!. I always say detox is something that first of all years, not months, it could take so long to actually get to a place where we feel like we’ve made a lot of progress, or that maybe we’re like done, even though I don’t know, if you’re ever done, I think the way I view it, I’m sure you do, too. Like we’re never a work in progress, we’re always going to be honing in on something or perfecting something in our bodies in some way. Plus, we live in a toxic world. So I think there’s as you travel, if you ever go anywhere, like you’re going to need to maintain. 

Ashley Smith  28:17

But in the beginning, I mean, I look at it, like, I’m a teacher, I want to teach you how to detox, I don’t want to just tell you, I don’t want to just tell you what to take, how much to take or lower this or increase that. I want to explain why. Here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to like have you take one drop of this. And I’m going to take one capsule of that. And I want you to understand why I’m telling you this. So in the future, maybe five months from now, maybe we’re not working as intimately together, you’ll know, you’ll remember what I said, but you can always slow down. 

Ashley Smith  28:48

In fact, I have a lot of clients who are very aggressive and they want to speed it up. We can’t determine how quickly we detox. the body is going to go at the pace, it’s going to go out we’re very big into the innate intelligence, our body really does want to heal, our body does have the power to heal, we just need to give it the proper tools. 

Ashley Smith  29:04

But I can’t say I want to detox in three months. That’s not up to me. I’m just giving my body the tools and my body is going to go at the pace that it’s gonna go. And so there is no harm in slowing down. We don’t want you to be miserable. 

Ashley Smith  29:16

I like to say I have very few clients who have ever missed a day of work or been like so sick. I mean, they might feel terrible. But we nip it in the bud and we make modifications, which is why it’s really important to work with somebody who understands detox and not just some one size fits all thing because it’s really not. It’s not super easy, especially for those sensitive clients. So you could always way way way lower the dose, sometimes increasing binders to be helpful and again, the lymphatic work could be huge.

Misty Williams  29:46

We’ve talked about metals. So you gave us a little teaser on testing for metals using DMSA. I know you have DMSA can be hard to come by. So maybe you could share with people where they might be able to get DMSA ideally you’re still working with the practitioner on this. 

Misty Williams  30:00

I like the idea because I’m a patient, like a patient, myself and a DIY myself, I like the idea of being able to figure things out and just do them. And thank god, I’ve been working with a practitioner on this stuff. So I want you to have the information. And I also want to tell you, as with a little mama bear energy to find a good practitioners to work with soy, but talk a little bit about how to do provocation to properly test for metals.

Ashley Smith  30:23

Yeah, so DMSA, I do have a really good source. Now, I can’t predict if this link ever goes away, but it’s been around now for a few years, it’s called Northern Health products.com, they’re based in Canada, it’s very, it’s almost impossible to find it in the US. So Northern Health products.com. And you can buy DMSA there. So we use it sometimes for detox itself. But for the provoking agent for heavy metal test. 

Ashley Smith  30:43

Now it’s a urine challenge test. So you are going to take what’s called a mega dose of the DMSA. I wouldn’t want anyone to do this without proper guidance from a practitioner. You collect your urine for six hours. And you also have to take DMSA, is a very short half life. 

Ashley Smith  30:44

including at night, you’re gonna wake yourself up.

Ashley Smith  30:48

So you need to take it every four hours around the clock for three days. Otherwise, we’re going to do what’s called that redistribution of toxins, we’re going to like pull things out of the cell, and then we’re going to ignore it and everything’s going to go back in and it’s going to be dangerous. So we need to do a full detox cycle with it. So one DMSA, every four hours for three full days of 72 hours, but you’re collected urine for six, 

Ashley Smith  31:23

Yeah, gotta wake up in the middle of the night. It’s kind of not fun, but it’s important to do it. And if you use the DMSA, in your actual heavy metal detox, which we do have a lot of clients on it, same thing, but you’re not doing it every day, it’s usually three days a week, maybe three days every other week, sometimes three days a month. 

Ashley Smith  31:39

So it’s just pick three days where you don’t mind waking up in the middle of the night. And you’ll be better off for it. So that is how yo, basically provoke it out of your cells, you collect the urine, you send the sample in. And it’s a pretty, pretty good test. It’s the best test there is. 

Ashley Smith  31:58

But it’s still I’d say I’d give it a pretty good. It’s going to tell you every metal beautifully, but lead and mercury, which are so so so deeply embedded. They might register just a little bit. But we know there’s a whole lot more than what shows up sometimes. The name of the test. It is the doctors data. 24 hour urine test. It’s a 24 hour urine toxic metal test. Yeah.

Misty Williams  32:23

Okay. Important to know that test name is for sure. All right, so we’ve provoked the metals. Now we need to find out we have certain metals, is this a situation like mold, where it just depends on what metals you have will determine the binders that you’re using? Or what’s the best way to go about metal necessarily?

Ashley Smith  32:40

No, because we have the binders that are tried and true that really cover like all the bases. I mean, we have clients were like, but I have high this or I have high that now we might give you additional key later, sometimes we stack them depending on what you know, something like DMSA has a real affinity for mercury and lead. 

Ashley Smith  32:56

So if we suspect that those are your biggest problems, we will for sure put you on DMSA. But it might not be appropriate for everybody, you know, we use EDTA. We also love using like a liposomal zeolite product. And then we also like to use like a charcoal activated carbon binder. I think to customize it would be more about how many things you stack. And maybe the dosing because some people you know, might handle very intense doses, and some people might not. So

Misty Williams  33:24

yeah, how is the test you describe different from a hair test.

Ashley Smith  33:28

Same thing as the hair tests only show you what you’re excreting so hair tests are beautiful for minerals, it really can give you a beautiful profile of what your mineral balance is, which is another important, key thing we want to look at. But for heavy metals, it’s often just showing you what you’re excreting in your hair and not what’s stored. So it’s not in there’s really no provoking agent you can use for the hair test. So it might give you a baseline, but it’s not it’s not a great test overall for metals.

Misty Williams  33:57

Yeah. So you’re basically just going to see what is able to be moved around or not. 

Ashley Smith  34:01

Yeah, and people are sick. They come here, they come to you, they come to me, because they are storing so much and they’re not getting rid of it, which is why their symptoms are presenting themselves to that. Yeah, if they were beautifully excreting all this stuff, they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.

Misty Williams  34:17

Right. Okay, well, this has been awesome. We talked about some of the big stressors with the testing looks like for them what protocols look like, thank you so much, Ashley, for spending time with us today and helping to unpack all of this. It’s very empowering. 

Misty Williams  34:29

I can say as a patient who has struggled with this stuff and knows a lot of smart people and still struggled. But just knowing what these great protocols look like so that you can kind of take the temperature of your path to see if you’re really headed in the right direction can be really, really empowering. So I appreciate you spending some time with us today and helping us understand how this works. Thanks for having me.

Ashley Smith  34:49

It’s my pleasure. Yeah. Well,

Misty Williams  34:51

Thank you everyone for tuning in. And we’ll see y’all soon. Hey, bye. 

Misty Williams  34:54

That’s it for this week’s episode. Thank you for listening. I hope you’re feeling more empowered to overcome your flabby foggy and fatigued and to reclaim your life. If you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button right now so you don’t miss any of our episodes. We have some awesome shows coming right up. I love reading your reviews and comments too. They inspire me and encourage other Rosie’s to hang out with us and learn all these amazing strategies for healing and living our best lives. Till next time sister. Bye