Midwife to Midwife

Functional Maternity with Sarah Thompson

• Tesa Kurin, Srah Thompson • Season 2

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Tesa (00:05.352)
Okay, welcome back to Midwife to Midwife. Today on our podcast, we are talking to Sarah Thompson. She is the author of Functional Maternity. And I was definitely drawn to the message that I saw on Instagram, just watching some of the functional medicine message that you were talking about, how it translates into pregnancy and how we could really help women.

have a more functional pregnancy, right? So I definitely feel like this is a wonderful chat to have in the midwife community because our education really doesn't give us a whole lot of foundation about functionality. Like diving deep into those labs, diving deep into some things that a lot of women are really dealing with in our

current culture. A lot of people have autoimmune disorders. They're affecting pregnancy. We're seeing a lot more thyroid issues. We're seeing so many things that are on a deeper level than just what the basic lab value is showing us today. So welcome, Sarah, to the podcast. Thanks for coming to chat with me today. I'm really excited. Why don't you tell us who you are, your background, and yeah, start there.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (01:28.33)
Well, first off, thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast today. I'm excited to be here. I love sharing everything functional medicine, especially with the midwifery community, because I feel that as midwives, you guys are in a very crucial place in order to implement a lot of these functional medicine principles into maternity care. So a little bit about me. I, my name is Sarah Thompson. I'm the author of functional maternity.

My background is that my medical degree is in traditional Chinese medicine. I have been in practice since 2005. I found functional medicine in kind of a roundabout way. My undergrad, I studied nutrition. Nutrition to me has always been something that was a very important part in the foundation of health. And as I grew my traditional Chinese medicine practice, we incorporate

nutrition and we incorporate all these things. And I always joke that TCM was functional medicine before functional medicine was cool. And what functional medicine does is it gives Western terminology to a lot of the concepts that we use in traditional Chinese medicine. And I found functional medicine actually after I had converted my practice into a maternity care practice. And it was just another layer to add on as I worked with my pregnant clients.

to help them achieve their pregnancy goals. It just seemed kind of like a common sense next step.

Tesa (02:59.744)
Awesome. What do you think, why pregnancy? Like why did you go into the maternity sector and bring functional medicine into that?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (03:06.574)
Mm-hmm. When I first jumped into the maternity niche here, it was actually during my own pregnancy and I had literally zero interest in pregnancy. I myself didn't want to have kids and then oh my gosh I'm pregnant and I had to learn very quickly all the cool things about pregnancy and by the end of it I was like oh my gosh why didn't anybody tell me pregnancy was so cool this is just beautiful and fascinating and

And me as a person, I'm somebody who, if I'm gonna know something, I wanna know everything about it. I want to know every little detail, and I have a whole section in my book about, you know, me as a kid, and it's kind of a silly analogy, but I was obsessed with dogs, and I knew every detail about every dog breed, I knew their genetic predispositions, I knew all these stupid little facts that did nothing for me in life, but I had to know it because I was obsessed with it. The same thing kinda happened to me when I became pregnant. I didn't know anything about it before, and...

it became something that I was just obsessed with. Like this is just fascinating. This is beautiful. And I need to know everything there was. And I learned very quickly that the resources in pregnancy care are actually quite limited. I had a wonderful midwife that delivered both of my kiddos and I had just all these deep seated questions that she'd be like, you know, I really don't know. This is just how we do it, right? I don't understand this. We don't really, outside of just take your prenatal, there's not a lot of other nutritional things.

Tesa (04:16.423)
Okay.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (04:32.086)
And deep down inside of me, knowing my background, knowing that all the things I knew about nutrition, I kind of, deep down inside was like, well, there's gotta be more. I know that nutrition plays into physiology. I know that it has the potential to change so many things outside of just fetal development. And prenatal nutrition in and of itself is just that. It's fetal nutrition. It's how do we grow a baby nutrition? But pregnancy is so much more than just a baby.

Tesa (04:44.082)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (05:00.226)
There's a mother who is changing and her physiology changes drastically during pregnancy. And that's kind of when my passion started to really fire up, I guess, is as I started to learn more about maternal physiology, I was just blown away by all the information that was out there that nobody seemed to have their hands on. And connecting the dots was something that I wanted to do for myself and future pregnancies, but also for the people that I served.

Tesa (05:22.929)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (05:30.262)
the patients that I saw, they deserved to have answers to the questions that I didn't have answers to. And thus functional maternity was born and thus the educational drive to go into functional medicine and learn more about that physiology and how nutrition plays into physiology and applying that to pregnancy kind of came about.

Tesa (05:53.377)
Well, there's definitely a need in pregnancy care across the board to have a better understanding to be able to help people get through some of the what we're seeing pop up a lot more, right? So when I get interviews from women coming to me, they say, well, I had preeclampsia in my last pregnancy. I had high blood pressure. I had choleostasis. We you know,

We've got to start looking at these issues at a deeper level to figure out how to, it's not just one thing. And I've seen that, especially in my own practice where I work with a much lower resource population, that I see a lot more ailments and a lot more conditions in pregnancy than I probably normally would in a very like middle-class high resource population.

that a lot of home birth midwives get to serve. So yeah, definitely turned me on to, you know, when I start seeing people having these conditions, like why are they having these conditions? And it's not going to be as simple as like, let's beef up your protein during your pregnancy. Because that's not the answer usually. So, but I love that.

I did kind of peruse the book and I've been going through it trying to find things that were particularly things that I've been dealing with in some of my current clients. I love how the book is broken up in sections to where we can talk about certain...

There's always books that are just kind of, you have to read all the way through them to understand something, but I love that I could just go to a certain section in your book and actually find what I'm looking for. So I do appreciate that a whole lot. I know we were talking a little bit off camera about how you had to cut out a lot of your book to get it out there, but is there another book possibly down the line, you think?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (07:59.33)
Possibly it's something that I had discussed with my publisher before we even released this book was the idea of a secondary book Simply because there is just so much information. It's like you and I were talking, you know prior to with this course that I'm pushing out There's just so much information that you really have to play around with. What do I want to add here? What really gives value to right here and what's better off in another grouping or what else can we expand on later? And That was a really

Tesa (08:07.502)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (08:25.838)
hard game because there is so much and there is so much that I didn't get to put in the book such as postpartum care. Right postpartum care is a whole section that we kind of lost out on. I would love to have expanded things like the chapter 12 functional childbirth side more so because I feel like that is such an important part of how functional medicine can change pregnancy and childbirth outcomes is by analyzing and understanding the physiology that leads.

Tesa (08:32.879)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (08:53.39)
to a physiological and functional childbirth experience. And how can we facilitate that with nutrition, diet, lifestyle, and all these great things we do with functional medicine. So secondary book idea has been, and something we've been toying around with is more of a patient's guide. Because the book you have is very much geared towards a practitioner. It's very complex. There's a lot of detail. There's a lot of physiology.

There's a lot of genetics happening in there. There's a lot of deep conversation. And I know for some patients, some, you know, expectant women out there, it's a little too deep. It's hard for them to understand that information and apply that information to their life. So the secondary book is looking to be something that's a little bit more patient friendly. So more of a guided book for the functional childbirth and postpartum phases.

Tesa (09:21.238)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (09:48.709)
Wonderful.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (09:49.374)
We do have an ebook that is available on the website that is a downloadable PDF that is kind of like a smaller version of what I'd like the second book to be. But and by smaller ebook, it's like a 90 page ebook that is a patient's guide to a functional childbirth experience. That is an expansion of that chapter 12 that goes into kind of a usable way that patients can use. So for midwives out there, if they've got patients,

Tesa (10:15.134)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (10:17.21)
or if they want to download it to have it as a resource for their patients, they're more than welcome to do that.

Tesa (10:23.048)
Hmm, interesting. Well, tell me about the courses. So we did talk about this. You have two courses, one that you're currently getting ready to release, but you also already have the thyroid physiology course. Tell me about that one, because I think that we are definitely in somewhat of a little bit of a thyroid epidemic in our country, honestly. And now that women are probably a little bit in an older age bracket when they're getting pregnant, these thyroid conditions are probably a little more common.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (10:43.456)
Oh yes.

Tesa (10:52.252)
than what we used to see maybe 15, 20 years ago.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (10:55.554)
Yes, thyroid conditions, and I see it here in my clinic, we have thyroid patients every single day, whether they're pregnant or preconception, thyroid is a big component. And it is something that I feel like most, and not even the OB-GYNs are even trained properly in assessing and managing thyroid conditions preconception through postpartum. So I did put out a course, again, this is something that I have taught at midwifery conferences on and off for a few years now. And...

Tesa (11:02.429)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (11:24.382)
I figured it was time to kind of push it out there as a CEU course. So there is continuing education credits for this course. It is hosted through an organization called Kibii. It's an international midwifery CEU course kind of platform. You people can find a link to that on my Instagram page, or if they want to email me and I can give my email at the end of this, I'm more than happy to give them that direct link to it. It should be popping up on my website with a direct link here pretty quick. Right now it's just via.

via their website. But what I do in that course is we go over all of the thyroid physiology, how other hormones affect thyroid function, why somebody may have hypothyroidism. So the number one cause here in the United States is autoimmune disease. In other countries, the number one cause is iodine deficiency. Here in the U.S., iodine deficiency is probably the second most common cause.

Tesa (11:56.529)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (12:20.382)
we're seeing it more and more as people start to limit certain foods in their diet that are high in iodine. So iodized salt fell out of favor, right? Everybody's going to Celtic sea salts and, you know, that kind of bit. We also see that a lot of people are avoiding things like dairy and legumes. And here in the US, we just don't eat a lot of seafood. So iodine deficiency is actually significantly more common than I think the conventional world really admits to.

They think that we've kind of gotten away from iodine deficiency because for a while I think we probably did limit some of that, but it's coming back. We have a little resurgence in iodine deficiency, and I do see it. So we go into some of those factors. What are normal lab values in pregnancy? Because I think there's a lot of controversy over that. We have reference ranges that really don't mimic and reflect what the science says on it. So we go over what the Endocrine Society and the American Thyroid Association and even the European Endocrine Society.

what are their recommended reference ranges, and then give you some tips and tricks on how to use that information in prevention and treatment. So that's that thyroid course.

Tesa (13:25.108)
Awesome. How can I ask questions like, what's the course selling for? How long would it take a person to get through it?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (13:35.498)
Yeah, it's actually a pretty quick course. It's only two and a half hours. And the price on that currently is $75.

Tesa (13:39.746)
Mmm.

That's very affordable. What is the CEU, like what kind of CEUs are they getting for it?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (13:50.238)
I think it's between two and three, depending on the organization.

Tesa (13:54.165)
Okay, cool.

That sounds amazing. I will probably have to pick that one up for sure. And then...

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (14:01.61)
Yeah, I do believe that, as I say, I believe that everybody should have access to a lot of this information. So I don't plan on making my courses crazy expensive.

Tesa (14:09.05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's nice. I mean, it's we all want continuing education. I love that. I think I said this recently that COVID really opened up the online educational market for a lot of people made it more accessible and more user friendly and more creator friendly too. So it's become a lot easier to host these courses online on so many different platforms now. It's just an incredible how many are out there. So

And then the one that I think that I had been really excited about, you know, waiting to release was the functional lab analysis during pregnancy because that, you know, it's us midwives we have like a foundation of this is what's normal, this is what's not normal, but then what do we do when it's not normal and how do we dive down that rabbit hole of finding out how to correct it. It's not so easy. Even with anemia.

Anemia has so many different facets. It's not plainly like give somebody an iron supplement. So talk to me about that.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (15:17.934)
Oh, yes. So anemia is one of those things that I do a lot of one-on-one, I feel like, consultations with mid-vibes, because I do one-on-one consultations for people, where we focus so much on iron, because yes, iron is, it's part of hemoglobin, it's a structural component, right? If you're low in iron, you're going to be anemic. But what if it's not iron deficiency? What if it's something that's preventing iron absorption, right? Something like a copper deficiency? What if it's something like our vitamin A?

Tesa (15:37.646)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (15:43.73)
What if it's an ethylation issue, B12, folate, with zinc and B6? There's all these different nutrients and all these different hormones that go into the formation of red blood cells outside of iron. But yet in maternity care, we focus on iron. And there's some good reasons behind that because iron goes into fetal health. There's other things, right? There's a reason we do that. But it does the maternal body slight injustice if all we're doing is focusing on iron.

And one of the key things to be able to read is the basic CBC. Because there's so much information and I find the CBC to be absolutely magical if you know how to read it. But most people don't know how to read it. They go off of what they've been told. Okay, hemoglobin less than 11. We may want to start giving them some extra iron. Okay. But what if it's not iron deficiency?

There's a strong possibility that it's not. Sorry, I realized my... Edit. Let's see, volume, turn that thing off. Okay. Apologize for that. Office phone is ringing. Okay. And regroup. So when we're looking at the CBC, it is pretty magical. And a lot of people, when they see that they think, oh, hemoglobin low, right? Give them some extra iron.

Tesa (16:37.196)
Right. That's okay.

Right?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (17:03.126)
But sometimes it's not the iron. Sometimes it's those other factors. Sometimes there's other nuances in that CBC that show dysfunction before the dysfunction ever happens. And to really understand the CBC, you have to go back to understanding the formation of blood cells in and of themselves, how the individual nutrients play into that. So in my course that I'm coming out with, like I think I was telling you too, I had originally planned on this beautiful, big, giant course that went through everything.

Tesa (17:14.929)
Hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (17:32.446)
in one big course and I quickly realized there's just so much information kind of like the book and so I kind of backed up a little bit and decided to release it in individual chunks. So the first chunk we're going to release is talking about the CBC because it is the most common lab run in pregnancy and it's not just an anemia marker, it's a test for anemia. You can use it to assess inflammation. You can use it to assess so many things that if you have

the understanding of the basic CBC, you're already set up for better success as a midwife from a functional medicine perspective. If you're starting the beginning of pregnancy with that OB panel with more information than just, ah, look at that, CBC looks, it's all within normal parameters, right? You have a better chance at preventing other complications later on down the line. Hemoglobin, for example, right? Normal hemoglobin at an OB panel should never go over 14.5.

Tesa (18:10.248)
and

the thing.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (18:32.146)
unless you live at high altitude, which most people aren't living above, you know, at 10,000 feet. Right? So when you see a hemoglobin over 14.5 at an OB panel, I automatically start thinking we need to watch this person for preeclampsia.

we need to start looking for inflammation.

And that's something most people wouldn't even see because the reference range goes all the way to 15 or 16, depending on the lab you're using. It's within normal ranges, but you see it in research. And I have case studies within my course that we go over. Here's somebody who came to me, you know, later on with preeclampsia, here's her OB panel. Look what we didn't see. It was already happening. There was already something at play. And so if you can read that OB panel, you're already in a better position to prevent complications in your patients and keep them at home.

Tesa (19:02.911)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (19:24.292)
Yeah.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (19:24.738)
Right? Because that's the goal, obviously, with home birth midwifery. And this is where I believe functional medicine has a really amazing place in your guys' education and your practice is because we want those mamas to have that wonderful physiological functional birth experience. We want them to have that home birth that they really, really want. And the way we do that is by understanding the maternal physiology and preventing things from ever happening. So, part one of the course is going to be going into the CBC.

Tesa (19:43.121)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (19:53.274)
And not just going through here's all the values, here's what ups and downs mean on that, but going back to the beginning and understanding the physiology behind the CBC. How are red blood cells made? What goes into their formation and function? How are white blood cells made? How about platelets? What are things that could change the ratios between these three different blood cells? All of that is really important when you're looking at that CBC. So it's a little bit bigger.

than just the values in the CBC.

Tesa (20:29.048)
Wow. Do you? That's going to be fantastic. I think that's a great starting point for sure. And I don't think that you miss the mark on that. And I love that you're going to just move forward with it and not wait for the big course, right? Because I've said this before too, even as us midwives, we can only take in so much information in those little chunks anyway, because we're so busy in our practices anyway. So I think it'll be.

it'll be very timely that way anyway, even if you decide to do it in those smaller chunks. Plus, if somebody is particularly dealing with a specific situation, they can maybe go to whatever part of the course that you've, you know, if they're dealing with thyroid issues or anemia issues, like any of those issues, right?

I think it's very interesting that you brought up the inflammation issue, and I don't think that inflammation is ever addressed in pregnancy at all. I did read that in your book as well. I think there's so many people who are dealing with inflammation, and I am extremely overwhelmed when I see it in people and don't know how to help them address it because I feel like, wow, it's kind of late to really be addressing this now.

So I'm looking forward to diving a little bit deeper into that and trying to find really just some good ways to help moms start addressing those issues. Because I know that that's the one thing that's not done in the medical model of care and the traditional obstetric model. It's more they're just there to...

deal with preeclampsia. They're not there to prevent preeclampsia. There's nothing in the OB model of care that prevents preeclampsia. There's nothing in the medical model that prevents hypertension. So they're there to manage it. Yeah, it absolutely is. They're just there to manage it once it does happen. So, and to identify it potentially. To identify and manage is their only modality. So,

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (22:24.746)
Yeah. Yeah, it's acute crisis management. Yeah.

Yes.

Tesa (22:44.149)
Um, do you?

Are there things that you would like midwives to know? I know I put out, I asked for three things, but if you can't get three, that's fine. I would love, like what would you most like midwives to know about functional medicine in pregnancy?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (23:03.574)
about functional medicine in pregnancy. That's.

That's more than just having a good birth, right? There's more to it. I know a lot of what I talk about is, let's make happy, healthy birth experiences. Let's get mom's body healthy. It can be more than that. And one of the things I always try to keep in the back of my head is, we have two people we're working on. And a lot of what we're doing is, it's more than just the mother in front of us.

A lot of what we're doing is setting up the next generation for better fertility success, for better pregnancy success, especially if that mom is carrying a little girl, right? What mom does in her pregnancy is going to affect that child's ability to conceive later. And we see this. For a lot of the people I work with fertility, they may be young and they've done everything right in their adulthood. But what happened with their mom when they were pregnant really kind of sometimes outweighs what they're doing right now.

Tesa (23:51.976)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (24:05.802)
So it's this whole big factor that a lot of my focus in functional maternity and functional medicine in application for maternity care is how do we get these statistics to decrease? How do we keep people in a more natural birth experience? How do we prevent deaths in pregnancy? How do we prevent preeclampsia? Well, it begins in the pregnancy of that next generation. So you may do all this great work for this person and do all of these functional medicine protocols.

Tesa (24:05.965)
Um.

Mm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (24:35.274)
And again, it's more than just that mother in the room. It's more than their birth experience. And they may have a bad birth, but that next generation may be set up for better success. So sometimes we don't see the fruits of our labor right off the bat, because the person we're working with has got a lot going on, which is why I go to the next thing, number two, that I want people to remember. The goal of functional medicine isn't perfection. It's to help...

the person achieve the best they can with what they've been given.

So that goes back. So what they've been given may be changes in their epigenetics based off of the fact that their father smoked when he was in puberty. Cool studies coming out on that where men specifically who smoked in their adolescence automatically make epigenetic changes that can factor into DNA changes in their kids. As simple as that. And there's nothing they can control. And again, maybe in their adulthood, they never smoked.

Tesa (25:32.616)
Mm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (25:38.242)
But they did in childhood. They played around with it, right? Whatever. That automatically starts to make epigenetic changes. And the woman we're looking at in the room can't change that her father did that. But we can help her make what she's been given work better for her. And that doesn't always mean perfection. And then the third thing I would say would be prevention is key.

Tesa (25:39.74)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (25:50.564)
Mm-hmm.

Tesa (25:55.836)
Right.

Tesa (25:59.502)
Mm-hmm.

Tesa (26:05.665)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (26:05.782)
Right? Like you were saying, the conventional model of maternity care is acute crisis management care, not preventative care. And I think that is where functional medicine really shines in maternity care is the fact that we're trying to prevent things and we're trying to catch things as early as possible so that we can prevent having to go down the path of acute crisis management.

Tesa (26:28.066)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (26:28.69)
If we can prevent it, then we don't have to deal with it. If we can catch it early, we can slow the progression of that disease. And oftentimes, prevention is preconception. I would say nine times out of 10, prevention is in preconception care. So the earlier you can get to those clients, the more likely we are to prevent those complications later on. When we're looking at developing that functional childbirth experience that I always talk about, prevention,

Tesa (26:46.117)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (26:56.646)
is more important than dealing in that actual labor experience. The body starts to prepare for labor and delivery all the way back at the end of the second trimester. So if you want to prevent negative birth outcomes, you have to start way back then. So sometimes when prevention care, we're working three months. Right? I joke. Everything in the female body is three months prior. Three months prior to conception affects the development of that little embryo.

It also affects that first trimester. What happens in first trimester affects second trimester. What happens in second trimester affects third trimester. And then what happens in third trimester affects the labor and delivery experience. Third trimester affects postpartum. So prevention happens in chunks beforehand. So the idea of prevention is, okay, number four, learning to read the lab work correctly. Learning to know what labs to run and when for preventative care.

Tesa (27:38.737)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (27:50.386)
Most of the time in conventional medicine, a comprehensive metabolic panel isn't run until we already have hypertension and protein in the urine.

Tesa (27:59.508)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (27:59.918)
kind of, okay, sure, you're gonna see that the liver and kidneys are sad, but they were sad probably months ago when we missed it, when they were having other symptoms that were ignored. They were having, you know, heart palpitations, insomnia, some of these signs of inflammation in their body already, where if we had maybe run a comprehensive metabolic panel with our OB panel, which I'm a big fan of, number one, we have a baseline. We know what was their body like at the beginning of pregnancy.

Tesa (28:07.601)
Hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (28:26.858)
And if we can run it again, you know, at 28 weeks, we go, what kind of a change already happened arterial spiraling and the placenta stops at 20 weeks, the growth of it. And usually it's after that mark that you start to see that progression towards preeclampsia. So what was their baseline? And what is their CMP at 28 weeks? Their baseline ALT could have been at an 11 and it jumped up to a 25. Well, it's not high enough for us to say, oh my God, we have liver issues.

Tesa (28:28.658)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Tesa (28:54.075)
Mm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (28:56.15)
But for them it is. That's a big jump. It doubled, but it's still within our normal parameters. So if you have that baseline, you can already see something kind of eking towards that, ooh, what's going on there. You can already start preventing that from progressing further. You can already see it before it happens if you know what you're looking for.

Tesa (28:59.096)
Yeah, doubled.

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (29:14.693)
Mm-hmm.

Tesa (29:18.undefined)
Hmm, that sounds interesting.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (29:18.37)
So those would be the things that, right? With functional medicine, I want midwives to know you have the potential and especially, like I was saying, you know, for you earlier, midwives to me, especially I feel like the home birth midwife crowd is just poised to implement these functional medicine principles into their practices and really make a huge difference.

She's going to know how to do it.

Tesa (29:44.656)
Yes, and that's the key is knowing how to do it. That's definitely not something that, and nor I don't believe that it should be part of our basic training. This really is more of a continuing education. Like we need to be able to focus on the basic physiological changes that happen during pregnancy and knowing how to manage pregnancy matters and helping women from point A to point B. This is definitely, I think, more advanced and you.

would probably wanna be practicing a little bit to have some background and better understanding to put this into practice. And that's my personal feeling. Like I don't know that I would have absorbed this very well in my initial training. Right now that I've been practicing for a while, I can definitely put this into practice and have a really good understanding of what I'm learning as well. So, again, it...

I think that there's a lot of midwives who definitely are looking for this type of education right now as well, because we know that it's not just so simple. We're definitely dealing with a more complicated population now, too. There's so many things that have happened in the last three years that have really complicated some things. So we're seeing so many post-COVID complications that are not documented and researched yet.

But as midwives, we're seeing it firsthand. We're seeing the fallout from what's happened in the last three years. We're seeing it directly related to pregnancy and birth outcomes. So.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (31:20.018)
Yeah, yeah. And then the stress aspect, nobody talks about how stress affects pregnancy and stress affects conception and birth outcomes. And I attribute actually some of the stuff we've seen in the last several years to the stress of what happened. And I always joke, if you weren't stressed during the last couple years, I'm worried. Right, because that was stressful in whatever way it was, whether it was isolation or it was trying to navigate different types of information that you were given.

Tesa (31:26.817)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (31:43.238)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (31:47.99)
was a lot of stress involved and I have seen definitely an increase in my clinical practice with the effects of this chronic stress on the body which then you know if you understand chronic stress it plays into exasperating any underlying condition you may have had and increasing the risk of inflammatory connections.

Tesa (31:49.39)
Mm-hmm.

Uh huh.

Tesa (32:08.518)
Yeah.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (32:13.538)
So, so many things, so many things that could come about from the last couple of years.

Tesa (32:17.052)
Yeah.

I know.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree. And that's been something that I've even been navigating, even with midwives. We've all had to undergo a lot of stress in our own practices thanks to COVID and how things changed in the world. But.

Tesa (32:40.048)
So the two courses, you've got the thyroid physiology. You said that there's a link on your Instagram for that.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (32:45.206)
There is. So if you run through posts, I've gotten a couple posts because we just released it at the beginning of the month. I think it was the 5th of June is when that course was released. So it's a, it's fairly fresh. Yes.

Tesa (32:53.884)
Oh, okay. Oh, nice. So it's fairly new. Nice. Great. And then the functional lab analysis will hopefully be out soon and we'll be able to start seeing that. I will definitely make sure that I let people know when I see it get released. Is there anything else you want to add before we cut off?

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (33:17.03)
I'll just add that if anybody has questions, I am open to communication with practitioners and people can reach out to me. Instagram tends to be the quickest way to get to me these days, so I'm at functional.maternity and DM me there. Follow along on Instagram. We're always putting up research articles. I'm a big fan of understanding the research and I try to put good articles up.

Tesa (33:24.817)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (33:46.242)
I try to vet them as best I can and talk about why this research pointed to something, but then also maybe where they went wrong in their analysis or whatever. I try to break it down for everybody as well. So that's one thing. The other thing is for people who are interested in functional medicine, but also feel that they're not in a place that they want to start implementing it into their patient care, I do lab analysis for midwives all the time, and I do case consultations and all of that stuff to help midwives.

kind of achieve the goals that they're hoping to achieve with their clients.

Tesa (34:22.96)
That's fabulous. I think I did see that on your website, and I think that's a very good service to make sure that everybody knows that you provide, because it's almost like, oh, when we have a complicated case, we might consult with an endocrinologist or something like that, but they too do not... I find, honestly, in my own area, the endocrinologist and hematologist really don't...they're still following a very, like, this is within normal ranges, so what do you want from me?

And I'm getting those answers all the time from those two specialties. And when it comes to pregnancy, they kind of just don't want to even deal with it. They don't want to deal with pregnant patients. So having a resource to be able to call a specialist for a pregnancy related issue and do a little investigating, I'm all for it and I think it's wonderful. And they can contact you through your website for that consultation, correct? Yeah, fantastic.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (35:18.73)
Yes, yes, yep, they can do that. And then if they have patients that they just want to send over, I always offer free 15 minute phone consults for people who are not existing patients. So before they ever schedule a full intake with me, I am more than happy to just do a free 15 minute phone call with them to assess. And sometimes, you know, in that quick 15 minute phone call, that's all we needed and we don't need a full intake. And we have enough information, especially when it comes to pregnancy, because that is a very time sensitive

Tesa (35:33.646)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (35:48.618)
you know, situation often where we don't have months to work on things. And so I want to be able to get them in faster if I can, to just give them some little bit of tips and tricks to kind of get them through.

Tesa (35:50.826)
Hmm?

Mm-hmm.

Tesa (36:02.588)
So you're doing telehealth for these situations? Like anybody could send you a patient? Okay, that's great. And then you guys, do you have a, it sounds like you have an in-person practice as well.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (36:04.426)
Yep. Absolutely.

I do. So my practice is located in Fort Collins, Colorado, but we do virtual patients. Yep. I have virtual patients all over the world. So we do a lot of telehealth.

Tesa (36:19.208)
Colorado.

Great. All right, Sarah, it was great talking to you. I really appreciate your time today and I'm looking to link a lot of this stuff in the show notes today. So if anybody's interested, you can definitely check the show notes. I'll link her Instagram page and her website so that you can look up everything that we talked about today. And then when the knee functional lab analysis comes out, I will definitely do an updated post on that as well. So that anybody who was interested in knowing.

but they can also follow your Instagram because I'm sure it'll be posted there as well. But anyway, if you haven't been following Sarah at Functional Maternity on Instagram, you should. There's been a lot of great posts, a lot of good information. That's how I came across it. I don't know how I ever came across it to begin with, but it definitely drew my attention in and I've been following it for a while and that's why I asked you for the interview. Thanks again. I appreciate your time and I hope you have a good day.

Sarah Thompson - Functional Maternity (37:24.898)
Thank you, you as well.

Tesa (37:31.944)
Let's see.