QC: Why Surgery Alone Isn’t Enough For Endometriosis And How Functional Care Fills The Gap

We break down why expert excision is essential and why it must be paired with functional, whole-body care to unwind years of inflammation from endometriosis. Dr. Iris Kerin Orbuch explains how gut health, immune balance, and nervous system support accelerate real recovery.

• excision surgery as the gold standard
• inflammation as a body‑wide driver of symptoms
• gut dysbiosis and food restriction cycles
• endocrine and autoimmune cross‑talk
• why standard labs miss key markers
• lessons from Lyme on systemic care
• phased recovery beyond the operating room
• coordinated support with nutrition, pelvic floor, psychology, and acupuncture

You can send them in by using the link in the top of the description of this podcast episode or by emailing contact at Indobattery.com or visiting the Indobattery.com contact page

Chapters

• 0:00 Fast Format And Safety Disclaimer
• 0:41 Introducing Dr. Iris Karen Orbuch
• 2:05 Why Pair Excision With Functional Care
• 3:20 Inflammation’s Systemic Impact And Gut Health
• 4:40 Long Delays, Misdiagnosis, And Next Steps
• 5:25 Closing And How To Send Questions

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Life moves fast, and so should the answers to your biggest questions. Welcome to Indo Batteries Quick Connect, your direct line to expert insights. Short, powerful, and right to the point. You send in the questions, I bring in the experts, and in just five minutes, you get the knowledge you need. No long episodes, no extra time needed. And just remember, expert opinions shared here are for general information and not for personalized medical advice. Always consult your provider for your case-specific guidance. Got a question? Send it in and let's quickly get you the answers. I'm your host, Alana, and it's time to connect. Today I am honored to welcome someone who has truly shaped the landscape of endometriosis care, Dr. Iris Karen Orbuck. Dr. Karen Orbuck is the founder of Iris Wing Sanctuary for Endometriosis Surgery and Wellness in Los Angeles, where she provides compassionate individualized care rooted in both advanced surgical expertise and whole body healing. She is a board-certified OBGYN and fellowship-trained endometriosis excision surgeon, having trained under pioneers like Dr. C.Y.Loo and Dr. Harry Rich, names synonymous with the evolution of minimally invasive surgery. Beyond the operating room, Dr. Karen Orbuck is known for her blending Western medicine and functional healing by collaborating with nutritionists, pelvic floor therapists, psychologists, and acupuncturists to help her patients truly heal, not just manage symptoms. She's also a co-author of the widely acclaimed book Beating Endo, How to Reclaim Your Life from Endometriosis, and her advocacy work extends beyond the clinic. She has served on the AAGL Foundation Board, helped lead the endometriosis special interests group, and contributed her voice to the groundbreaking documentaries like Endo What and Below the Belt, which have helped bring this disease into the public conversation and policy spaces. Please help me in welcoming the brilliant Dr. Iris Karen Orbeck to the table. What does functional medicine in the context of endocare mean? How is it different from the Western medicine traditionally approached in chronic conditions?

SPEAKER_00: 2:15

Yeah, I do think that functional medicine needs to be paralleled with endoexcision surgery. And it's because the implants of endometriosis are inflammatory. So what's being released to the whole body are these inflammatory meteors that are going systemically to the body, making us feel so fatigued and exhausted. Inflammatory meteors are going to the gut, causing like a quote unquote, if you use an Instagram term, like leaky gut, right? So small intestinal dysbiosis and a large intestinal, also overgrowth and dysbiosis, it's going to the endocrine system. Like that's where our we develop autoimmune disease. It's going to the endocrine system. The inflammation is throwing those off, causing our body to start attacking ourselves. So when you think of the implants and then you think of like a 10-year diagnostic delay, so, and typically once you have symptoms, those implants have been firing away, releasing inflammatory meters for a very long time. But if you just think about day one of symptoms until, you know, 10 years of a diagnostic delay, there's 10 years of an inflammatory environment that our bodies have been living in. So if you go to the internist, right, like who works for a hospital, they're going to send off a panel of labs, they're going to tell you everything's normal, you look fine, and you're going to be like, but I don't feel fine, right? Because they're not even testing for the right things, right? They're not, they're not even understanding what to look for or testing. They're not looking at the gut. So I think it's the inflammatory effect of endometriosis. And when I wrote my book, what drove me to really think about endo differently is because I was in New York and there was a lot of Lyme disease in New York, right? Because I'm not far from Connecticut, Lyme, Connecticut. A lot of my patients would be on the Long Island shore, out in the Hamptons, where there was a lot of tick-borne illness. And I started to have like a lot of patients who were educating me about Lyme disease. And I'm like, this is so fascinating. So I started doing a deep dive into Lyme, and I realized that it's an inflammatory, like the ticks cause this whole inflammatory cascade in our body. And I'm like, this is how I have to approach endometriosis. And that's sort of what drove me to then further go from the inside out in terms of treating endometriosis. Obviously, coupled with excision of endo. Excision of endo is still the gold standard. We need excision, but when you're 10 years into anything, right? I don't care if you're 10 years into not exercising, right? You can't work with a trainer for four weeks and expect to like have a habit of exercising, right? If you ate poorly andor restricted your eating for 10 years, right, because you had tummy aches or food hurt, you thought that you're allergic to a lot of things. That restriction has led to such microbiome imbalances that it's going to take time to fix these things. So we need to cut out the implants and we need to treat the um to undo the inflammatory component of the disease.

SPEAKER_01: 5:25

That's a wrap for this quick connect. I hope today's insights helped you move forward with more clarity and confidence. Do you have more questions? Keep them coming. Send them in, and I'll bring you the expert answers. You can send them in by using the link in the top of the description of this podcast episode or by emailing contact at Indobattery.com or visiting the Indobattery.com contact page. Until next time, keep feeling empowered through knowledge!