Latest / The Cyclical Doula Podcast: Fertility Awareness, Charting Cycles, and Reproductive Health Education / Beyond Protocols: Dr. Tarah Davis on Root-Cause Healing
Transcript
- Tarah Davis: It's about unlearning, it's about relearning, it's about really loving your body, and that is something that we have not been taught as a society. And I hope that no matter where your functional medicine journey takes you that it's one that teaches you to learn how to love your body because that is one thing that we have to do in order to heal anything first. Emmamma: Welcome to the Cyclical Doula podcast. I'm Emma, a certified fertility awareness educator, miscarriage doula and the founder of Emmamma LLC. This space is for women who want to understand their bodies deeply, not just memorize information, but actually feel confident in interpreting their cycles. Here we talk about ovulation, hormones, cervical mucus, basal body temperature, and all that's messy in between emotional layers that come with being a woman. We talk about trying to conceive, avoiding pregnancy without hormones. postpartum transitions, pregnancy loss, perimenopause, and everything in between. Because body literacy isn't just about charting. It's about the autonomy. It's about informed consent. It's about not outsourcing your reproductive decisions to guesswork or fear. Each week, you'll hear conversations with women's health professionals, ⁓ birth workers, ⁓ educators, and researchers along with solo episodes where I teach practical skills you can apply to your own cycle right away. if you have ever felt like you should have learned this information sooner, if you have ever felt disconnected from your cycle, If you want to raise the next generation without shame around their bodies, you are in the right place. So grab your tea, open up your notes app, and let's build a cycle confidence together. emmamma: Welcome back to the Cyclical Doula podcast. I'm so excited to have with me today Dr. Tarah Davis, a functional medicine pharmacist and the founder of The Rooted Pharmacy, a virtual wellness practice where science meets soul and root-cause healing and it becomes personal. With a core belief that most disease begins and is exacerbated in the gut, she helps individuals navigate chronic symptoms. Autoimmune conditions, hormonal imbalances, and deeply entrenched health challenges through personalized whole person approach. She is also trauma-informed and recognizing how past stress and unresolved emotional patterns can shape the nervous system and silently sabotage healing. She cuts cutting-edge science with lived wisdom and intuition, offering her clients more than protocols. She offers a path. To transformation rooted in deep listening, connection, and sustainable healing. Tarah is also a proud military spouse, a crunchy boy mom, and an unapologetic plant lover. She believes true wellness blooms from the quiet, unintentional choices that we make each day. When she's not guiding clients back to vibrant health, you'll find her in nature, tending to her thriving plant family or savoring slow-filled moments with her beautifully full life. Thanks so much for being here. Tarah Davis: Yes, we're so excited. emmamma: I'm so excited to have this conversation. so I would love to just hear a little bit more. That intro you has so much information about like who you are, but is there anything else that you just want to share about who you are as a human being? Tarah Davis: Yeah, well currently I'm on a farm right now. I my family has a farm in Tennessee and that's really kind of where the rooted pharmacy came from. and so that's where I'm at now. We're always traveling, always back and forth. So just making the best of life. emmamma: I love that. It's so good. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about how you kind of got into this functional medicine and the process that got you to doing what you're doing now. Tarah Davis: Yeah, so let's see, I was into functional medicine when I was 13. I got really sick, found functional medicine, kind of like the fringes of functional medicine to start, and healed my gut from diarrhea. I was having diarrhea 20 times a day. healed emmamma: Yikes. Tarah Davis: my gut and but I continue to have issues throughout life. And when I was 30, I had my son and I had help syndrome, hepatic enzymes, elevated low platelets, it's part of a preecalampsia syndrome. And I tanked and I was in the ICU for ten days, stress, stress, stress, and then we ended up moving five weeks later across the country and it just really did me in and I couldn't even go back to work. And I had seen over ten practitioners, and that's when I decided Like I'm going all in, I'm going to fix myself. No one else is listening to me and that's where it all got started. emmamma: Wow, what what a crazy experience. I'm like, there's so many of those layers. But I think the thing that is so like valuable and and also disappointing is that you weren't getting the help that you needed, but you were able to find it yourself. And I think that that's it's one of those things that's like it's so disappointing that so many people experience things like that. And also amazing that there's people like you now who are able to help get to that next step. Tarah Davis: Yeah, it was really frustrating being a healthcare provider that I didn't have that help and couldn't find that help. And I was digging and I thought I was already in the holistic health realm. I had written a drug-induced nutrient depletion database, done all kinds of stuff and I just couldn't find the answers. And it was really full circle when I was able to bring it back to people too. emmamma: Yeah. It's so good. So I so much of your work is focused on gut health. What are some of the things that you feel like people don't understand about how gut health works? Tarah Davis: Yeah, so gut health does not mean gut symptoms. Point blank. Gut health is your gut is where your immune system, your nervous system, your oldest nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system, your vagal nerve, your rest digestion, heel state, and then your digestion. It's where it all comes together inside your body. And it's not in your brain. It's not, you know, out in our arms. It is in our gut. And when our gut is off, the rest of our body feels it. That can be chronic chronic symptoms that we just don't know the answer to yet. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: MS, autoimmunity. MS is a big one that I've just been seeing a lot of lately. fibromyalgia, again, going back to that trauma-informed piece as well. That's in the gut, that's in our nervous system. And that's why I'm so big on the gut because everything kind of just comes together there. emmamma: Yeah, and so what does that look like practically? Obviously, it I'm sure it depends specifically on the individual that's working on their gut and understanding how their gut is working, but how do you how do you go about understanding what somebody's gut looks Tarah Davis: Yeah. emmamma: like and how how they can start that process? Tarah Davis: Yeah, I think it's evolved over the years. So I have been emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: a functional medicine practitioner, doctor of pharmacy for 10 years now. And I have been in this functional space for over 15 years. And just really seeing we started out not testing. It was just fixed the gut. And that's really where I started with when I had diarrhea 20 times a day. We did a diet. We did some antimicrobials, we got rid of the bacteria that was overgrown, and that was kind of it. But now we have so much more. There's all kinds of testing. There's our GI map, there's our gut zoomer, there's all these things that if anyone's looked into their gut, they have probably heard about. But I think even beyond looking, getting that picture, because in our gut, there are trillions of bacteria. There are more bacteria. in our gut than there are people on this entire planet in one person's gut. So when our bacteria emmamma: It's crazy. Tarah Davis: are off, we definitely feel it. And our bacteria, they're not just there just growing and digesting things. They're actually creating hormones. They're breaking emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: down hormones. They're breaking down cell mediators. Even histamine is broken down in our gut. Estrogen, estrogen, there's a whole piece of estrogen called the estrobolome. in our gut and it's where we break down, we create, we detox all of these pieces of estrogen and it's specific bacteria that do that. So what I do is over the years I've come to figure out kind of okay how do we test how do we look at it because emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: there's a very diff big difference between looking at our tests and actually treating our test. And so we just dig in. And we see what our bacteria look like. We see what is going on as far as digestion. Are we digesting our food properly? Are we inflamed in our gut? And then we start to peel back these layers and that talks about what's happening in our bigger systemic body as well, not just what's happening in the gut. emmamma: That's cool. So I I can imagine that it's kind of like a long haul process, but is it of like figuring out like the testing and then like incorporating, but is it how what does that timeline look like for most people of working through that? Tarah Davis: Yeah, it really depends on how deep their emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: symptoms run. so we start to peel back those layers and I say like layers of an onion and we're peeling back one and we might expose another and we have to get in there to really find out what is going on at the roots. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: so you know, one person may have chronic constipation for their entire life and we can fix it in six weeks. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: Somebody might have a lot of inflammation. Maybe they already have irritable bowel disease or they already have a diagnosis there. that might take six months. but really the sweet spot for me is six months. I call it the Rooted Revival. It is my program to take you from feeling absolutely crappy, not knowing what to do to thriving with your health through chronic. unresolved symptoms and we get to the root of those and we fix those. so six months is really my sweet spot for functional medicine. Functional medicine is slow medicine. It is. emmamma: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: We have to be ready, willing, and able to make those changes. And if we cannot, then functional medicine is not gonna work for you. And and I say that up front because I try to be up front with everybody. Like we have to make these changes for ourselves. I can throw All the supplements, someone can give you a protocol. I don't use protocols, but someone could give you a protocol, all the supplements have you do all of those things, but if we aren't fixing your life in the terrain and what actually got you here in the first place, then we're not doing you a service and we're just masking all the symptoms. So six months is really what it takes to kind of unravel our digestion, make sure that our gut emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: is working, make sure that we're now absorbing the nutrients that we need because we might not have if our gut wasn't working. And then we're taking that a step further and we're actually thriving and we're making sure our labs are optimal, not normal, and we are moving out of extensively fixing our gut into now fixing our body. emmamma: Yeah. That's I think that's such an important piece of it of like you mentioned that it's a lot of what you're looking at is the gut and how to help that, but that how it ripples out into so many other aspects of how people are functioning in in all aspects of their health and their life and how it's kinda like the the base of it. But I think based on what you've talked about already, like it sounds like almost Or maybe not almost that might be a big phrase, but like many, many experiences that people have in regards to like symptoms could be solved by looking at their gut. Is that would you say that's correct? Yeah. Tarah Davis: Yeah, that would be for most cases, most circumstances, I would look at the gut first. And I have a client who is 16 and she has lots of mood disorders. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: and we looked at her gut and we saw all these bacteria that we are now seeing in research that they start to correlate with these mood disorders. And emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: we're not necessarily bacteria that we're noticing every day. We're not getting sick. We're not blowing our nose. We're not, you know, doing these things externally that we've noticed. and maybe we're not even having diarrhea or constipation. we've building normal in that regard as far as the gut goes. but these things are showing up and they're affecting our brain health. They're affecting our hormone health. and yeah. They're not just in the gut emmamma: Yeah. I think that's it's so it's so valuable. And I like in my field, like all as we're talking, like my brain goes to like all these hormonal and reproductive health situations where I feel like focusing on your gut can really help with that. So like things that come to mind like endometriosis, like although like it's not gonna go away by working on your gut, it does seem like it would like reduce some of those symptoms that people are feeling and get some relief from some of those. kind of like exacerbated feelings just by bringing down the inflammation and stuff like that. Tarah Davis: Yeah, and I think I I tell my clients it's kind of like tacks on the bottom of your foot. when emmamma: Mm. Tarah Davis: it like functional medicine, we have tacks in the bottom of our foot. Okay, a protocol might pull out a few tacks, might work for some people. and working on the gut might pull pull out a few tacks. but we want to pull out all of the tacks. So we want to really do that big picture. So when I sit down with a client, we go for an hour and a half to two hours. Digging back all the way to birth with them, like what was their birth emmamma: Mm. Tarah Davis: life? Because being a doula, you know, birth is our first trauma. no matter how great our birth is, it is still traumatic to our nervous system. It is still a stressor. And we can see that maybe they had myconium in inhaled fecal matter while they were being born emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: and had to have antibiotics right after they were born. Set them up for a lifelong gut issues and we have emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: to look at all these pieces and build the puzzle out and so we can really see that big person so it becomes less of this gut focus more of emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: the whole picture but our gut is just that first thing that we work on because it's that biggest emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: piece that holds all of the inflammation it's where we not just eat and digest but we have to be able to be able to digest to absorb and to actually get into our cells and that piece is really what happens in the gut as far as nutrients, minerals and absorption goes. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's so powerful. And I feel like this is something that I don't yet know a lot about. So I'm really excited to just like hear from you. And also my brain's turning of like all these things that like myself and other people in my life could probably benefit from working with you and getting all this knowledge. what is the thing that you think most women who you run into like are experiencing that they might not know is like something that they can work on. I don't know if that's a too broad of a question, but Tarah Davis: No, this is no, this is it. It's perimenopause. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: I think that perimenopause is just an overplayed word right now. emmamma: Yes, I would agree. Tarah Davis: Perimenopause is like the thing that there's just so much noise about it right now, but it emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: really isn't about our hormones. It's about this much about our hormones. Of course, we know that they start to fluctuate later on in life. But it's about everything that has really just come together in this stage of life. And hormones are just like the cherry on top. And we emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: just see all of this dysfunction. We see metabolic dysfunction, blood sugar imbalance that's happening years and years before any kind of diagnosable type two diabetes, even pre-diabetes. We start to see things like, I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning and I can't go back to sleep. That can be your blood sugar. that stress. emmamma: Mm. Tarah Davis: we see, well, I'm really stressed, I can't sleep. Okay, well, that can be your nervous system, that can be your circadian rhythms, off there's all different things. and then I think too, like we're it coming to this age where our parents are starting to rely more on us. We have children that are relying more on us, we are working. We are trying to go to school and like all of this is coming together and I don't think that we give all of that stuff enough credit. and we emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: want to say, it's just our hormones, let's throw some hormone replacement at it. And while that may work beautifully for some people and that might be like what they mean, if they're ready, willing, and able to make changes, we can do it without the hormone replacement. We can emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: balance you, we can get that inflammation down, we can get your mood feeling better. We can really make you thriving without having to go that route. If that's something that you don't want to do, or we can use both and that's the beauty. emmamma: Yeah. Yeah. I think I I know we're in a lot of the same Facebook groups in our area because we live nearby. But I feel like I'm constantly seeing people be like, I I'm in perimenopause and I like am thirty two, thirty seven, thirty whatever. And I'm like, Yeah, you're probably like from my perspective, I'm also like, Yeah, you probably aren't. You're probably just like experiencing some of these symptoms that like need some extra support. in other aspects of your life and like, yeah, your cycle's being affected, but it's because of all of these other things that your body's doing. Yeah. Tarah Davis: Yeah, I think we've been taught like everything is in a silo. our heart, our thyroid, our gut, our emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: we've not taught that all of this works together. And we really see that the most when we talk about women's hormones. And I don't know if it's more because there's like more talk around it or you know, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: we just all have that experience. common experience, but we see that a lot emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: there. emmamma: Yeah, I think it's it's fascinating to me. And as you mentioned that, like I think it doesn't help that traditionally, like there's all of these different specializations of different types of functions of the body that doctors specialize in, which is great because then they're like really focused on something, especially for like emergency medicine. Like that's so powerful. But also like then when we're trying to look at health as a overall whole, sometimes we miss that. So many things are connected and like as you were saying, going back to birth, even how our bodies kind of function through all aspects of our life and how that can affect things later on. Emmamma: hey, I'm just popping in real quick to say Make sure you're subscribed to the Cyclical Doula podcast on whichever platform you're listening to. ⁓ And don't miss upcoming conversations. If this episode is resonating with you, please share it with a friend, rate it and write a review. This is how this movement grows, not through algorithms, but through women talking to women. All right, let's jump back into it. emmamma: I would love to talk a little bit more about you were talking about like the metabolic side and like seeing pre-diabetes and things like that. Tell us tell us a little bit more about that. What do you see with that? Tarah Davis: Yeah, so I use in my practice one of the tests that I like to do just because it gives so much data for women is a continuous glucose monitor. emmamma: Okay. Tarah Davis: so I just finished wearing one, just stick it on the back of your arm. I do it for four weeks for my clients so we can really see what is actually happening for them. I think it's a really fun way to see data in real time for them as well. but we look at it like Okay, we have we have goals. We s we'll set goals as far as like what we want your blood sugar. Is it between 70 and 140? And that's when you're not eating. When you are eating. We don't want it to peak over 140. That's just kind of a broad statement there. but sometimes we notice that different meals will cause us to have different peaks and different troughs as far as going low as well. if we go too long between meals. some women are eat do better if they eat every three to four hours versus if they're eating every, you know, six hours. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: or some fast, and they shouldn't be because their blood sugar is really low. And when your blood glucose stays low, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: puts a stress on your body and your body starts making adrenaline and cortisol and it's like picking trying to pick you back up and when it feels like you're tanking and that's what happens at night too. Our cortisol peaks because our blood sugar lowered at night and now we can't wake go back to sleep because we basically just had a rock concert and we can't we can't do it. So we see these throughout the day, throughout the month and throughout what foods we eat and how we pair the foods together. So we can start to get under this underlying dysfunction years, even a decade before we start to hear these words like prediabetes and diabetes, when we start to hear things like your hemoglobin A1C, your average glucose over 90 days, is not right. if it's high or it's even I see that it's too low because of the compensating. so emmamma: Mm. Tarah Davis: we start to see these things and we can dig in and we can talk about, you know, what's the best foods for your body. because genetics plays a role in that too. There's always epigenetics above the genome, but genetics will play a role in what your body tolerates over my body. you know, maybe I do really good with 120 grams of protein, but maybe you don't need that goal and and or your body doesn't tolerate 120 grams. 20 grams of protein a day. So we emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: can really start to see these pieces and start to create intentional plates to nutrition for clients as well, because I don't want someone always having to measure their plate or I want it to be intuitive. And so this helps with that intuitive process of knowing how to build our plates, knowing what those look like because they are not. What we have been taught. emmamma: Yeah, totally. I think that's I don't I don't think we're taught this very well at all. I feel like some like I remember in school like having the like traditional like food. I think it was a pyramid when I was in elementary school and middle school and stuff, but like I we're not like we're kind of taught it, but I feel like it's more like environmental at your home or whatever of how to eat. And that's gonna be completely different depending upon people's resources or family styles or all of those different things. Tarah Davis: Yeah, and and we take that into consideration. Definitely. Like, emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: okay, have eight children, like, I know you can't make eight different meals. I know you can't make two different meals. Like, emmamma: But Tarah Davis: we're going to talk about what we can do to make that work for you in your unique life and your unique like circumstances because that's what functional emmamma: huh. Tarah Davis: medicine is. It's about functioning with your life. And I understand that not everybody's life can be my life and or your life. And we have to function. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so good. How you kind of mentioned what it looks like maybe in different circumstances. How do you think navigating like your health while also being a parent? Like how do you how do you do that and how do you kind of help your your clients, patients do that? Tarah Davis: Yeah, so I also see children. so I I don't advertise that necessarily, but I see a lot of children. I'd say fifty percent of my practice is children from age emmamma: Okay. Tarah Davis: four, all the way to ninety-two is who emmamma: Nice. Tarah Davis: I see. so or I say four, four days. Four days to have two years. emmamma: Yeah. Awesome. Tarah Davis: so I see children. I think that functional medicine should I mean, in just that functioning piece. should be part emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: of everyone's life. I incorporate it, I have a five-year-old. we talk about our foods and we talk about what our foods are doing to our bodies. We recognize emmamma: Uh-huh. Tarah Davis: how they make us feel and like we go to Chick-fil-A. Don't worry. He said McDonald's. emmamma: Yep. Yeah. Tarah Davis: but we talk about these things and did he notice how this meal made him feel and how he was hungry so soon after this meal. Or did you notice that you know this drink made your tummy feel different? And if emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: you had water, you felt a little bit better during the day when you're sweating. and we just kind of start to notice those pieces. And that's the same for my clients too. Like we I talk about this, like let's just notice it, let's have this child's mind, this beginner's mind. and I emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: think that's so important because We get lost in this all of this nuance and really we just need to bring it back and have this min beginner's mind about our bodies and how we're going to love them and treat them. And so I think it's a big part of everyday conversation for families. and just making it just not feel so heavy. emmamma: Yeah, absolutely. And I think like like you were just saying, like sometimes it's I think we like overanalyze how these conversations should be happening around food and eating and and it sometimes it's just like understanding how our body like physically feels after eating something and if that feels good or not so great and how we can adjust with that can be a really good aspect of just understanding how things are working. Tarah Davis: Yeah, and I think and like even just like building our plates and just like showing, hey, this is how our plates build. Like you don't have to eat it. Listen, I have a pickiest pickiest kid. and he he got COVID when he was thirteen months old, lost his sense of taste. Anyways, it's been a whole thing. So I know about emmamma: Yeah. Yeah. Tarah Davis: picky. And but it goes on his plate, we touch it, we talk about it. We put it on our nose, we play with it, whatever it is, it doesn't have to be eating it yet. But just emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: knowing that it's there and knowing that it is a safe thing, can emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: be so powerful for kids. And we can sneak in anything that we need to. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: but and I will teach you that too. But but as far as actually emmamma: How about? Tarah Davis: getting that exposure is so big because even adults come to me and they're like, I don't touch lettuce. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: Okay, well let's just touch it. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: You don't have to eat it. emmamma: Mm-hmm. And I think so I I would be curious if you think that sometimes when people have like adverse food, like physical reactions of like not wanting to touch it or like being like, Yeah, no, I don't really prefer that. If sometimes it's like irritating their gut or their system and it's just like a subconscious, like they know that it doesn't feel good. Tarah Davis: Definitely. Yeah. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: especially milk. you hear emmamma: Okay. Tarah Davis: that a lot with kids in milk. Like, my mom forces me to drink milk and my tummy hurts emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: and I don't drink the milk. so I hear that a lot. gluten emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: is another thing that's just really hidden that when we start to emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: like dig in we notice maybe it's gluten. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: and even for like even like if we start to get into like ADHD and like some of these like nuanced things for kids, like even emmamma: Mm. Yeah. Tarah Davis: those like food dyes, gums and filters emmamma: Mm. Yep. Tarah Davis: and these pieces can be really huge and maybe they're not wanting what you have because it's in there. and emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: muscle testing, kinesiology, muscle testing where and I don't do it in my practice, but where they hold like emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: the agent up to your chest and see if your muscle is affected by it or whatever. And that's kind of the same thing emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: like you're it's close to you, it's near you. How's it affecting? emmamma: Yeah. That's fascinating. I I think sometimes at like we don't as a society don't give our bodies enough credit to know that like to s see that they like know what they need or like the kind of support that they actually could get and like the signals that they're giving off. And obviously sometimes we can like restore the like proper functioning of some of that, but I think they're it our bodies like really know what what they need and what they what they want to get support from. Tarah Davis: absolutely. Our bodies are so just in have this innate wisdom. And emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: we have to like reconnect to that. and we emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: have to be able to like get our bodies back to being able to function properly to have like kids need that if that makes sense. But emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: I think that even when it comes to like weight loss resistance, like our bodies emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: feel safe and if they don't feel safe they're gonna hold on to everything and that emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: includes toxins, that includes extra hormones like extra estrogen that we can't detox properly. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: that includes extra foods and even insulin. when we talk about like insulin resistance and we talk about fat storage. these pieces that are critical parts of our body can also be things that cause other issues like weight loss resistance. emmamma: Yeah. Yeah. That's that's huge. And I think like well again, like when we have somebody like you who's able to kind of look at it as a whole and able to look at the body as like a whole connecting function and being able to look at that, that really helps find some of those causes and I can imagine that most, if not every single one of the people that you work with walk away feeling significantly better. just because they're able to find their their brute causes and like help just with their day to day. Tarah Davis: Absolutely. And I think that's a big part of the rooted pharmacy and just like the rooted revival program is that I don't want you to stay here. Like I please, I want you to go on, I want you to blossom, I want you to be able to do this for yourself. So it's not just about getting you functioning, it's about f getting you functioning and educating you. So emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: because that's the powerful piece, because if you don't know why you're making the changes. You're not going to continue to do them. It's going to fall off. There's going to be bumps along the way. But if you know why you were doing the things that you were doing, you can find that discipline. You can find that structure. We can find a way for that to work for you. and then you can continue to do that even after you have left me. Yes, people come back for like adjustments or I had to have a surgery and an antibiotic. I want to make sure my bed's okay. but As far as I don't want them to stay in my practice. I want them to emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: go on and after our six months together to really thrive. emmamma: That's so good. I love that so much. I think like it's I think that's when you know that like a health professional is doing their job really well is when they're like, I like I want to help you be in this situation and then like I don't want to have to see you again. Like obviously I'm always here, but like I don't yeah, I want you to know how to do this on your own. And I think that's such Tarah Davis: Yeah. emmamma: a good, a good perspective for people to be at. Tarah Davis: Yeah. And I just love it because, you know, we cry together. We will I mean we'll pull out traumas if that's something that we feel like we need to talk about. Of course, I think therapists emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: are like, please go see a therapist. But emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: but we have our own work that we have to do in the body as well. emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: And we have so we'll cry together. We will work through things together, message me to celebrate all different kinds of things, from quitting vaping to you know, sh didn't talk to her ex-husband for three weeks. And that emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: was what was really like weighing in on some of her health concerns. I think emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: that there's all these pieces that we get to see at the Root of Pharmacy that we don't get to see just an everyday practice. And No matter how I've practiced in the past and how much I want to pour into my clients, I've never gotten to do that as much as I have with Ruby Farm Steam. emmamma: Yeah, that's so awesome. I love that so much. What else do you want to share with people who are listening? So whatever you thought about like coming into today, what else do you want to share? Tarah Davis: think that for functional medicine, like it can be super overwhelming for people and it's like where do we go? Do we go direct primary care? Do we go to a coach and a functional medicine practitioner? Is the person that you're looking to see even a like a health care provider at all? And I'm not saying that emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: you shouldn't see them, but are they like you need to know these things when you go in? Like what are you emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: to and what are you actually looking for? Are you looking for someone to fix your diarrhea? Then maybe go there. But if you're looking for someone with your full autoimmune disease and you have medications and you want to taper off of them and you want to do all of these things, then look for a licensed healthcare professional. And emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: so I think that that is one piece of the puzzle, but also just like getting in and doing it. Like emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: Don't put your toes in. Don't just sit there and dabble. Functional medicine medicine isn't for dabblers. You jump in, you do it, you immerse yourself, you're ready, willing, and able, and those changes will show up in your life. Absolutely. emmamma: That's so valuable. And I think like there's so I think there's so much noise in the space of like this is gonna fix whatever experience you have. And I think your perspective of like, yeah, you you can go to anybody, but like if you're trying to do X, Y, and Z, like looking for the person who's gonna be able to help you go through that process is so much more valuable than like jumping around and trying all these different coaches or like supplement programs or things like that. Sometimes like just getting to that that root of what's going on can be extremely valuable to just to be able to focus on that one thing. Tarah Davis: Yeah, and and knowing like, you know, are they coming at it with a protocol that's one size fits all or is this emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: a one on one thing? Because I I can tell you I don't think I've ever actually seen a protocol. Like I don't even look at them, I don't want to see them because everyone is completely individual and we have to look at them that way. From fertility, which I we just had another rooted pharmacy baby last week. emmamma: Yay! Tarah Davis: so I'm really excited. She had Hostimoto's obese. she had PCOS or we call it something different. PMOS. emmamma: Yep. PMRS, yeah. Yeah. Tarah Davis: and then she had diarrhea, constipation, just off and on IBS and we started digging in and took about three months and she had multiple miscarriages and able to get her fertility back. And it's emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: not just about her, it's about her husband too, you know this. and we've we worked on all of that. But fertility acne, autoimmunity Those gut health issues, depression, anxiety, all of these are pieces that I'm seeing right now. And then of course emmamma: Yeah. Yeah. Tarah Davis: those like gut health where we're missing part of my colon, I'm missing a stomach. I see all of those too, in work emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: with GI. emmamma: Yeah. That's so okay. So you mentioned about fertility. And I think this is I just responded the other day yesterday to a post on Facebook where somebody was like, I have unexplained infertility. and so we're like going the IVF route. Like, is it does anybody have any recommendations before we like dive in? And I was like, like stop, like go see somebody else first. Which I think like there's a time and a place for things like that. But I think it's so helpful when there's people like you who are working to restore what our healthy functioning of our bodies are and being able to find those things that you mentioned for that particular client of listing off of like what they needed support with and then they were able to get pregnant. Like I think like that's that to so much of our society, like we're so quick to be like, okay, like let's just go to like the medicalization of how to make this process work without making sure that the parents are functioning as best as they possibly can with their health. Because as many of us know when we're parents, like once you have a child, like you're you're not sleeping well, all of those things. And that's just gonna add to it. And if we don't If our body's not at the prime, then that's gonna be really hard. Tarah Davis: Absolutely. And I think like we just even IVF, like we're not getting to the root of like sure there's some like things, but like what are you inflamed? Like your body can't hold anything you're inflamed. Is are emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: you absorbing those nutrients? Again, going back to the gut. you know, we can say Hashimoto's and we can say all these like diagnosable diseases all day long, but at the root emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: that's not even what they are. their mineral imbalances, their nutrient imbalances, their bacterial imbalances, and we have to start stress, cortisol, we have to start to pull those apart and see them for what they really are and not get diagnosis paralysis. emmamma: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point. And I think like when when we're so focused on like getting a diagnosis or or having one and we're still not finding the how you can support your body best, it it's the same kind of concept. Tarah Davis: Yeah, it can be really frustrating because we're doing all of these things and we feel like we're throwing everything at it and we feel like we're emmamma: Mm-hmm. Tarah Davis: doing all the right things and maybe we're even like eating right. emmamma: Yeah. Tarah Davis: but nothing's happening and we still feel like crap and that's cause we just haven't gotten down to those roots yet. emmamma: Absolutely. That's so good. what is the thing that you want people to come away with today with this with this conversation? Tarah Davis: you're not broken. there is so much that our lifestyles have just set us up for failure for. we have just been taught so much the wrong ways for so long. It's about unlearning, it's about relearning, it's about really loving your body, and that is something that we have not been taught as a society. And I hope that no matter where your functional medicine journey takes you if you're watching this, that it's one that teaches you to learn how to love your body because that is one thing that we have to do in order to heal anything first. emmamma: Yeah, I love that. Thanks so much for being here. Where can people connect with you and find you? Tarah Davis: Yeah, so I'm the Rooted Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y www.therooted pharmacy dot com and I'm the Rooted Pharmacy on Instagram and Facebook and Dr. Tarah Davis on Instagram. emmamma: Awesome, great. I'll put all of those in the show notes and people will surely connect with you. thanks so much for being here and sharing all your wisdom and having this conversation with me today. Tarah Davis: Thank you. Emmamma: Thanks so much for being here today on the cyclical doula podcast. If this episode resonated with you, the most powerful thing that you can do is to share it, send it to a friend, text it to your sister, forward it to that group chat. This is how conversations about our bodies start changing, quietly, organically, woman to woman. If you are listening and thinking, okay, I want help applying this to my cycle, I offer free cycle clarity calls. It's a relaxed conversation over Zoom where we talk through your goals, your charting practices, and what kind of support that would actually make sense for you. You can book one at emmamma.com / free. And if you haven't already, make sure you're following or subscribe to the Cyclical Doula - podcast so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you feel called to leave a rating or review, it genuinely helps more women find this work. So thank you. You deserve to understand your body. You deserve to feel confident in your reproductive choices. And you don't have to figure it out alone. I'll see you next week. Thanks for being here.