Dr. Kyle Warren
I am Dr. Warren (one of the founders of NutriRestore). I hope me and my family’s journey in health can help you and your family. I count myself blessed, but like all families, we’ve had tough times, too. We’ve families have had health problems, probably just like you. Our families and extended families have autoimmune diseases, mold, tick-borne illnesses, neurological disorders, gut problems, food sensitivities/allergies, skin problems, and more. We know what it’s like to be sick or have someone you deeply care about become sick.
Dr. Warren’s Story – Marriage is Hard, but Even Harder When You Are Sick
I have always been an assertive and proactive person. I knew I wanted to be in natural healthcare since I was around 12 years old due to a chiropractor helping me with some gut problems, and later hip problems, in high school. However, my career took a turn away from traditional chiropractic and into functional medicine while I was earning my doctorate.
My wife and I got married the summer between graduating college and going off to chiropractic school in St. Louis. Our first few years of marriage were good. We had normal struggles. I was not a terrific listener, and my wife was not a great communicator. I worked on listening more and we went through life supporting each other and learning more about each other. It was good. It was normal.
The Big Red Flag – Sexy Wife, Unhealthy Husband = Marriage Problem
Somewhere in the 2nd to 3rd year of chiropractic school I was getting burned out. I was tired and less driven than my normal self. I chalked it up to the rigorous schedule, but I knew something was wrong when this happened. One day, my wife put on an um…shall we say nice outfit and asked if I wanted to spend some intimate time with her…I replied, “No, I’m really tired.” My wife turned and went back into the other room and I remember thinking, “Holy Cow, what the hell is wrong with me?!?” I need to go to the doctor!”
My unpleasant experience from the first two doctors – No one cares about the “why”
Following that realization, I made an appointment to go see a doctor. He didn’t run any tests. He didn’t look at me but stared at his clipboard (this was right before doctors started using all digital records). I was told that I was depressed and should take medication. I asked, “WHY I am depressed?” and he said, “because of stress.” A second doctor experience was largely the same. I thought this was a nonsense answer, so I kept looking.
Just to be clear, I think all doctors go to medical school because they have a passion for helping people improve their health. However, the medical system isn’t designed to train doctors to look for the root cause of disease a vast majority of the time. The issue isn’t the doctor, it’s the system.
The third doctor finds a reason, but fails to go far enough
The next doctor I see agrees to do some testing and finds I had low testosterone. Ahhh!! Finally, an answer! This explains the lack of drive, low energy, and low libido. He then offers me testosterone shots, which is when I put on the brakes. I asked the doctor the “WHY” question again. Why is my testosterone low? (I was around 24 years old at that time). My body still had the ability to make testosterone last year. Why did my body stop making testosterone? What caused the low testosterone? He literally rolled his eyes at me and said, “We don’t do that here.” You’ve got to be kidding me! We don’t find the root of problems here? How ridiculous! Would you take your car to a mechanic who doesn’t find out why it isn’t working? Why go to a doctor except to understand why your body isn’t working?
My fifth doctor finds out why and helps me heal
The biggest problem I had with my doctors was that they seemed genuinely UNINTERESTED in finding out why I was sick. If you don’t know the root cause of a problem, you can’t ever solve it.
By this time, I was starting to interview and shadow doctors that I could work as an associate for when I graduated. One of them was gracious enough to work up my case. He found I had a virus called CMV (a cousin virus of EBV) and gave me a protocol to help my immune system. Over the next year, I helped my immune system, got over the virus, and then my testosterone went back up! I was back to my healthy self after almost 2 years of struggling.
What I Learned from Being Sick – Attack a Problem Until You Solve It
I love the quote from Albert Einstein about sticking with your problems until you’ve found a solution. If this strategy was good enough for Einstein, it’s good enough for me! It certainly took persistence to keep searching until we found an adequate answer to my health struggles.
Chapter 2: My Wife’s (Anne) Struggle: Show-Stopping Sick for “No Reason”
I will be a little more succinct in telling my wife’s health story. To be short, after my health improved, she went from being a healthy college athlete to being extremely sick for no known reason a few years later. She would get dizzy and disorientated. She was extremely fatigued. She could not think or comprehend anything she read. Life was terrible and we had no idea why. Traditional medicine said everything was fine and suggested she was depressed. Once again, we did not feel like this was a good answer. Having gone through my own health journey, and by this time being well into my functional medicine education, I ran every test I had available to me trying to figure out what was wrong with my wife. I learned ceaselessly in an effort to discover how to help my wife. We changed our diet (several times) and did adrenal/hormone tests, stool tests, chemical tests, looked at autoimmune diseases, neurological function, mold, ticks, and more. I kept going until I found things that helped her.
My Goal: Help My Wife Be Healthy and I Hope That Helps You, Too
You see, I couldn’t give up searching for answers on how to get someone healthy because I had to keep going until I found something that worked for my wife. Along the way I learned so much. I helped many other people with what I learned, even though not everything worked on my wife! I helped improve leaky guts and thyroid patients balance their metabolism and other chronically ill people improve. Eventually, I found my way through autoimmunity, mold, environmental illnesses, and into chronic tick-borne illness (mainly Lyme disease and its co-infections).
I may share my wife’s whole story another time, in full (Tick borne illness stories are often rather lengthy), but suffice it to say, if you saw her now, you’d see a healthy woman who is both a mother of our 3 (soon to be 4) children and a supporting wife. We didn’t get here without a lot of work. We ran tests, tried protocols, failed, retested, and didn’t give up until we found things that worked. You can do it, too.
You Can Have the Health to Chase Your Dreams
The struggle with being sick, or my wife being sick, was that wasn’t the way I pictured life! I’m sure it isn’t the way you picture life, either. You want to work towards that career goal, or have the energy to volunteer, or go do fun things, or be the best parent or spouse you can be! At NutriRestore, we hope these products, which we’ve used in over 5,000 patients now, can help you have the health to go live your life, just like they have helped me and my family.
Dr Paul
Hello! My name is Dr. Paul Deglmann (co-owner of NutriRestore). I want to share a little of my personal story with you to make you realize that even practitioners who dedicate their careers to health and nutrition can still have their own health issues.
As you know, when you or someone you love becomes sick, it makes you search that much harder for answers. When the answer is unclear, this is where you likely have had to become your own “doctor” in terms of digging into the research and trying to find out WHY you are sick.
Figuring Out the “Why?”
While in chiropractic school, my health was doing “well” until my face started to get irritated/red. Around the same time, I also started to experience some weight gain and brain fog. It went on for a few months…. then a few more months…..then a few more. I finally saw a dermatologist who prescribed a topical and oral antibiotic. The result??……. nothing.
A few years later, I visited another dermatologist that was highly recommended. He diagnosed me with rosacea and prescribed me Accutane. Given my education and background, I was hesitant to take the medication because I had heard about the potential severe side effects. I asked the doctor “Why did I get rosacea?” He replied “We don’t know. We just know Accutane works to get rid of it.”
After being on the Accutane for a few months, my skin did clear up. I was thankful for that, but it then returned a few years later.
In 2010, I started to study functional medicine intensely and got much more serious about looking for the root cause of the symptom or disease if I wanted a long-term solution. This is also around the same time that I started to date my now wife, Jill. In the beginning, we would go out to eat and almost every time she would end up lying on the couch with her knees bent trying to relieve the abdominal discomfort. After this happened a few times, we ended up testing her for gluten sensitivity. The test came back extremely positive and required a gluten-free diet. Now that she tested positive, I figured that I’d better do the test on myself, too. When my results came back, I was shocked! There were 22 different markers involving gluten sensitivity and I tested positive for 20 of them! Also, the two antibodies associated with Celiac disease were off-the-charts high. I didn’t have any digestive complaints at all and Celiac disease is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine. How is that possible? I then thought to myself “Why do I have Celiac disease?”
With gluten sensitivity or Celiac disease, you can have an extremely wide variety of symptoms. Mine happened to be rosacea, brain fog and a few extra pounds. For someone else, it could be migraines, chronic pain, diarrhea, difficulty gaining weight, canker sores as well as many other symptoms and some people don’t have any symptoms that they can detect or correlate to gluten in the early stages.
Fast forward a few years and we now have two young boys that are also gluten-free due to these reasons along with the fact that my wife and I both have a genetic predisposition to gluten sensitivity and Celiac disease.
Remove the Ingredients from the Toxic Soup=Results
When my wife went on a gluten-free diet, her digestive symptoms went away almost immediately! For me, my skin cleared up (at the time) and I lost 55 lbs in 5-6 weeks and wasn’t even eating healthy! Instead of a regular pizza, I’d have a gluten-free pizza. Instead of regular donut, I’d have a gluten-free donut. The gluten protein was literally that toxic to me and my body started to shed weight extremely fast. One of our favorite instructors, Dr. Bob Rakowski, says it best…..”The solution to pollution is dilution.” Your body will hold onto fat and retain water to make the toxicity less toxic to you. This is certainly true because after just maintaining the tradition gluten-free diet for a few years, my symptoms associated with gluten exposure started to return. Because of this, I ended up drastically changing my diet about 5 years ago and am now grain-free/dairy-free due to fact that all grains contain a form of gluten (just not the same gluten as what’s in wheat), but that’s a story for another time.
I have seen so many patients where dietary changes are extremely powerful when food is the big inflammatory trigger breaking the body down. However, maybe your diet is already good, but you are still struggling with your health. This is where high-quality supplements can potentially help you address some of the other big inflammatory triggers like microbes (bacteria, yeast, fungi, parasites, tick-borne illness like Lyme disease), toxins (chemicals, mold, heavy metals) and nutritional deficiencies. Everyone is different, so it is very important to answer the question “What are the triggers driving your symptoms?”
The NutriRestore products have played a large role in improving my overall gut health as well as replenishing the nutrient deficiencies I had as a result of Celiac disease.
I sincerely hope that the NutriRestore products and education along the way can help improve your health along with the health of your family and your loved ones.