Dr. Deb Muth 00:03What if bloating, back pain, and low energy aren’t separate problems, but clues from the same root cause? What if your posture and the way your fascia moves are changing how your digestion works and how you feel every day? Today, we’re unpacking why symptoms like bloating, fatigue, and persistent pain often come from deeper, whole body issues, and how a multimodal, root cause approach speeds real recovery. You guys can, put our advertisement in here for Venari before we do the intro.Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, the show where we uncover the root causes of chronic illness, explore cutting-edge regenerative and integrative care, and empower you with practical tools to heal.I’m Dr. Deb, your medical detective, and today we’re talking about whole body recovery, how movement, fascia, gut health, and personalized medicine come together to restore function, energy, and confidence in your body. If you or someone you love struggles with bloating, pain that won’t quit. Slow recovery after surgery or postpartum, or chronic low energy, this episode is for you.So get comfortable, grab a warm drink, And let’s get into it.So today, I’m joined by Dr. Shalini Bhat, founder of the Movement Boutique in Toronto. She is a chiropractor and double-certified functional medicine practitioner who builds care around root causes, lady after my own heart. And rather than just treating the symptoms, as we all know, and you guys have heard me talk about before, that is how we get to the other side of things. So, what I love about your work is you blend the clinical expertise and that lived experience, and just before we started recording, we were talking about the difference of fascia.and chiropractic, and even when you’re looking at bringing in acupuncture and Pilates and functional medicine, having all those modalities together is so amazing. So, before we dive into all of this stuff. Tell us a little bit about your own story. Shalinibhat 02:49Yeah, well, my own story is that I grew up very steeped in Western medicine. My father’s a surgeon, and I had, you know, access to all the allopathic care that was out there, but I kind of had all that, what I call, gray area symptoms. That doesn’t make it into, you know, an allopathic answer, so to speak. And so, having access to all of… you know, the best… this specialist and that specialist didn’t really give my IBS you know, some type of help, and it didn’t really give my chronic back pain some type of help. And I kept, like, tearing my meniscus. I was a dancer, and I just kept, like, thinking, I’m doing all the same things as all these other girls in my class. Why am I the one who keeps tearing my meniscus? Like, what is up with… they… like, we all have the exact same tissues. Why is my tissue resilience so low? that this keeps happening to me. And I seem to be the only one in, you know. from dancing from 3 till I was… when I was 3 till when I was 18, and experiencing this, and I’m looking at everybody, like, what’s the deal? And I sort of felt different, but I couldn’t really pinpoint what was going on, and probably similar to your story. all the things that were coming at me were just labels and diagnoses, and like, you know, same with my meniscus, they were like, the first time, they were like, alright, we do surgery. I was like, okay, sounds good, like, went and did the surgery. The second time it, tore, I was like, that obviously didn’t, do it, because they took out 30% the first time, and then, you know, some of the 70%, you know, tore. And I said, there has to be… there has to be some reason why my My tissue resilience is low, and why that shear force is going through on my left knee every single time, like that same mechanical strain is happening, and fast forward to today, I realized that fascia is this fabric that runs all over the body in huge swaths, and in very large, sort of movement patterns, which we’ll get into, but basically, the way that I was, like, standing, the way that I was… my tissue resilience was less, that’s what was setting the stage for me to re-tear that meniscus, but nobody was asking those questions. My IBS, like the stealth infections I had, the leaky gut I had, all of those things creating excessive inflammation just in my body in general was decreasing my tissue resilience and making me re-injure that same area. So instead of, oh, I’ll just keep getting it, you know, shaved down or taken out, like, why was that same mechanistic injury and strain happening? on that knee, and I started asking different questions, which led me to, instead of going to medical school, say, oh, wait, chiropractors can actually, like, you know.Actually move the body, understand what’s going on, spend the time with patients to properly diagnose, and then actually use our hands, because I’ve always been a very tactile person. Being a dancer, you know you’re always using your body, I understand my body, so when I started my kinesiology degree. I… kinesiology was a no-brainer. I’m like, I have a body, I want to use it, I want to learn… you know, when I’m learning about the muscles and the hands and the… like, I have that, so it’s… I’ve always been a touch kind of person, and that makes sense to me, learning about the body. And, that’s why I ended up studying in such, let’s say, asking alternative questions, so to speak, and that’s why even when I finished my kinesiology degree, and even when I finished my chiropractic training, I still went to school to learn acupuncture training, because I still had more questions, and thenI… and concurrently, I was teaching Pilates as well, and Pilates always resonated with me because I thought, yeah, if you have this really strong powerhouse and this really strong core, that always helped my back. And it always helped my knee. And so, translating kind of all four of these modalities, the chiropractic, the fascial release, the acupuncture, and the Pilates, became sort of my… my own little method that I created on how to help people. I probably… a lot of people listening to this, think of chiropractic as, like, you go somewhere and you get crack, crack, crack top to bottom. That actually is not how I’ve ever practiced, either, because even when I was chronically inflamed with all these issues, even an adjustment would send me into more inflammation, and I would be, in… having aches and pains, so that was not even… I needed it so much gentler, and that’s why I started working with fascia and thinking, like, what else is here? And, like, if someone’s so inflamed, maybe an adjustment is too aggressive for, somebody in the moment. And there’s a time and a place for everything, don’t get me wrong, but that wasn’t my personal, you know, go-to, so to speak, and so that’s why I started working more gently around fascia, and that’s why I used acupuncture needles, and pilates training, and rehabilitation, and looking at people’s movement patterns, and seeing, okay, where are things going off here, and what’s the actual… I hate the word root cause, but that’s where we all come from, it’s just gotten so crazy. But really, truly, if you have back pain, why are we just looking at the back.Like, if your entire pelvis is off, if your entire, like, body is leaning to one side, and you’re putting way more weight on one foot than another, like, why are we… why are we just treating the back? Why are we just adjusting the back? Why are we just, you know, putting ice on the back, or put… or putting painkillers, or rubbing things on the back? We gotta look at the entire body as one whole system when it comes to injury, and that’s my very long backstory to tell you how I… sort of amassed these different things that I do, And in my training. Sorry, I forgot one piece in there, and that’s… with my gut thing and my IBS, I went back to school and did functional medicine training to figure out what that was about, because, and even when my uncle mentioned it, I think, oh gosh, early 2000s, he said, leaky gut, and I thought, well, people probably think these days, like, wait, there’s holes in my stomach? You know, like, what isAnd at that time, you know, way back in the day, the first test was, like, that, flakulose mannitol, like, that really. Dr. Deb Mut 08:53Boom. Shalinibhat 08:53You can get tests. Yeah. Now, obviously, we’ve come a long way. So yeah, that’s how I ended up with all these five random modalities that are sort of enmeshed into one, and that’s what we do in my practice. My clinical practice is literally all of those modalities, and we really meet people where they are. So we invite anyone to come to us with, whether they have an MSK issue, and that’s the primary thing they want to work on, we can do it by starting Pilates. We can do it by starting fascial training. We can do it by starting acupuncture. We can do it by running labs and seeing where you are functionally if you want to lower that inflammation, or those stealth infections, or whatever it is that you have going on. So we invite anyone to come in and sort of pick their service menu, because I feel we… we should help everyone, but not everyone feels… like, not everyone’s like, wow, I want to run a school test with you first. They may have the capacity to be like, okay, I’ll try a workout, or I’ll try a Pilates class, you know? And then once they’re in our space, they’re like, oh wait, what else do you offer here? This is really different than where I’ve been. So that’s sort of what my practice is all about. Dr. Deb Muth 09:58I love that. I love that blending of all of the different things, and I think, you know, some of the best practitioners are those who’ve been through things, and it doesn’t have to be that way, but we kind of explore all the different things that could be causing our issue