Unmasking Our Health: Hypermobility & hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), Part 1

Episode 215 with Katy Weber & Kalin Johnson

Welcome back to our new series, “Unmasking Our Health,” in which host Katy Weber teams up with medical expert Dr. Kalin Johnson, PharmD, to look beyond the neurodivergent brain and explore what it means to live in a neurodivergent body.

After years of interviewing late‑diagnosed women and seeing the same patterns — chronic pain, fatigue, autoimmune issues, hormonal chaos, gut problems, “mystery” symptoms — Katy created the Unmasking Our Health series to explore the bigger questions behind neurodivergence: What if ADHD isn’t just about our brains, but about our whole bodies — and how and why is the medical system missing the full picture?

In part one of a 2-part series, we unpack hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) and hypermobility, and why these connective tissue conditions so often show up alongside ADHD and autism. This episode focuses on the lived experience, the diagnostic gray areas, and the body-wide symptoms that can look unrelated until you understand the connective tissue thread running through them.

We discuss how hypermobility is different from flexibility, why the Beighton score can miss real cases, and why symptoms like bruising, pain, dizziness, brain fog, and poor stamina often get mislabeled as “just clumsiness” or “just anxiety.”

In this episode, we cover:

The difference between hypermobility spectrum disorder and hypermobile EDS, including the extra diagnostic criteria for hEDS beyond joint laxityKalin explains the difference between flexibility and hypermobility using the rope-versus-bolts analogyThe Beighton score is helpful as a screening tool, but it only checks five joints and can miss people whose hypermobility shows up elsewhere, especially with ageKalin shares her diagnosis story, including years of worsening symptoms, specialist dead ends, and being told it was mental health before the physical pattern was recognizedWe discuss why ADHD and autism appear more often in hypermobile people, with possible shared genetics, connective tissue differences in the brain, autonomic nervous system dysregulation, and altered sensory processingThe connections between hEDS and POTS, orthostatic intolerance, fatigue, GI symptoms, interoception differences, mast cell issues, and inflammationCommon real-life clues like “party tricks,” joint pain in yoga, easy bruising, weak grip, poor stamina, and the feeling of being “a creaky old lady” after sitting too longWhy car rides, standing still, a