Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Lauren Bahr, PT, FNCP

I’ve been so excited to put this all together for you and to share with you. You will meet an exceptional physical therapist who is helping women with chronic pain and anxiety by combining physical therapy with functional nutrition. Lauren Bahr is a licensed physical therapist. She’s a health coach and she’s a graduate of the Functional Nutrition for Chronic Pain certification program at the Integrative Pain Science Institute. Lauren combines physical therapy together with functional nutrition in the plan of care for her clients with chronic pain and anxiety in her private practice, which is called Simply Balanced Wellness.

What I love about this interview with Lauren is not only is she passionate about the type of practitioner that she’s become, but clear about sharing her entire journey of learning and discovery to arriving at the place she is, where she’s now able to combine traditional physical therapy, pain education, functional nutrition and even some of the coaching skills with helping her clients with pain and anxiety. We all know these are skills that do not appear in a traditional physical therapy curriculum or quite frankly, in any traditional form of medical education. Lauren has spent years learning these techniques as well as honing her skills to be the practitioner she is now. Lauren is even now dipping her toes into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a treatment which I think is going to be critical when she’s working with her clients with anxiety, as well as chronic pain in her private practice.

As you go through this, what stands out to me is Lauren’s journey. It’s her journey as a practitioner and she also weaves in her journey as someone who dealt with her own health challenges of chronic pain and chronic fatigue. To help you out, Lauren includes a free download to accompany her interview. This free gift is called the Breakfast Recipe Book. If you are interested in nutrition or if you’re someone who’s currently using nutrition with your clients, you’ll know that breakfast can be a time that’s challenging for our patients and our clients because many of the convenient breakfast foods out there are highly processed, they’re loaded with sugar and they even include trans-fat. If you want a combination of three things that are bound to cause inflammation in the body, which can lead to chronic pain, processed foods, loaded with sugar and loaded with trans fats. Often many of the processed breakfast foods include that. In this Breakfast Recipe Book, you’re going to find a ton of delicious recipes that you can use for yourself or with your family or you can use it for nutrition education when you’re working with your patients.

To download this free gift, all you have to do is text 134Download to the number 44-222 or you can open up a browser on your computer and you will type in www.IntegrativePainScienceInstitute.com/134download and you can grab that free gift which will be delivered right to your inbox. I want to thank Lauren for being a member of the Functional Nutrition for Chronic Pain Certification. If you’re someone who’s looking for an integrative practitioner like Lauren who has a combination of these important skills that can help you with chronic pain, check out the Integrative Pain Science Institute Practitioner directory. You’ll be able to search there on a map to find a practitioner in your area. Let’s welcome Lauren Bahr.

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Integrating Nutrition And Physical Therapy With Lauren Bahr, PT, FNCP

Lauren, welcome. I’m excited to talk to you.

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

You have some interesting work going on, which is why I wanted to have you here. You have this cool crossroads happening of traditional physical therapy, health coaching and functional nutrition. There are few therapists that have been able to integrate those three skill sets together. They are separate skill sets in and of themselves. They’re important skills that we can use to help people with chronic pain and the non-communicable diseases that we see in a PT practice. Take us back. I’m interested in talking about your whole journey. Let’s go back to what made you interested in becoming a physical therapist first?

I’m one of those lucky people who realized as a kid that’s what I wanted to do. Early childhood, I loved learning anatomy and getting those anatomy kits as a kid. I played a lot of sports. Year round it was soccer, softball, basketball and I would find myself getting injured and I couldn’t wait to get back to my sport. I became fascinated with how can I help my body heal faster. I was massaging and using ice and it became a fascination. In seventh grade, we had a career day and one of the people who came was a woman who was a sports physical therapist. It was one of those light bulb moments like, “A-ha, that’s what I want to do.” I get to learn about the human body, I get to help people. It seemed like the perfect path for me.

That’s a common story. Many of us were athletes first or we had a parent or someone else who influences who are working in healthcare. You went on to Ithaca College, which is a great school. New York State, Ithaca has been well-known for so many years.

I was lucky because it was a five-year Master’s program. As a freshman in college, I was already enrolled in the program. I sailed straight through and by 23, I was done.

Now every program has a DBT program, but back in the day that five-year Master’s was so cool to have because those were the days when we were transitioning from a four-year BS PT to a Master’s. Most of the Master’s program that started was six years. Ithaca had that five-year, which was so cool and you can work your way through it fast and start working and start treating patients. Where did you work first when you graduated?

I worked at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. I was doing neuro rehab. I was working with people with strokes and brain injuries, after major trauma, like car accidents. It was a wide variety. That was my first job.

How long did you do that? It’s interesting because oftentimes they told you originally you should start in either acute care or adult rehab before you go into let’s say outpatient sports in ortho. Did you find that?

That’s exactly why I went that path because I knew I wanted to be an orthopedic clinician, but I got that same advice. It’s best to start in the hospital and see a big diversity of different conditions. I followed that advice. I was there for a year. They rotated me to the outpatient setting in the hospital, and then when they were getting ready to rotate me again, I said, “No, I want to stay in outpatient.” I went to the outpatient world and that’s where I spent the bulk of my career.

In outpatient, more like more general orthopedics?

General orthopedics, but there’s always been that mix of the occasional patient with MS or Parkinson’s, a little bit of neuro mixed in.

I know somewhere along the lines of your professional journey, there’s also a personal journey as far as your own in health goes. Where did that come into the story?

That happened a few years ago. There was actually a couple of things that happened before that, but I wanted to share that I had noticed some trends happening in my professional career, and I don’t know if you noticed this too. Early in my career, it seemed like the people I was seeing was the acute ankle sprain or acute low back pain or Achilles tendonitis. You rehabilitate them, they get better, they go on their way. I was noticing these trends of more and more people with chronic health conditions and also chronic pain. That wasn’t something I felt like we were taught in school. When I was seeing someone in their 70s or 80s with chronic pain, it wasn’t that alarming because they had a lifetime of wear and tear. When it was people in their 40s and 30s and 20s and I’d be treating their knee but they’d be talking about their back pain and their shoulder pain and this widespread pain, it was like scratching my head, “What’s going on?” Did you notice that?

Yeah. I tell therapists all the time that. I graduated PT school in 1997, and like yourself, if you were a PT, those days like 1997 was the tail end of the sports PT rise where there were outpatient sports clinics and sports in ortho clinics opening. I would say the majority of your population was a relatively healthy population of orthopedic and sports injuries. As you mentioned, as the years and decades went on, there was a more and more chronic disease, obesity and autoimmune disease. I’m not sure if there’s research on this or not and it’s probably a confluence of two things. One, these things started becoming more popular in the general population. Two, maybe your referral sources start to see the value of PT to help these patients. The amount of chronic pain and chronic disease was not in practice when I first graduated PT school.

It sounds like we saw the same trends and that’s when I noticed there was something missing. What was this missing piece as to why my patients had these chronic health conditions and chronic pain? I started searching and it was interesting because I had a patient who was a nutritionist. I got excited every week when she came to see me because the conversation would quickly go into nutrition and I wanted to pick her brain. She had planted some good seeds. She said, “Check out the Weston A. Price Foundation.” That talks about eating real food and nutrient-dense food. It became a hobby for me. I still didn’t see where it could fit into my skill set as a PT, but it became a hobby because I was a mom and I needed to feel myself for my busy days. I also wanted to make sure I was feeding my children well.

As I started to dive into nutrition, I came across a couple of things. The Dr. Terry Wahls, TED Talk, when I watched that, she has a chronic progressive MS. She was so debilitated that she was in a wheelchair despite taking the best medications out there for MS. Her story is that she healed herself using food as medicine. When I watched that TED Talk, it was the missing piece. I think she had talked about inflammation and I had also come across that term. Soon after, I read the book, Grain Brain by Dr. Perlmutter. Inflammation was this a-ha, “This is the piece that I’m missing in my population of chronic pain and chronic health conditions.” How can we influence inflammation? There was my answer, was the nutrition piece, so that that started to steer my journey differently.

It’s interesting because if you follow her work, her work talks to us I think as PTs because she talks about exercise quite frankly as obviously something that’s important for people with MS. She also talks about neuromuscular electric stimulation, which we’ve been using as PTs. One thing that she brings in, which we haven’t been using until recently, is nutrition. I think what you’re describing, other PTs have described too. It’s like, “This is it. I’ve been working with exercise and manual therapy and patient education and neuromuscular electrical stimulation. Here’s one more thing that I can tool myself with to help patients.” You were going to talk about your personal health journey somewhere.

That leads into my own personal health journey because luckily, I had started learning about nutrition, and then in 2014, I started having my own health challenges. I was having chronic fatigue and body aches and fevers of unknown origin and these weird symptoms. I would go to the doctor and she would run the blood work and say, “You’re fine. We can’t find anything wrong.” I would just keep pushing. I felt like I was on this treadmill of life and pushing through the discomfort that I felt because I didn’t know any different. I was cleaning up my diet a little bit. We did start to go gluten-free as a family. I did see improvements in my energy and in my sleep, but I still wasn’t feeling right. There was a perfect storm of stressors in my personal life. I started experiencing significant anxiety and insomnia. Go back to the doctor and she’s like, “Take these anxiety medications and come back in two weeks.” I did that and two weeks later I was worse. She looked at me and she said, “I think you need to take a medical leave. You’re not functioning well.”

I was in bad shape. I wasn’t sleeping and not functioning well. I ended up getting a medical leave, which was terrifying because I had been on this pedestal my whole life and thought that I was in this picture of health and all of a sudden, I felt broken and scared. I was terrified that that was going to be my new reality. I knew that I didn’t want that. I also had this deep belief that if I was waiting for medication to fix me, I would be medicated the rest of my life and I might still be struggling. That’s when I decided to write my own personal prescription and that included an anti-inflammatory diet. I went gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free. Luckily, I had discovered nutrition and some of these other resources. I added a few other key supplements like fish oil and probiotics and magnesium.

After three months of devotion to my nutrition, my sleep and a few other things, I was feeling good enough to go back to work. I continued these things for a solid year and then I realized I was feeling better than I had in many years. Why were we not shouting this off the rooftops? From there it became my personal mission to figure out how I can start incorporating this? I was sharing bits and pieces with my patients, but I felt like I had to do it behind closed doors because at the time it wasn’t part of the scope of practice. I didn’t know I was allowed to talk about these things. It seemed harmless to talk about food. In any case, I wanted to find a way to share it. That’s when I discovered health coaching.

Lauren, one of the things that we talked about is non-pharmacologic options for chronic pain. As PTs, we’re at the top of the pyramid now with regard to non-pharmacologic care because for so long patients have been recommended opioids and other types of pain-relieving medications. As PTs, a lot of education has to happen. We have to educate the consumer about what we do. We have to educate our referral sources, people who refer patients to us. We also have the influence of big medicine and big pharmaceutical companies that have a lot more money and a lot more power on the airwaves than we do. What’s your opinion about some of these topics which can be difficult to discuss with some patients?

I have strong opinions on this topic because the way I see our traditional healthcare system is that it’s not about building health. It is a sick care system. When people go to their doctor looking for help, the solutions are drugs or surgery oftentimes. It’s the lucky few that get to come to see a physical therapist. I believe we need to flip it on its head and we need to create a true healthcare system. We know that the foundations of health are healthy movement, healthy nutrition, and healthy lifestyle factors.

There are those three things that you said: movement, exercise, nutrition and then some of the mindset, stress reduction, coaching principles fit beautifully into a PT practice. When I think about a physical therapist who can integrate these things, I believe we are at that pinnacle of helping people through chronic pain and chronic disease in a way that a pharmaceutical will never ever be able to help people with. Not that we’re saying that they don’t have the role and the patients may need a drug for a certain period of time. However, we talked about this before with regard to tribe, we should come together as non-pharmacologic professionals and say, “We need to push back hard against what’s happening out there.” The pharmaceutical companies don’t care if PT reimbursement drops or visits are cut or if a patient can access care. I think it’s up to us as professionals to come together and push back against that.

I don’t turn on the TV very often but when you do, it becomes obvious that the pharmaceutical industry is marketing directly to the consumer. I think 70% of commercials are pharmaceutical commercials. People are being told that seed is being planted, you will get sick and when you get sick you will take this drug and you will be on this drug for life. Like what you’re saying and what I’m saying is instead of suppressing symptoms, if we create a tribe of healthcare practitioners who are supporting and building health, it’s a totally different approach. It offers people, in my opinion, a better quality of life.

I love that you bring up that you run this prescriptive anti-inflammatory diet for three months. That’s when you started to turn the boat around, so to speak. I think one of the reasons why, especially in the PT world, which we work from an evidence space, so much of the information out there online is doing a two-week detox or three-week cleanse. It’s a big turnoff to a lot of PTs I believe with regards to nutrition. The message you’re sending is one where, “Start on this diet.” It takes time for your biochemistry to turn around. Meaning if you have some systemic chronic inflammation where there’s low grade or moderate grade, you’ll probably feel better. You’ll probably notice something in three weeks. However, when you continue that three months and a year later, you’d be shocked at what happens. That’s the big difference I think between nutrition and pharmaceutical medications, where like a pharmaceutical medication may make you feel better sometimes instantly, but long-term there are side effects to pharmaceutical medications, almost every single one of them. Versus with nutrition, you may not feel better instantly but long-term you’re going to feel 100 times better.

It’s also a different approach. When you look at the medication, what you’re looking is you’re looking at the symptom and you’re looking to suppress a symptom versus nutrition is looking how we can support the body’s own innate ability to heal. It’s a different mindset and a different approach.

How did you find health coaching?

In my journey to figure out how can I package this nutrition and lifestyle information and share it because I didn’t feel like I was allowed to share it as a physical therapist. I didn’t know any other PTs at the time who were sharing this information in the world. I was looking online, I knew about naturopathic doctors and had looked into that and that was a lot of education I looked into. I started to hear this word called functional medicine. It was a lot of education and then I stumbled across health coaching. It was a one-year program. I said, “I can do that.” That’s how I found it.

You went through that program and did you start integrating some of the health coaching skills you learned immediately it or take a little bit of time?

It took time. I didn’t have the confidence to be sharing it immediately. I knew that nutrition worked. It was more that fear of liability and does my profession allow me to speak about this topic? I didn’t talk about it for a long time in the professional setting. I went through health coaching school and I launched my business in 2017 and I think that’s when you published your book. That’s when I found you and your book. I was like, “There’s another physical therapist out there doing this and paving a path. This is cool.” From there, I launched my own business and because it was my business, I knew I could talk about it. Also, I saw the work that you had done with the APTA and you had added nutrition to our scope of practice.

Nutrition is part of the physical therapy scope of practice nationally that went through in 2017. The different states have yet to adopt it and many of the State Practice Acts are silent on the topic, which is not necessarily a bad thing. They just haven’t taken a stance. Most of the Practice Acts that you can integrate health and wellness and health promotion, which nutrition falls underneath that. Lauren, you’re definitely not alone. For years, I talked about nutrition and discussed council on nutrition and some of my fellow PTs would say, “Nutrition? Where does that fit in?” You do feel like you’re alone, like you have to come through this coming out period. “What are people going to think about me? Am I weird? I’m talking about salmon instead of quad sets.” Once you start and you see how it does weave so well into integrative physical therapy practice, it almost gets under your skin. It becomes a part of you.

I can’t imagine not discussing nutrition.

How and when did you say, “I am now going to self-actualized as a PT and say I’m a licensed physical therapist. However, I no longer had this narrow scope of doing exercise and movement and manual therapy,” which is very important. You can broaden into the realm of functional nutrition.

I started dabbling with it after I got my health coaching certification. I still kept it a little bit separate where I had my health coaching clients. I also had the physical therapy side of my business. On the physical therapy side, I was talking about it a little bit but not pushing it too hard. If people truly wanted to learn more about nutrition, then they could move into the health coaching side of my offerings. I went through your certification program for functional nutrition for chronic pain. That has been an exciting course because now I have this whole new set of tools and I incorporate nutrition from day one. Prior to that first visit of seeing somebody, I send them to inflammation index questionnaire. They fill that out, we review it during the first visit and right away we have that conversation about inflammation and how we can reduce their overall inflammation and we start talking about nutrition at that first visit.

With your work with the clients and they’re filling out the inflammation index and you’re starting to talk about food and nutrition and diet, how are they responding?

They’re blown away. The feedback I’m getting is that one woman said, “This is far exceeding my expectations.” One person come into mind because she had a couple of head injuries that was dismissed and then has developed leaky gut and chronic systemic inflammation with allergies and headaches, fatigue and chronic pain. Her symptoms are so widespread throughout her body and her quality of life has gone downhill. For her to learn about the term leaky gut or intestinal permeability and to find out that there are some solutions, there’s some hope and she can get it by coming to see me, she’s over the moon. She’s so excited to be working with me.

Most people have been exposed to nutrition in some way, whether it’s Dr. Oz on television or a website or hopefully potentially through an evidence-based practitioner who has had some training. It does give you a little bit of a head start when patients have an interest.

Some people know a lot and oftentimes they know a lot, but they’re not necessarily applying it. That’s where we have a pivotal role as a physical therapist is we are in a good place to help with behavior change and we’re good at meeting people where they are and giving them actionable steps that are achievable. That’s what we’re trained in.

When you’re seeing someone now and you’re working with the patient or the client, are you setting aside fifteen minutes to counsel on nutrition and then fifteen minutes for exercise and manual therapy? Is it more fluid and there may be a day where you just spend on nutrition and maybe the next visit, you would spend that entire visit on thorax?

It’s very fluid. My style is definitely, I like to incorporate manual therapy and I find that as I’m doing the manual therapy, we’re talking about nutrition. It’s incorporated throughout the visit. I do like to set aside some time at the end of the visit and share some of the handouts from your program and share the action steps that I want them to take.

How has going through my program been different than going through the health coaching program? They do talk a little bit about nutrition in the health coaching program.

It’s different. Institute for Integrative Nutrition is for the lay person. It’s for anybody and it’s a great foundational program, it’s broad. It covers nutrition as well as sleep, relationships, career, all sorts of things. The program through you was a much deeper dive into evidence-based nutrition and much more clinically applicable information.

There are going to be PTs who will read this and probably like both of you and I had been through this already like at first year, “I don’t know if I can do this. Is it okay? Does this fit into my practice?” You start to become this other practitioner so to speak. What would you say to a physical therapist who’s on the fence about learning about nutrition and integrating it into their practice?

Like any other new skill or modality that you add, you have to start taking some baby steps. You might go to a manual therapy course over the weekend and Monday morning you have to start trying it. I think the same is true for nutrition and start learning. There are resources out there. Your program, your book, there are other resources, and as you start gaining that knowledge, you can start with a simple conversation about sugar and start with baby steps.

Tell us about your practice now. What kind of practice do you have and how is it functioning?

It’s a women’s health and wellness business and I have the two sides. Health coaching is one track and that I can help women located anywhere in the United States. My focus for that is chronic pain, as well as anxiety because that’s something I’ve lived through. On the physical therapy side, it’s women with pain but that has to be in-person visits. I have an office locally where I go for that.

As a physical therapist, what would you like to see our profession do with regard to nutrition? The APTA, nutrition is part of our scope. There are still some little things that are gray in there about different topics. What would you like to see as a licensed PT where they’re supposed to be representing you as a practitioner?

I would love to see it be incorporated into the education program for physical therapy school to be talking more about chronic pain and chronic disease and that underlying inflammation piece because that’s where we can play a role in altering somebody’s inflammation. I would like to see it start in education and then certainly continuing education, people can seek that out themselves.

There is someone in our program who lives in North Carolina and in that state, the PT Board there did pass an unfortunate statement that says, “Physical therapists can’t sell nutritional supplements,” which our supplements are generally recognized as safe, meaning they’re safe for the general public and there are lots of good evidence-base behind certain supplements, specifically Omega-3 fatty acids is one with regards to chronic pain. What’s your stance and feel on physical therapists talking, educating and selling nutritional supplements?

I think as long as we are becoming educated, then it’s another thing that we should be able to offer. I feel comfortable now, especially after the certification through you, to be recommending certainly fish oil, magnesium, turmeric and some of the other key players that can be so helpful. There’s so little risk or harm in offering these things. I would like to see it be something more common that physical therapists are recommending for their patients.

Do you find your patients are asking questions about supplements?

Yes.

When you take a history or some of your patients are already taking supplements and you may educate them about what’s missing. Oftentimes, people come to me at times and they have bags of supplements and I take them off of things that are not evidence-based for certain types of conditions.

People are already curious about supplements. People already want to steer away from the traditional medicine route and they’re looking at the alternatives, but they need help. We’re in a good position to help them if we’d done our own research. We can help guide them in taking the ones that are the most necessary and also guide them on quality.

That’s a great point I didn’t even touch on. Quality is a big part of it because there are a couple of junkie brands out there that don’t provide any type of therapeutic benefit for a patient who has a health condition. How have you begun to discuss your skill set, all your skills with referring practitioners? Maybe referring physicians who look at physical therapy as, “They’re going to do heat and ultrasound and exercise and massage and send them on their way.”

As an independent business owner and also I’m an out of network provider, I’m not marketing myself at this point to physicians. I primarily am offering talks in the community. I have done some talks for local physical therapists and I’m getting ready to do a talk for a local chiropractic office on to educate them about the benefits of using nutrition when treating chronic pain. I have evidence to back it up. There’s no reason not to be talking about it.

It’s great that you go into a chiropractic office because they do learn a little bit of nutrition in school, but when they come out, it’s up to them like it is with us to continue their education. If they want to go deeper and learn, they have to take courses. I think it’s great that you’re going in there and networking. What are the kinds of lectures in the community have you offered?

A lot of my lectures had been health coach orienting. A lot of them have been for new moms. One topic was energizing snacks and sleep hacks. Another one has been mindful eating. I’ve talked about the link between nutrition and pain. I’ve talked about a holistic approach to anxiety, a variety of topics. Also back pain, a holistic approach to treating back pain. I talk a little bit about movement, nutrition and mindset.

I’m curious to hear a little bit about the anxiety part because we have a bio-psychosocial model. The psychosocial aspect and psychosocial skills are showing up in physical therapy literature and physical therapy education and physical therapy practice. I’ve interviewed a lot of PTs now and I’ve been to conferences. You’re the first PT that I’ve heard who says, “I’m going to market my skills as being able to help people cope with their anxiety,” which I think is a huge bold step for you to do. It’s funny because some of the best research around anxiety relief is movement and exercise. You had taken a bold step on the nutrition side incorporated that. That’s in your skin and you’re doing it every day. How did you say, “I am going to help women with anxiety and I’m going to be comfortable talking about this?”

A lot of it stems from my own personal journey and I think part of how I did recover from anxiety, because it’s something I’ve lived with for two decades. In order for me to overcome it, one of the key things that I came across was this word brain inflammation. There’s this widespread inflammation that is behind chronic pain, brain inflammation was part of my anxiety. To me, because I’ve been through it myself, it became a natural segue to start talking about it. I did also get some training with Trudy Scott and Jessica Drummond. I went to a course taught by them and so I have some formal education in it as well.

We have some amazing physical therapists and some physicians and other health coaches that are part of the Functional Nutrition for Chronic Pain Certification that you went through. I think everyone in the group is excited to take this information and get out into the world. Many of them are jumping in and this is the first exposure to the nutrition they’ve ever had. What’s been cool for you to watch as they have been going through that journey? When you think about all the people in the program, they came in like, “I don’t know, can I do this in my state? What am I going to learn? Is it going to fit into my practice? Are there handouts or am I going to be able to put this into initial evaluation or follow-up treatments? How do I put this in my documentation to insurance companies?” What’s been cool when you look at this first class, this first cohort that went through the certification?

It’s great that we’ve found a tribe of like-minded physical therapists.

That’s the first thing. I’m glad that people took the course but I’ve been like, “Thank God we have a tribe of people.” I feel like if a State Practice Act comes up and they want to put some language in there that we don’t agree with as far as nutrition, we could start to get our tribe together and whether start a petition or create a paper or do a podcast on it. To me that’s been so incredible and I thank everyone for that.

There’s a lot of strength in having a community around it. It’s been cool to see the excitement. One guy, he’s excited to be using this information for people with chronic knee pain. He said he treats a lot of knee pain. A couple of people seem to be in the pediatric scope. There’s a huge need in pediatrics to be addressing nutrition. One in two children is being diagnosed with a chronic health condition. We know that food can influence their quality of life moving forward. It’s exciting. I’m seeing people’s Facebook posts and talks that they’re starting to do and they’re sharing things, positive experiences that they’re having in the community and with their family members too.

It’s funny how you go in thinking, “I’m going to help support all the patients I have,” and then you wind up helping your own health and helping the health of your family and your friends. I can’t even tell you from doing this how many of my family members read this and they’re like, “I don’t eat gluten anymore and I feel so much better. If I go out one night and I do eat gluten, the next few days, I don’t feel very good. I have brain fog and I have IBS. The things you were saying are helping in a number of different levels.” To me, it’s amazing how you come in thinking, “I’m going to go into it for this one little piece,” and you wind up helping your whole family, your whole community, which I think is the beauty of this work as a physical therapist.

Your certification is for chronic pain, but this information is applicable for so many conditions.

Lauren, it’s been great chatting with you. I think the work you’re doing is you’re past the forefront as far as working with people obviously with chronic pain, with nutrition, with anxiety. I think a lot of people are going to read this and they’re going to say, “She’s doing some of the things that I only thought about doing. I want to be able to do that too obviously.” If people want to learn more about your work, where can they find more information about you?

I have a website. It’s called SimplyBalancedWellness.com and I’m also on Facebook and I’m under Simply Balanced Wellness on there. I also have a book called Ready, Set, Heal: A Handbook for Busy Women and it walks you through a six-week plan to reclaim your health and happiness using nutrition and a holistic approach.

SimplyBalancedWellness.com, you can visit that website to access all of Lauren’s great work that she does both online and in person, in her practice. I want to thank Lauren for being a part of this and being part of the first cohort of students in the Functional Nutrition for Chronic Pain Certification. Make sure you share this with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, drop it into your favorite Facebook group. If you know PTs that are interested in nutrition, tell them to join us. Join our tribe because I know we have started a major wave with moving this forward, not only in our profession, but of course out into healthcare because people really need some of these skills. I want to thank Lauren for being on.

Important Links: 

• Integrative Pain Science Institute
• Simply Balanced Wellness
• Breakfast Recipe Book – free gift
• Weston A. Price Foundation
• Dr. Terry Wahls’ TED Talk
• Grain Brain
• APTA
• Institute for Integrative Nutrition
• Trudy Scott
• Jessica Drummond
• Simply Balanced Wellness – Facebook
• Ready, Set, Heal: A Handbook for Busy Women
• https://integrativepainscienceinstitute.com/134download – free gift
• http://SimplyBalancedWellness.com

About Lauren Bahr, PT, FNCP

Lauren Bahr is a physical therapist, health coach, author, and founder of Simply Balanced Wellness. She provides physical therapy and private health coaching for women who want to reclaim their health and happiness, naturally. Her passion and desire for launching her business were born after she overcame her own health struggles using nutrition and lifestyle changes. She knows that the human body has an amazing capacity to heal and she’s on a mission to spread that message.

The Healing Pain Podcast brings together top minds from the world of pain science and related fields to discuss the latest findings and share effective solutions for persistent pain.

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