Dr. Cindy Geyer

speaker

241 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 1 Jul

Dr. Cindy Geyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Dr. Hyman Show · This Is Why You’re Not Sleeping Well—and How to Fix It Fast · 4 Nov 2024 podcast

Right. Lead, mercury, things that that are under the radar for many, many people and unfortunately can be a problem.

What happened with your sleep?

Well, I think it's the time to take a history and really understand all of the other interconnectedness that could be going on. For example, somebody with sleep concerns might also have digestive concerns, and then we might be thinking about assessing their digestive function, looking at a nutritional assessment.

But I think there's a time and a place and there's tremendous value in screening somebody with a portable sleep study because that gives you a tremendous amount of information. And we're using it, yes, to diagnose sleep apnea, but also to say, how often do you wake up during the night? How much percentage of time are you spending in REM sleep and deep sleep?

Are you tossing and turning all night long? So it can give us a tremendous overview in terms of somebody's sleep throughout the night. And from that, we can also decide, okay, what else do we need to explore?

So this is somebody that, and one of the things I wanna plant the seed for is sometimes we start with what we think is the most likely issue and we gradually uncover more potential contributing issues and peel the layers of the onion. And this was a woman that I had known for years. She was pretty healthy in terms of her lifestyle. She exercised. She wasn't overweight. She ate a healthy diet.

She didn't drink any alcohol. She was treated with antidepressants. She was on a serotonin reuptake inhibitor and Welbutrin for her depression. And she was also on hormone replacement therapy. She was post-menopausal in her 60s. And she started complaining of fatigue and difficulty concentrating and just felt scattered. And by Sunday, she would had the need to take a three hour nap.

So well, that's unusual. So we did some of the usual testing for causes of fatigue. We tested her thyroid, it was okay. We looked at her iron levels or sugar levels, they were okay. So I decided to do screen her with a sleep study. And it turned out you would not have looked at her and said, oh yes, she is the poster child for sleep apnea.

She turned out to have one of the most striking positional components to sleep apnea I've ever seen. When she was on her side, her sleep was normal, but when she was on her back, she had respiratory events that count as either a slowing of airflow or a stopping of airflow more than 60 times an hour.

Yes, yes.

That's a lot. No wonder she was exhausted, right? So when you see a positional component like that, I have people who don't want to do a sleep study because they don't want to, I'd never wear that stupid mask. But for her, we said, okay, well, let's start with retraining you to learn to sleep on your side. And she tried that. There's some commercially available positional devices.

There are all kinds of strategies you can do.

or the fanny pack with the pillow stuffed in it. Yeah, there's all kinds of strategies you could do. And of course, it's big business, right? You can buy a slumber bump or a bumper belt.

Even more sophisticated, there's now a biofeedback device that's a strap around that vibrates when you roll on your back. So it's sort of autogenic nighttime training to get you. So that's what she used, interestingly enough. And it helped a little, but she was still tired. So as we're peeling the layers of the onion, she had some digestive symptoms, a lot of bloating, a lot of discomfort.

And we had done a full sleep study. She had restless legs and periodic limb movements. She turned out to have a very abnormal breath test for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

Where they don't belong, right.

Absolutely. And low iron. Her iron wasn't terribly low, but one of the sidebars here, I think the other thing we do in functional and integrative medicine is understand the difference between a normal blood test. I should put, quote, normal blood test and an optimal blood test. Ferritin is a classic example of that. Ferritin looks at your total tissue iron.

In your iron bank, your iron stores, right. And normal can be anywhere from 15 to 250. Yeah. So. It's a big range. It's a big range. And what we know the threshold is for somebody who's got restless leg symptoms is you actually don't want to be normal.

You want to be over 100 because there's some evidence, even comparing it head to head with those dopamine drugs we mentioned earlier, getting somebody's ferritin over 100 was as effective as the dopamine medications.

That's amazing, right? As simple as correcting a nutrient deficiency, not to the normal range, but the optimal range for that condition.

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