Healing Migraines By Combining an Integrative Approach with Technology with Diane Ducarme, Founder of Migraine Heroes

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi, and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, doctor Jessica Drummond, founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. Today I have a really special guest for you. Diane Ducarme has created Migraine Heroes. She and her team have the solution to chronic migraines, but she comes at it from a very unique perspective. She is trained in science, technology, engineering, mathematics.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:36 She’s an engineer. She’s a technology expert. She’s not a physician. She’s not a clinician. She has an MBA from Harvard. She’s thinking from a technology and business perspective on how to solve chronic migraine is where it begins. And you’ll hear the stories of why, just like many of us, she got into this because of her personal story. But her collaboration through her corporate connections, through her international work has been through connecting traditional Chinese medicine with Western medicine strategies, nutrition, lifestyle, medicine, everything we do here with a functional medicine perspective. But where she’s taking it to the next level is she’s trying to help make this technology more scalable and more approachable for people who can’t afford functional medicine. And this is a question that myself and my colleagues and our students at the Integrative Women’s Health Institute are always asking, how do we make this kind of healing more accessible? And it’s very, very difficult because to be trained in this, to do the difficult work of working with the most challenging clients who have been through the wringer, who have seen all the top neurologists or, you know, whatever the top person is in their field and they have not found the results, it’s because the problem is more complex and easier.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:15 It just simply does not fit into the model, and it requires active participation by the person navigating the healing. And all of these things are complex. It requires coaching skills. It requires bringing together different physiologic systems, not siloing each system across different parts of the medical system or different parts of the hospital. So as you listen to this interview, I want you to get curious about how you can help people with complex chronic conditions not be forever reliant on a system that keeps them just a little bit sick, right? Needing pain relieving medicine. Needing migraine medicine, needing insulin, whatever it is. Insulin. You know, there may be a reason that people may need that. There are Western tools that people need to use for the long term. But is that always the case? And is it the case in the clients that you work with? And if not, what are some of your thoughts and ideas for building a new kind of medicine that’s scalable and profitable, or maybe not profitable? And does that matter? While we still take care of the people who are providing the healing, right? So we can’t have them being overworked and burnt out.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:43 So dig into my conversation with Diane Ducarme, and I will see you on the other side where I want you to grab just one nugget from this conversation and bring it to your practice next week. Welcome back, everyone to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I am thrilled to be here with Diane Ducarme. She comes to work with women and men, but we’re going to talk about what’s particular about working with women and migraines. But not just that. We take migraines as a symptom of deeper, more complex health challenges in the very same way that over here we’re often looking at things like endometriosis or MCAS or the perimenopause transition, or any kind of chronic pain as not being in isolation, but a red flag, a yellow light, a warning sign of something being off with the system. So Diane comes to us with a really interesting background, which we just briefly talked about, and I want to let her share that with you, because I think for those of us who are trained in this kind of one foot in one academic area and one foot in another academic area, we’re lucky to see problems in a different way.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:06:15 And one of the things we briefly touched on before we hopped on here is that I think we’re all aware that AI is going to be absolutely changing the game in health care very soon, very soon, within the next decade at least. So let’s start off, Diane, with why migraines and what is your perspective on migraines?

Diane Ducarme 00:06:42 Thank you so much. I started to work on migraines when my sister told me she was having migraine that day. I was not being a saint because most people, when they hear someone has a migraine, they will hear they have a headache because empathy is what you can relate to as a human, as a person. But that day, we had just lost my uncle and godfather from a glioblastoma, which is a form of brain tumor, as you know, that grows from a pebble to the size of an orange extremely fast. And he had been very well operated. But the tumor regrew very fast. And so he left four children behind. And my sister said, I have been having migraines for the last three years, and I’ve done a couple of MRI, but they don’t see anything yet.

Diane Ducarme 00:07:27 I wonder if I’m not developing what he’s had. And so she was very anxious. And because I know nothing, my background is in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I said to her, I know someone in China where I’ve worked who is spectacular, let’s contact her. And before we do that, I’d like you to write three pages with me of all of the other symptoms that you experience. I want you to tell me everything that is going wrong with your body and for how long it’s been going wrong. And so revise the three pages together, and we take the call together. And Doctor Jang, with whom now I work, is telling her what to eat and why she’s in pain. And 3 to 4 months later, my sister stops having pain and I leave it at that. I don’t think it’s special. I don’t think it’s illogical. I think it’s quite normal. She had a few problems inside of her body. Her body manifested like a firearm and we extinguish the fire and the alarm is gone.

Diane Ducarme 00:08:22 A couple of years forward, I’m now living in New Zealand and my neighbor tells me, Diane, I’ve had this super confrontational conversation with my dad. I’ve had migraines for the last seven years. I’m like, oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. And she’s like, oh, I just don’t like to mention it. And he is telling me that I need to get medicated for life, including having injections. And I told her. What? You’re 36. So that means what, 50 years of injections I use? Serious? Of course, it didn’t mean that. I understand. It freaks you out. And you know what? I know someone, and I was working full time in corporate environment. I know someone who I think can help. If you don’t mind, we’ll do a bit of WhatsApp and WeChat and I’ll ask you a lot of questions. This process might take a bit of time and I’ll tell you what to eat, and then you can move on. And so I you know, we do that a couple of weekends and she eats the food.

Diane Ducarme 00:09:13 And then I see her again and like how are the migraines. It’s like they’re gone. I’m like, oh great. You know. And I’m like, why did your dad tell you to take injections for 50 years? And she replies to me, because my dad is a renowned neurologist based in New York. And I tell her what? That doesn’t make any sense. Like, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Your father is, of course, super smart, otherwise he wouldn’t be a neurologist, let alone super connected, be it New York. And of course, he loves you because you’re in touch with him. And a father loves his daughter. So I thought, oh, probably the foods that I give her mimicked medication. So I went online and I made a huge level of discovery that I want to share with your audience today. And it really hit me that the medication that she was offered were painkillers. So they were attempting to mute her pain when what I was doing with Doctor Dying, we were trying to listen to her pain and see what does it mean? What is your body complaining about? And I really thought, that is so bizarre.

Diane Ducarme 00:10:21 He wants to give her a painkiller. It’s such, such a weird idea. And then you think, no, wait a minute. If my child has a headache, I’m likely to give them a Tylenol, but that doesn’t make any sense. And so I started to deep down in my research, and I realized it was 18% of women. And now it’s actually 22% of women and 5% of men. I’m like, oh wow, that’s a crispy fact because it means I’ve lived in Europe and I’ve lived in China. It means Western science is missing the point, because here we are in a situation where the female body is not a proxy of the male body. And so I digged up and I found it was genetic. And I also felt terrible. I thought, wow, if it’s a fifth of my girlfriends, oh my God, I’m just such a bad friend. That’s how it started.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:13 I love that story because it shows that oftentimes the path of what we choose as health and wellness professionals is related to.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:21 Just a curious question, and it sounds like because your background is so distinct, you were trained in Stem, went to Harvard to become an MBA. So you have this business perspective when we think about healing migraines from a broader perspective that integrates traditional Chinese medicine, that integrates nutrition. You know that our organization, our motto, if you will, is don’t chase symptoms, optimize systems. Because the original Western system that I was trained in is really about doing exactly what you said, quieting symptoms without listening to what they’re trying to tell us. So tell me a bit more about the Chinese medicine perspective in healing migraines. What kinds of things is the Chinese medicine practitioner looking for?

Diane Ducarme 00:12:18 So when you look at something, you ask questions and you look for other symptoms. So you look for what’s the body language? When I started this, I was asking 30 questions and I was told by a very prolific investor that 30 questions was way too long and no one would answer my questions. Now I have 100 questions.

Diane Ducarme 00:12:39 And women, you know, when I was having 60, 70, they’re like, oh, amazing questionnaire. You’re missing this. You’re missing that. And the women were adding things, whereas men would tell me, oh, 18% of women, are you sure? And really and is that really a problem? And I was like, okay, just you don’t get it. It’s okay. But really 100 questions. Why? Because the body is going to have other symptoms. Now those other symptoms will pertain to other systems, but it’s not a 1 to 1 relationship. This is where it’s ambiguous. It’s a many to many relationship. So if you think of the female body as a factory that produces physical matter. So in her lifetime, a woman is going to lose 23 to 28l of menstruation. She’s going to produce zero up to, I don’t know, five, six, seven children on average. Two. She’s going to produce, on balance, 30kg of matter a physical matter. Okay. So if you were to compare the female body to the main body, which is where I want to start with traditional Chinese medicine, if you want to compare the female body to the main body.

Diane Ducarme 00:13:41 And they were both factories, maybe the mill factory produces envelopes. Simple product sperm. Yeah. And the woman is going to produce a whole car. Okay. It’s a car manufacturer. So when you look at the dashboard of these two factories, of course the dashboard of the women is a lot more sophisticated. There’s oftentimes on social media is a joke of what’s on the men’s mind. And this is an on off button. What’s on a woman’s mind. You have all of these buttons. Yeah. It’s a reflection how people feel in that is. And so then you try to take all of the other symptoms and look at what else is the body saying. The migraine makes so much noise that you don’t see anything. What else do we have? Endometriosis like you mentioned. Do we have MCAS? Do we have irritable bowel syndrome? Do we have a leaky gut? Do we have really itchy eyes and dry eyes? We have I discharged, we lose our hair. Do we have thyroid issues? We have bloating.

Diane Ducarme 00:14:38 Do we have perimenopause? And what are all of these imbalances? And when you solve those, then the brain stops making so much noise.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:48 I really love that perspective because first of all, I want to just pause for a minute and think about absolutely. Of course, we need to look at women differently from men. Production of building humans. I think that’s so rarely thought about, you know, the fact that our hormones are much more complex, but also our literal production system of building DNA, building proteins, building enzymes, like we have to be well nourished. We have to be well recovered. And when you think about the lifestyle of most women. Being well nourished and well recovered is extremely difficult because we generally have more jobs, if you will, than men. So in a given relationship, let’s say a husband and wife, a wife will have a full time job, or at least a part time jobs. So will the husband paid work? Then the woman takes about. I think it’s still about two thirds more of the childcare responsibility than the men, at least two thirds more of elder care responsibility and all the what what’s known as the mental load.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:16:02 So when we’re talking about the brain, brain inflammation could be directly related to how many socks does she need to buy for the school year? Was this permission slip filled out? You know, did the mortgage get paid, yada yada yada? And not only that, but women are carrying an emotional load of everyone else, right? They’re carrying how their teenagers are feeling, how their grandparents are feeling at the end of life. Where is everyone living? How close or how far? Who’s organizing Christmas or holidays? So I think when we think about the work that women produce, there’s so much more productive that without the adequate nourishment and recovery, of course, the systems are going to begin to break down. So now you’ve got this perspective on migraines. It’s like you’re looking at all of the areas which could be breaking down. The migraine is kind of the warning sign like, hey listen, things are falling apart here. How are you now doing this in practice? How are you helping women directly with their migraines or any other health challenges?

Diane Ducarme 00:17:12 The way practically I’m doing it is first asking about 100 questions we track every day.

Diane Ducarme 00:17:18 One of the things that is fascinating with migraine is the only way. You know, a person has a migraine, you ask? It’s completely an invisible disability. And so we track on a daily basis where the brain is at if it’s sharp and free, if it has been, etc. in parallel, we track a lot of other things we track. How is your bowel movement along the Bristol chart? So is it more rabbit like or is it sometimes non-existent? There’s a lot of constipation. If, for example, the woman is in perimenopause, she has a lot of bloating and a lot of dryness in her large intestine, then through her vagus nerve axis, there will be a lot of dryness in her brain, so she’s going to feel more dizzy, more foggy. Sometimes people will call this a Meniere’s disease as well Vertigo, dizziness. Or is the person having a really wet bowel movement? Yeah, wet every single day and have quite sharp pain for example. So we’re going to track everyday the pain we’re going to track.

Diane Ducarme 00:18:14 So I have an app that is called the Migraine Heroes app. And in that we track we track also other symptoms. Are your hemorrhoids gone? How is your mood. How is your vaginal discharge? When you had your menstruation, did it have blood clots? You have fibroids. Do you have cysts? And so on a daily basis, we ask for a lot of these things and all the symptoms need to go and to do that I don’t really ask people not to do stuff. I don’t ask them not to have certain foods. I’m like, my job, if you have sugar cravings, my job is you no longer have them. That’s my job. Because the sugar craving is also a symptom, I add foods. I’m going to ask them to focus on a couple of foods that will just completely reboot their systems, and usually we’ll reboot two systems at a time. That’s how it works. And then migraine, where it’s very different than maybe some other things, is a moving target. Imagine the dashboard of a factory and imagine the cycle of a woman.

Diane Ducarme 00:19:10 Every part of the cycle, there will be different problems exposed. Yeah. So maybe, you know, if she has hormonal shifts, the fire alarm will be indicated differently. Different part of the cycle. A cycle is also a day, so some people might wake up every single day with a migraine. Do you see what I mean? And so because it’s a moving target, maybe if you have Covid or flu it will change what the body’s complaining about the most. And you always have to target what it’s complaining about the most. And the onion from outside to inside.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:19:41 Yeah. And I think that’s the same with many. You know, migraine is different. But I also think it’s the same as many of the invisible illnesses that we’re dealing with. Because first of all, they often co-present, right? We have multiple invisible illnesses at the same time. And so I think it’s just for the woman, which one is the most loud is the one she’s most dealing with at this moment. And I think through the cycle, like sometimes the migraine is the biggest problem.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:11 Sometimes things are easier when hormones shift. And so and I think what you said about the questionnaire is a really valuable point, and why we really do need women as a part of this transition in AI medicine and just Stem transition and tech transition in general, because I do think that women really appreciate being heard in a nuanced way. So when I meet with a client, I’m going to listen to that story for at least 15, 20 minutes, whereas your average physician appointment is something like 3 to 7 minutes. So they don’t even have time to, like, hear these overlapping issues. And the way it’s not because the physician doesn’t want to listen, it’s just because the system doesn’t give them that time. So when a woman has a moment to slow down and really think about all of the things, not only does she begin to understand the connections, but she feels heard.

Diane Ducarme 00:21:17 I love that you see that because it’s so, so, so, so true. After the tests. There’s a few different services that we offer, and if we do it in person, then I have a call with them and the call is on the paper is an hour.

Diane Ducarme 00:21:30 Sometimes it goes up to three depending on the level of history they have. But one thing that is really common is they will be very emotional. At the end of the call they say, oh my God, like my body is making sense. And no, I’m not erratic. And also no, I’m not crazy. And yes, I’ve been chasing with the right intuition. And so they’re really emotional. I oftentimes ask partners to join because they also suffer in a very different way. They have sometimes compassion fatigue. They don’t really get it. And when they see their spouse understanding and stitching all of the pieces together, and for them it’s very rational because there’s, you know, AI and sort of data. It reassures them, it comes together. But it’s so true. It’s so true. It’s extremely true because also emotions play a huge role. I’ll give you an example. I had this woman really early on. She had migraines, like, you know, for 30 years, and she was taking six triptans of these five days a week.

Diane Ducarme 00:22:22 So that’s just to illustrate the level of pain she was under. She’s getting better, better, better, better. And then one day the pain spikes. It’s really spikes. And I’m thinking, wow, I’ve done something wrong. I must have given her a wrong food or a wrong instruction, or she’s too long on the food or what did I do wrong? And so I pick up the phone and I call her. I’m like, I see that you’re in massive pain again. This is like rocket level of pain. And she said something I did not expect. She says my daughter tried to commit suicide. I was like, I’m so, so sorry. I had just no idea. And we talked about that. And so back to your point of being listened to. There’s the listening of the physical symptoms, but there’s also the emotions also play a role. So you know that mom has empathy. It’s also her daughter. So she feels the pain that her daughter is feeling and that puts her in pain as well, if that makes sense.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:16 100% I’ve had clients with things like vulvodynia bladder pain syndromes that have had complete resolution of pain. Once they learn to have boundaries with certain people in their families and the emotion of a stressful time. So we do a lot of heart rate variability tracking in our practice. So we’ll use, you know, whether it’s a Garmin fitness tracker, an aura or a whoop, something like that. And you can see the shift in that heart rate variability will translate to symptoms even if the person. One of the things that I see often because I see so many women with endometriosis, because that chronic pelvic pain syndrome starts generally around women that are like 8 to 12 years old, they’re pretty young. They learn to really power through. So they’ve disconnected from. And I’m sure many women with migraines have the same issue. They’re so used to that level of pain that they don’t really feel it anymore. But the heart rate variability catches it, and it will also catch it when it gets a little worse because of whatever stressor, whether it’s a family stressor or I noticed aura posted on their Instagram a couple of days ago during the US election, which was pretty stressful around here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:24:45 People slept 23% less or something like that. I don’t remember the exact data, but their heart rate variability was, you know, 19% worse. On average. They’re looking at thousands of people seeing a big shift just from a national stressor. So if you’re thinking about a family stressor or an individual little stressor. Absolutely. That will translate directly to a spike in symptoms. So with your technology you’re taking a lot of data. It sounds like you’re also monitoring some data as well.

Diane Ducarme 00:25:23 Yes. So we’re monitoring so that monitoring so that we see until the pain decreases in intensity and frequency until it disappear which feels completely surreal because if we take back the example of your endometriosis, 8 to 10 year old, these women, they’re not born with pain. Absolutely not. But they’ve lived for five, ten, 20, 30, 40 years in pain to be told that it could only be medicated. They go from episodic to chronic. Pain takes completely over their life, their relationships, their work. They might be fired a lot for that.

Diane Ducarme 00:25:58 So it’s really it’s completely takes over life. Yes. So we monitor that. It goes down and so we monitor it hand in hand with their cycle. And we explain I think a lot of what you said is so true on they need to understand, take the time and understanding so we try to teach them them. It takes me one year and a half to train a new health practitioner, but we teach everyone themselves and they really love it because then they feel they have a mastery, like the weather changes the like. And I got that infusion and I pass through the storm like a flower, and that was just so cool. Or they will say we have in the app it’s called the Migraine Now button. I’m like, you can click on the button if you have a migraine and it’s going to guide you what to do in that instance for you as a person. I decided that and I avoided three days of pain. I feel powerful, I feel the anxiety of the next attack. So here there’s even in the shaman.

Diane Ducarme 00:26:52 Three days people will report they have an anxiety of the pain to come. So they struggle to enjoy the moment. And that is going to start to really, really slow down. Yeah it’s beautiful.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:27:04 Well and I think that’s so important because we do have all of these tools, right? We have nutrition, we have supplementation, we have nervous system regulation tools like breathwork and movement practices, and literally just things like sleep and hydration that sometimes people miss. And we have medications when necessary. But I think when the person living with the chronic symptom begins to have mastery over those tools and how they relate to the symptoms, it doesn’t feel so much like this is random, that they don’t know when the pain is going to happen, that they don’t know when the symptoms are going to happen, and they don’t feel as scared that they’re going to be like lost at sea without the capacity to bring it back. And so just by reducing the fear, you’re actually going to impact the symptoms.

Diane Ducarme 00:27:58 Yeah. Absolute.

Diane Ducarme 00:27:59 Because you decrease the fear. The constant fear. Absolutely. Yeah. So they feel more understood. You know, there’s this woman, she was saying, I’ve been to the doctor for, you know, the last few years I’ve had dizziness. Eight out of ten every single day. I’ve done every MRI, every blood test, and they’re telling me, no, everything is normal. It’s in your head. And she’s like, I am dizzy. And so I think women can be having these really difficult experiences where they express a symptom and they’re completely gaslit. There’s a bit of a deaf dialogue going on now. You know, you have to go to the doctor, you have to do your me, you have to do your blood test. This is extremely important. There’s a lot of other things that need to be ruled out. But if the doctor says no, it’s in your head. I don’t see anything going wrong with you. I think it’s just part of being a woman. You’re in pain.

Diane Ducarme 00:28:48 Yeah, that’s part of being a woman. You have a lot of clots in your menstruation. That’s part of being a woman. You have mood swings. Yeah, that’s just you. But that’s just you. That’s just you. If people say that, you know, then they’re not equipped to solve it because we’re pre disease here. The body is not diseased. It’s just communicating. Unless you do something about this we’re going to go and hit the wall.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:11 Yeah. Yeah. So what is next for you. What do you think. How do you plan to progress this work?

Diane Ducarme 00:29:20 Look, I think just for now, it’s really scale at a human level. I think last year we were able to take care of 30 women in parallel. Now we’re able to do 100. We just released a freemium in the app because of one thing I obsess is affordability. Women can have me in massive financial distress, so they’re maybe single mum working sort of two jobs, having children and being in pain. And so they have the content get promotion.

Diane Ducarme 00:29:48 They can be really abused in terms of salary. So there’s a huge vocation because it’s a business problem. You see, the best way to make money on top of someone who has migraine is just to leave them in pain and medicate medicaid’s them. That’s the business model we’re in, unfortunately. and so it’s just so the premium is designed to help people track and start to understand and start to do a few small things. And then there’s an automatic plan where you don’t have a human, but you have an AI guiding you. It’s called nectarine and nectarines only job. We’ve been training her for five years. We’re in love with her. Like, honestly, she does such a phenomenal job. She’s just absolutely divine. And she’s always available when it’s 2 a.m. and you’re in pain and you need to understand your pain. She’s there when it’s 5 a.m., when it’s Christmas, when it’s New Year’s Eve. You know, in these moments of truth as human, there’s three of us around different time zones in Europe and New Zealand.

Diane Ducarme 00:30:44 but we can never like, you know, it’s hard to be in that moment and to have the sharpness that she has. So we’re relying on her more and more. And so the idea is, can we stop this? It’s like, enough is enough. It’s a, it’s a it’s a billion of people. It’s a fifth of of women is a fifth of women that we just pop pills to and tell them, stop listening to your intuition. You’re erratic. You’re not making sense. You say wine as a trigger, but when I look at your data, it’s not. And it’s not because the cycle and when you consume the alcohol is going to matter and it’s going to change if it triggers you or not. So women just completely lose their sense of worth, and then they’re told they’re depressed and they say, I’m not depressed, I’m in pain. But they say it’s then you are depressed. And so the idea is just it’s a work of love. And there’s a Gibran like philosopher that says, work is love made visible.

Diane Ducarme 00:31:32 So this is a massive letter of love to just say, can we just stop doing this to our woman and therefore to our children?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:40 Yeah. Well, and I think it’s very important that you bring up this financial piece. I was actually talking about this just today with our women’s health coach students. We’re always looking at how do we create more accessible and affordable models. And yet we are working with the most complex of clients. So the person doing that has to be well compensated because it’s a very difficult job. And as you said, they can only really see like 30 people a year. I’m encouraged because Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City has just launched their first, a very strong looking like sort of center for chronic illness. And they’re going to be doing a lot of research, really looking at these overlapping issues because and for them, it was inspired because they’ve seen a lot of long Covid clients, which is also exploding and will continue to explode until we have a better solution for acute Covid.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:40 But, you know, the pandemic really isn’t over. But people with long Covid tend to also have, well, Covid tends to trigger things like MCAS and migraines and a post-concussion like syndrome and cardiovascular Vascular diseases. And so it’s a place where there’s a lot of overlap. They’re also looking at things like chronic Lyme. But even then in an academic medical center with billions of dollars of funding or at least millions of dollars of funding, they can only really see because they also want to be doing research, which I think is valuable. 700 patients a year, I think is their 2 or 3 year goal. And it’s just, you know, as you said, so whatever, 8 billion people. So there’s like 2 billion people with migraines. There’s 176 million women with endometriosis. Like there are billions of people dealing with this. And we’re not really even touching the people who can’t afford to deep dive into some of these more expensive options. And yet, I think you’re exactly right, because the skill set or the tool of AI bots, if they’re well trained, are actually a really good option here.

Diane Ducarme 00:34:00 Yeah, because the the solution we’re trying to make it super easy to implement. We’re really a solution in your pockets that you can have any time you need and that you can not have anytime you don’t need. And it’s in your kitchen. You know, when I started this, investors said, oh, you’re solving the problem. Can you make them sit longer? It’s a problem that you solve it. It’s like, what? Can you make them sick longer? I’m like, no, no, we’re not doing that. And I really thought, wow, this is really ingrained in the way we we do things because we have gross domestic product. So we have to produce more money. Therefore, leaving these people in pain is profitable. Is that okay? And ignoring I’m not on my watch. It’s just not okay. And so I completely bootstrapped. I did everything in a way that I’m like, you know what? For me, what matters is efficacy. And my husband and I, we decided that he would do well and I would do good.

Diane Ducarme 00:34:55 And he says, it’s okay. We invest. Every penny I’ve ever been paid has been going into making the system better and improving more lives. I’ve cut on shopping, I’ve cut on all of the female stuff, and I’m like, you know what? It just fulfills my heart with purpose to so much. Like, we change, we transform people’s lives. My hairdresser, he says, oh, but if you give them food, you tell them what to do. Then they know they don’t need you anymore. I’m like, great. He’s like, but it’s very bad for moneymaking. I’m like, it’s my hairdresser now. No, I want you to know what you want to do in your kitchen. This is serious. It’s, you know, life threatening at times if you’re driving and you have a migraine with or it’s life threatening. And so sometimes I said to my team, there’s not enough money. And they cut on their hours and still work them. It’s extraordinary. And yeah, we’re making it happen.

Diane Ducarme 00:35:44 And it’s really true what you say because at the same time I want to pay my health practitioner really well and at the same time I tell them and they say, oh, but this one, she really has no money, or this one she really is in distress. I’m like, I see embrace nectarine. She’s helping us solve. So what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to we have a lot of commonality case. So it’s one of a kind service and app. It’s worth patenting it. It’s very special. With that, we can solve all of the things we’ve already seen, but we continue to see more things. So the health practitioners, then they get focused on the very complicated things and we get an nectarine. She goes where we’ve already seen it doesn’t mean it’s not complicated. We’ve seen crazy things. And I have a podcast called the Migraine Heroes Podcast. And in that podcast you will see, for example, the testimony of Cassie. Cassie said, I’ve seen the most senior neurologists of all of the US.

Diane Ducarme 00:36:40 I’ve traveled to different states to see them. I’ve seen people who have written books on, for example, the topic of vestibular migraines. They were very kind. They did not solve it. You solved it. It goes back to your point, Jessica of Doctor Jessica of, of listening. Like listening. What is she saying? She’s saying she has liquid in her inner ear. The doctor is saying there’s nothing and that it’s wrong. And I’m telling her, if you feel you have liquids, I will use foods to remove liquids. And then it goes. I’m making it sound a lot more simple than what it actually is in practice, but then it goes, because you know what? She’s right. She’d never. Why would she lie about that stuff? Of course she’s right.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:24 Absolutely. I think it’s important that we begin to challenge these business models. Because you’re exactly right. Healthcare is very expensive right now, and the best business models for it, or the most profitable business models, I should say, are all reliant on people being attached to a chronic illness model, you know, needing constant insulin or needing constant pain medication.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:52 It’s a treatment over the long haul, rather than these moment to moment tools of reconnecting the autonomic nervous system to the digestive system, which is really just about things like circadian rhythm alignment or eating foods that are not going to promote yeast overgrowth, which is kind of what you’re saying. And from a Chinese medicine perspective, the tools actually can be much more simple and much cheaper. But they do require. So do any of your clients struggle with the amount of kind of time and commitment that it takes to do some of these?

Diane Ducarme 00:38:33 I’m a lazy cooker, and so there’s always lots of like, you take the food, you put it into hot water, Don’t even need to boil it. And then you drink the water. You don’t even have to necessarily eat that given food. If you don’t have the time. There’s always foods, just always, you know, infusions and what I call decoction. So where you let the water boil the food for a bit longer makes the nutrients absolutely massively bioavailable. You know, we’re dealing with real people also.

Diane Ducarme 00:39:02 We give them always a lot of choice. Like you know, you know, you can take this, this, this. They all do the job. Just pick the ones that suit your organic needs or financial needs or it taste buds, you know, just see what works for you. But these are the possibilities that we work with you and not create damage and not interact with your medications, things like that. It took forever to build, and my friends were like, okay, can you not grow bigger? Grow bigger? I’m like, I’m dealing with real people and I’m aiming to solve 100% of everyone’s problems. So no, it will take the time that it takes because it needs to be safe and inclusive and good and make a huge difference. And so it’s becoming possible. So we look forward to having a board of doctors. And yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:39:45 Having worked with chronic illness patients for almost 25 years now. That’s the right way to do it. You can’t scale it if it’s not complete.

Diane Ducarme 00:39:54 Yeah, because.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:39:55 You’re going to like you said, they’re going to be missing the things you haven’t seen yet.

Diane Ducarme 00:39:59 Look, you have to also put yourself in our shoes. Like, you know, I’m doing lists. You know, sometimes I have like, okay, 25 lists I need to do today. It’s I’m like, my brain is like, let’s not do that because it takes so much brainpower to look at all of the data and assembly, etc.. And so now it’s more and more feasible. There’s also your own health where you have to do what you preach. Therefore you have to be a bit on time. You can’t have too much screen time, you can’t speak too much. You have to preserve your own health. And so it’s about new business models where health can thrive and we can solve problems, while we can also respect the people who actually do the work. And currently we have reliant yes, on on a subscription to medication model, which works very well for a part of the population, but just for the common population, this just doesn’t you know, it just makes us, I think, collectively less productive.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:40:55 Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. I think taking a little more time upfront and prioritizing the health of the team, prioritizing those basic, you know, is really a leadership way of changing how we address health. Because if you look at the average health care professional, they’re not particularly healthy.

Diane Ducarme 00:41:15 Yeah, it’s very true. Yeah, it’s very true. And so that’s why I think it’s really a labor of love. And I think if my sister had told me I have a migraine and I had known I had been a doctor and I had known everything I would have known, I would have told her, hey, I’m sorry, lifetime of medication. These are some of the ones that statistically work the best. But it’s going to be a moving target and you’re going to have to mitigate the loss. And you should start planning how you’re going to think about work. You know, that’s what I would have said. But I think the fact I didn’t know anything, you’re like, okay, wait a minute.

Diane Ducarme 00:41:48 Let’s rethink how how that is. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:52 Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us. If someone is right now struggling with migraines, where can they find you in your work?

Diane Ducarme 00:42:04 So you can go on the App Store or Google Play and download the app called Migraine Heroes? I would really encourage you. There’s a myriad of podcasts there in the app actually gathered in the app. This one will be two. We also have our own podcast called Migraine Heroes, where people come and share their story. Share this story not because they’re paid, but because they’re like, oh my God, this is such a bittersweet moment. Sweet because I have just the life of my dream, but bitter because I’m like, what? I’ve just lost so much time. And then my website is actually called My Nectar Health. Com and there you can take the test. You can book a course. You can really take the plan that suits your needs. If you have few migraines, go on an automatic plan.

Diane Ducarme 00:42:45 If this is really taking over your life, get more help will be there to cater to your needs. Our goal is you live a life free of pain. That’s how we measure ourselves that were allowed to measure ourselves and that’s how we thrive and are happy. Basically, I.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:01 Love that, I love that well, thank you so much for dedicating your Stem training to helping people living with chronic pain and migraines in particular. I think what you’re developing here is really revolutionary, and I think you’re doing it in the right way to protect yourself and your team and your patients and just taking your time with it. So thank you for sharing all that with us.

Diane Ducarme 00:43:24 Thank you so much, Doctor Jessica Drummond. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:33 I don’t know about you, but after that interview with Diane Ducarme, I’m thinking very differently about how we can approach complex chronic illness, like chronic migraine, like the work that she does at my nectar health. My nectar health. Com. Let’s start getting curious about how we can use technology.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:53 Let’s be frank. Technology is accelerating the growth of AI technologies of machine learning technologies are absolutely going to change how healthcare is delivered. It is going to change the role of clinicians. We have to be thinking about what our role is. Once an AI generated tool is able to communicate better than us and is able to be more accurate than us, but we have to build the models. These things aren’t built out of thin air. So when we think about building a model, how can we start doing that with the technology you may have in your practice right now? How can you scale something that you might be working with people one on one to working with five people at once? Because not only do you then get the benefit of being able to leverage your skill set, but the people in your programs get the benefit of community. And if we think about a tool like whether it’s aura, ring or even peloton or this app that she’s talking about, migraine heroes, when people feel like other people are going through the same thing as them, even if they’re not in the same room together, there’s a sense of community, right? So we had that little story about how everyone was feeling stressed by our election last week.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:45:20 When you see that as a community, people are going through stressful things or going through celebratory things, or we’re seeing some people getting improvement and other people’s cheering them on. How can you bring that sense of feeling not alone, but also feeling a sense of commitment to the process? Over time, that accountability is much more fun within in a community. That’s why peloton was so successful during the pandemic, because everyone kind of was connected even though they were exercising at home instead of at a gym. So I think there’s really important shifts coming in the world of technology and healthcare. And I think they’re going to go in two different directions. I think One Direction is going to be more technology leverage, digital community that’s more scalable because we can put complex questionnaires and solutions into machine learning models and have them be very more and more accurate over time, how those models are built does matter. So women need to be involved. Health care professionals need to be involved, not just technology experts and people with business degrees.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:46:37 And then second, I think there is a really accelerating opportunity in creating small, connected, in-person group experiences, either through art or through nature or through song movement. Any kind of physical, in-person collaboration in a more and more technologically accelerated world becomes so much more valuable. So think about how you can get your clients together and outside children, outside people dealing with the same thing outside and communicating or together. And maybe in an art space, being more creative, I think we’re going to see that both of these things become Increasingly necessary and valuable as health care transitions continues to transition. It’s been transitioning for years now, but continues to transition into an age of accelerations of technology. Thanks so much for listening. Get curious in your own practice and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:48:15 Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.