Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: To it's a kinetic thing with Karen K. Today we're going to talk about hormone replacement therapy. So to start out, what are they?
[00:00:07] Speaker B: So hormones are substances that your body produce naturally, that you need for health and youth. So most people know testosterone, progesterone, estradiol, or there's actually three different estrogens, but estradiol is the one we replace most often. There's other hormones people don't know as much about. So we know thyroid replacement is a hormone hormone, vitamin D is a hormone. There's one called DHEA that has a lot to do with your cardiovascular health. So that's basically what hormones are.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: So women typically lose hormones as they age, but so do men, right?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yeah, both men and women see a pretty big decline in their hormone levels when they get in their 40s and 50s. So we, we know females have perimenopause and menopause, but they actually now have started calling it menopause as well as men start to see their testosterone levels drop.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: And so you have options to replace that with more of a natural product.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: We do. So we use bioidentical hormones. You know, for years there were more synthetic hormones, things like Premarin, Provera, things like that. But we found that they don't work exactly the same way our naturally made hormones work. So now we're seeing more and more what they call bioidentical hormones. And so what bioidentical hormones are basically, if you think about, let's say you have a lock and key to your front door and you go down to ACE Hardware and you have them make a duplicate of that key. That duplicate works exactly the same as the key that came with the lock. Right. And so bioidentical hormones fit those receptor sites that your body has for your natural hormones in the exact same way. Your body doesn't know the difference.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Okay, so say someone like my age at 62, is that something that I would be a candidate for? Or what's the. Is there an age cutoff?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: There really isn't an age cutoff. Now we're finding more and more that you can stay on hormones unless you have some rare contraindication forever. And they really are a key to healthy aging we see over in Europe. It's just almost expected that everyone's going to be on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy here in the US we just haven't caught up with that. I think, you know, for a multitude of reasons, some misinformation about the safety and efficacy of hormones and big Pharma really Controlling the narrative of what's going on in our lives. So we haven't been as aggressive with hormone replacement therapy in the past. Now we're starting to see that become more and more popular and more and more asked for. As more research comes out, the truth comes out about the safety and efficacy of hormone replacement.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: So a woman that's in pre menopause, is that something that she would start on just to eliminate drop off of hormones?
[00:03:03] Speaker B: So, yeah, it, you know, it depends obviously on your age and your symptoms, but especially perimenopause. We know we can help with a lot of those symptoms and avoid some health issues down the road. If we get started on the hormone replacement earlier instead of later. We've for years let women especially suffer with symptoms of fatigue and insomnia and bone loss and, you know, brain fog and hot flashes and things that really, it's not necessary.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: So what would be like, I have a friend that I was joking with her that she must be, she's 50. I'm like, you must be starting at least pre menopause. And she went and had her blood work and her blood work, her hormones were normal. So does that mean she's not in it or what? How does they indicate besides symptoms?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Well, it'd be hard for me to totally answer that without seeing what lab, because I hear and I get people in my office all the time that have been told their labs are normal.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: And one thing I always say is there's a difference between normal and optimal. Normal is like a bell curve of every other female, let's say the 45, and what their levels are. They may all be unhealthy or have, but it's just an average. And so, and it's a wide range list. I'm just, I don't know, throw out some numbers there. Say a female's total testosterone should be somewhere 100 to 200. Where your lab value may say 40 to 60. Well, that's normal. But is it optimal? No. So optimal. I always say when you look at the normal ranges, you can be. If we think about in school, you can pass a class with a D minus. You can pass a class with an A. So do you want D minus or do you want the A plus? So A plus is your optimal. That's where we want you to be. That's when you feel your best, when your symptoms are resolved and you have the most health benefits.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: So they come in to see you and you're going to draw blood immediately?
[00:05:02] Speaker B: We are, yeah. And so, you know, by Textbook definition. You're not in menopause till you have been exactly 12 months without a menstrual period.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:05:14] Speaker B: So if you go 11 months and 20 days and you have a one day period, you're not in menopause.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Okay. Wow, I never heard that.
[00:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah, so we look at other things too. You know, you can look at fsh, LH levels, which are blood levels. You look at their estradiol level, you can look at their progesterone testosterone levels. Obviously, thyroid's a big win. I hear people come in all the time and they're telling me, I know my thyroid's not active, it's sluggish. And my doctor says they checked the TSH and it was normal. But that's not all you check, you know, because their TSH splits into two different thyroid substances, T3 and T4. And you can have a normal TSH for years. But your T3, T4, especially your free T3, which means it's unbound, your body is using, it can be really, really low. And you're going to have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, even though your PSH is normal.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: And what is the symptoms of hypo?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: So usually you can't lose weight, tired, sluggish. You can have, you know, thinning of hair, shedding of hair, thin nails, unhealthy nails, kind of brain fog, that kind of thing, everything. If you think about, you know, low metabolism, a lot of that comes with hypothyroidism.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: And then what are the symptom of? Low hormone levels needing some replacement.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah, and you're going to see things depending on which hormone we're looking at. But you can have bone loss. You. So you start seeing like all of a sudden you're getting shorter. Why? Why am I getting shorter? Okay, you might see brain fog. Women especially tend to have poor sleep habits. You know, either they can't fall asleep or they fall asleep, but they wake up and there's a hundred things going on in their brain. Just no energy, no strength, no libido. Even if you make yourself have a sexual encounter, you may not be able to climax. Women especially can have vaginal dryness. They can have genital urinary symptoms. So things like urgency frequency, they can have pain during intercourse, they can have bleeding with intercourse. All of those can be signs of low hormone levels.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: And then obviously hot flashes are the hot flashes.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah, night sweats, those are other big ones that are usually key indicators.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yeah. So they come in to see you, you run blood work, they're obviously low. What do you determine, like, how much they get, what type, what's the procedure at that point?
[00:07:55] Speaker B: So there is a formula to calculate, like, what their age is, what we look at, what their age is, what their symptoms are, what their different lab levels are, and plugs into a formula. And then we will give them starting dose. And then usually what we do is once they get their first dose of hormones, we let them have that for about four to six weeks. And then we'll recheck their levels, but also have them fill out a new symptom.
And usually what we'll see is symptoms have greatly improved. Symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia. They may have that at the beginning of the consult is severe, extremely severe. And then when they come back four to six weeks later, those things are mild or moderate. And then we recheck their levels again. And we can always adjust their dose up or down based on their symptoms and their labs.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: And is the thermone replacement therapy, is it in a shot or how do you give those to people?
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Very different ways. It's somewhat dependent on the person, what their preference is. And then also there may be some medical reasons why we would choose one over the other. But for men, I would say probably the most requested is either injection pellet therapy or we can do sublingual, which is a dissolvable tablet that goes under their tongue. There is some new oral testosterone out there, which is the first that we've ever really had of a good quality oral testosterone. There are gels that you can use in creams as well. So for women, we can do again, oral medication. We can do sublingual. We can do pellets, occasionally do shots and don't do a lot of injections in women, patches, creams. So it just kind of depends on one, what their lifestyle is like and two, you know, any contraindications to one form versus the other.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: And is it a shot? Is that something they give themselves like weekly at home?
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah, we teach them how to inject themselves and then they go home with their medicine and they inject usually for shots. One, once or twice a week.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Okay. And then pellets. What is, how does that work?
[00:10:09] Speaker B: So pellets are little compressed, hard, compressed amounts of the different hormones. So I like a male testosterone pellet. It kind of looks like a tic tac, is, you know, a white tic tac. And they are placed with a hollow needle under the skin into the fat layer and they are time released and they absorb slowly over Time. So for males, they typically get pellets every five to six months. And the nice thing about pellets is they really mimic the body's own production of hormones in that where they sit and how the blood flows over them. When people are more active, doing more strenuous activity and things, they release a little more of the hormone. When they're sedentary and quiet, they don't release as much. So it really kind of mimics what our own body does. For females, pellets last three to four months. And so if you're not really great at taking medicine every day or twice a day and you know you're not going to remember, you don't remember which day you gave your shot on or you travel a lot. Pellets are great because you just put them in and forget about them.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: And is that considered surgery or how. What's that procedure look like?
[00:11:19] Speaker B: No, it's just a minor procedure. It's almost really an injection. The, the little hollow needle that we use is so small, we just close that puncture wound with a little steri strip and we cover it with a sterile bandage. They can take the bandage off the next morning and then leave the steri strips on for four or five days and then go on about their business.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: So it's an easy.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: In office, it's real, it takes about 10 minutes max.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: Where do you place the pellets?
[00:11:45] Speaker B: So in females, we place them in their buttocks, usually kind of the upper outer area of the hip because that's where women carry more fat. We used to place males pellets there as well, but males get a lot more pellets and bigger pellets and they don't carry much fat in their hips. So we put it in their love handles there above their belt, and they tolerate it much better there. And there's more fat there for them.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Is there downtime or. Not really.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: So we ask them to not shower. The day we put the pellets in, they can take a shower the next morning and then no setting in, like shared water. So no swimming pool, hot tub, bathtub for about four days. And like for males especially, we don't want to do any super extraneous activity like squats or heavy lifting for about four days as well.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: And then. So it's an in office Visit. It lasts three to five months depending, and then it's like 20 minutes in the office. Yeah. Basically after your initial consult where you take your blood work.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: So do you take pellets?
[00:12:55] Speaker B: I do.
I have pellets I heard the speaker talk the other day. I'll probably be in the casket with pellets in my beehive. I love them. I love the way I feel. I used to wake up drenched.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Night sweats.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: I'd go to bed freezing and then I'd wake up like somebody poured a bucket of water in the bed with me. And my husband used to say, you know, I can't stand to be next to you. You're like a furnace. Your feet are ice cold. And the rest of you, it's like a furnace. And you started. For the first time in my life having no libido. And since I've gotten a pellet therapy, it's so much better. And I'm not good at remembering to take meds every day or twice a day. So the pellets work great for me. My husband has pellets in both my partner and his wife have pellets. And I don't think any of us would ever go back to not not having them.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: How long have you been doing it for yourself?
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Oh, Gosh, I am 59 and I have probably been doing them at least five years or nine years now.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Really?
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Wow. So let's touch on a touchy subject because it's kind of a subject that matters to me about cancer and hormone replacement therapy. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:14:11] Speaker B: So there has never been any true research study that shows that hormones have any effect on increasing cancer rate. There have been some. You have to understand how research is done. And there's two ways that really people do research. One is randomized controlled trials with that are blind and that are placebo driven. So that means that, for instance, we take 100 women, all age 40, all with, let's say, no significant health problems, and we give them estrogen. We take another hundred women age 40 with no significant health problems. We give them a sugar pill. Neither group knows if they're getting estrogen or not. Then they follow those people for years, whatever, and then they look at did group A that got estrogen have more risk of cancer or less? Or did group B, they got the sugar pill. And they find over and over again when they do randomized control double blind studies that actually the incidence of cancer is lower in the women that got hormones than the women that didn't. Now also they do sometimes what they call retrospective review studies where they may pull an insurance database of 10,000 women, all about the same age, from all over the country. And all of those 10,000 women got a prescription for estrogen and Then they calculate cancer. You know, they interview them and how many of those got cancer. Problem with that study, type of study is we don't know if the women actually took the estrogen. They had a script for it. Did they fill the script? Did they take it? Were they tested prior to the study? Did they already have cancer and it just hadn't been detected yet? So sometimes those retrospective reviews will indicate a higher risk of cancer, but when you actually give the medicine to study cause and effect, it's a lower risk. And so you can assume just by looking at older data, when you don't know if anybody actually took it or what their. What their risk were or what underlying health issues, you can't really claim that. It's just. It's a great study to go build a new study to build a hypothesis. And, okay, now let's actually give the meds to some and not give to the other, and let's see what happens. And in every one of those studies where they actually gave the meds to one group but not to another, the risk of cancer is lower.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: So when an oncologist tells you not to take them, it's from an old study that isn't really a legitimate study.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Yeah, there's actually was a really great article and study that came out recently.
I believe it was in the Journal of Obstetric obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Levy. And she said the title of the study was something like, why are we still treating women like it's the 80s? There was one big study that came out from the Women's Health Initiative that did show women that got synthetic progesterone or progestins Provera that those women in the arm of that study had a higher risk of breast cancer. But that was looking at a synthetic hormone. And actually, over time, they found out the study wasn't clinically significant even with the synthetic hormone. One of the authors was overambitious and published an article without the consent of the other investigators. And before they had the final numbers in. And once the final numbers came in and everything came out, found out that that was wrong. That's what we'd been teaching in medical school for years, and they've hung their hat on it. And they've also extrapolated that because this one hormone, this synthetic hormone, maybe showed a little bit more. That must mean all hormones are bad, right? And that's like saying, you know, if you take genetically modified wheat, it does these things in your body, therefore all wheat is bad. You can't take wheat that's kind of the logic that came behind that Women's Health Initiative.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: It's frustrating for someone like me.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: It's frustrating because you've gone to a specialist who scared the life out of you, and then you've got somebody over here who has actually probably had 700 more hours in hormone therapy, a natural path or integrative medicine, functional medicine, person telling you you're perfectly safe and you're better if you do. And who do you believe? You know, this oncologist who saved your life or this, you know, rebel out here that's doing other things.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Rebel. Only to the medical world.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I think to traditional medicine, you know, and it's sad. And, and who sponsors all of the medical school education. That's big pharma.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: But they don't want you taking something they can't patent and make money off of.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: It is really, Ann. And we're seeing this more and more and more, as you know.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: And you had talked about a conference that you went to where that doctor is. The woman was doing high dose hormones.
[00:19:24] Speaker B: Yeah. There are physicians out there, primarily functional integrative medicine, hormone specialists, that are actually treating cancers with high dose hormones. And it's very promising looking. You know, we're still at that, unfortunately in the US we're so ready to sue people. And so, you know, what I keep getting told is if it's you or your own family, do it. If it's stranger, don't do it. Because if something happens, they're going to come after you and you're going to have to dig out these hormone specialists to testify on your half. The half. And there's 10,000 old school doctors that are going to testify against you. And it's sad.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: It is sad. And the, and also the positive of hormones is not just for the symptoms of low hormones, it's other things that it does for your body, which is scary to think about. I just witnessed my mom and I think some of that was having a hysterectomy really early and not taking any kind of hormone. And you see the deterioration of her body, of her heart, of all those things that could have been her heart.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Your cardiovascular system, your bone structure, your genitourinary system. You know, one of the physicians I've done a lot of training with is, he says he's a reformed ER doctor. He started an er and it was his nurses begging him to write them scripts for things like thyroid and hormones that nobody else would. And they were telling him, but we feel so much better and we're so much healthier. And he said, finally, you know, it got me thinking and I started doing research. And now he's kind of the king of hormone replacement. But he said, you know, if I had my way, I would sprinkle estradiol on every woman in every over 70. They would not be coming into my ER with urinary sepsis or fractured femurs or compression fractures of their spine. He said, wouldn't happen if we would treat them appropriately with hormones.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: That's so crazy.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Isn't it crazy?
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: You know, and speaking of estradiol, which is, like I said, the most prominent form of estrogen, now we're finding even health benefits for men. And we are starting to see more and more men being placed on it. And we used to think on estradiol, on estradiol, and not in huge doses. We're not trying to get their levels like a woman's level. It's not like when we're doing gender reassignment where we're trying to get a man to have a woman's level. But it's really, it's interesting that estradiol is the only drug, if you will, that not only stabilizes plaque buildup within the arteries and the cardiovascular system, but over time will reverse that plaque buildup. So with really little to no side effects. So, you know, when that plaque is built up inside your cardiovascular system and a piece of that plaque breaks off and travels, that's where you end up with a heart attack or stroke or a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in your lung, or maybe a blood clot down in your leg. So it makes that plaque stay where it is initially, and then over time, that plaque buildup dissolves, and there's nothing else out there that does that. You know, we all are being told you need to be on a statin medicine, a lipid lowering medicine. Studies have shown if you take a statin for 10 years, your life expectancy will increase by four days.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Four days for all the damage it's.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Doing, but all the side effects that come with it, all the muscle loss and wasting and fatigue and like, is that worth it? We have something out here that your body produces naturally that would do that. We can start supplementing as it starts to drop off production to do a much better job. And so, yeah, I have men now that have had strokes or heart attacks young and putting them on low doses of estradiol. And I'm like telling them, don't tell your primary care what we're doing, because they're going to think I'm crazy and quit taking that stupid statin. But don't tell them. And then they'll come back and they're like, my doctor's so happy my triglycerides are down and blah, blah, blah. And she said, good job taking that statin. And he said, you know, I just laugh behind their back but you can't tell them what you're doing because they will disagree and they will disagree and they will unfortunately don't know what they're talking about. Don't have the research, but you know, be disrespectful to another provider. There something different.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: That's really sad.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: It's so sad. It's so sad. And so, you know, as the doctor that I've trained with, he won't even tell you how much estradiol he takes, but he takes a ton.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Really.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: And as long as you keep the testosterone levels, you know, at a certain, above the estradiol, they don't grow boobs, they don't start crying at puppy commercials. You know, none of those things. Just like with women, women need testosterone too.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: And again, we're not giving them male levels of testosterone, we're giving them young, healthy female levels. So instead of feeling like a 60 year old woman, they feel like a 30 year old woman.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: And we all have testosterone anyway. We all over time. It does every. All the other hormones.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: It's just logic. If you think about logic, how many 20 year olds do you know with bone loss, with compression fractures that go into the hospital, with urinary tract infections, who, you know, have no enjoyment of sex, who have heart disease and breast cancer and uterine cancer, prostate cancer. Those things all happen later in life as your hormones deplete.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And you just basically described my mom. She had a compression fracture in her back which kept her immobile for a long time. She had a break ankle break because of bone loss. She had went into the hospital with the UTI and then it caused kidney failure and then she passed away. Like all those things, I saw all that happening to her over the years and it's just, it's sad to think about. And I feel like, you know, like with me having a hysterectomy in my 50s, I'm going to be just like her.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Because of the fact I had an oncologist tell me I can't take hormones because of the hormone driven cancer. In quotes.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Yeah. We now know with men, mainstream medicine, the second if they've had prostate cancer, the Second, their psa, their prostate specific antigen is back in normal range. They're considered in remission. They will immediately put men back on testosterone now because they know muscle loss, libido loss, erectile dysfunction, bone loss, all of those things outweigh the risk of taking the testosterone. But women in America, we're still again, treating them like the 80s when we know the research says we shouldn't be doing that.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Why is that? Why is it okay for them to do that with men but not women? It's just the same.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: It's just the same lack of knowledge. Yeah. Why do male executives always get paid more than female executives? And yeah, it's just men, unfortunately right now kind of control the medical schools, medical training, big pharma, so many things. And you know, we are always just told, well, that's just part of getting old, sweetie. That's just part of menopause. You just have to live with that. Well, no, you don't. No, you don't.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: That's so frustrating because the worst symptoms ever.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Especially the lack of sleep. I mean, you, anything you read about is always about sleep as your recovery. You need, yeah, you need a good amount of sleep to recover over the night so that you're actually healthier, function better, your brain functions better, but yet you can't sleep because you've. Yeah, you've got all the symptoms.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It's crazy. You put women on a little dose of progesterone at night, they're like, oh my gosh, I go to sleep, I stay asleep, I wake up rested. I had no idea. My brain's not crazy anymore. I'm not ready to cry at the drop of a hat or, or, you know, choke my husband at the hop of drop of a hat. Right.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: And a doctor, a medical doctor would not, would they. Do they even prescribe it to people?
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Rarely. The only time I typically will see, like mainstream medicine, they may prescribe a really low dose estrogen patch or pill for a lady that's having almost debilitating hot flashes or night sweats, but I rarely see them. Ever prescribed, prescribe progesterone and probably never testosterone.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: And if they do, it's synthetic. It's not.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Then there are some commercially made bioidentical estrogen and progesterone patches and peels out there now.
But it's really funny because a lot of especially gynecologists still use Provera, which is the synthetic progestin that actually has a black box warning on it for breast cancer. And they'll tell People, they can't take hormones, but they have bleeding between their periods or something, and they'll put them on the worst drug out there. Yeah, it just, you know, and I've watched my own family, my little niece and stuff, and I'm like, I could fix you. But, you know, she has a relationship with her doctor and this is what her doctors told her and that's what she's going to do. But it drives me nuts.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I can only imagine it does.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Because even as just someone that's from the outside looking in, it just makes zero sense.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: It really, it makes none. And you know, one quote I heard recently that really kind of resonated with me is muscle is the currency of aging.
Meaning that if you maintain good muscle tone as you age, you're less likely to be immobile, headbound, chair bound. You're more likely to live a vibrant life far into, you know, your, your age. And losing testosterone has a you. It's very hard to build muscle with no testosterone for men or women.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: And you see men that are at the gym all the time, they're working out hard, but they're just still putting this pot belly on and they just don't have the strength. They can't lift what they used to, they can't do the number of reps, they're just not honed the way they used to be. It's all testosterone deficiency. Yeah.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Wow. It's really frustrating. Well, obviously you've done a lot of research. You are the expert in Tulsa, I think, on hormone replacement therapy.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: I have done probably at least 700 hours of education just in bioidentical hormone replacement. I just got back last week from another conference in San Antonio. I'm going all the time, learning more all the time.
Really interesting to see different people across the country. Like, one of the main speakers that I've listened to several times is actually a cardiovascular surgeon, so an open heart surgeon.
He prescribes ton of estradiol to men and women. He's like, I don't want him back in my operating room again. And somehow, because he has become so knowledgeable in hormone replacement therapy, he has a huge practice of women with pcos, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Primary mainstream medicine doesn't know how to treat that. And it's actually fairly easy to treat.
Progesterone is a life changer for these women. And so, like, how does the cardiovascular surgeon, an open heart surgeon from Chicago, end up being the national expert on pcos? Well, it's all because of hormones. I also met a really interesting psychiatrist in Tennessee who was. Has a psychiatry practice, and next door he had a medicine spa. And I actually used to travel around the country training people and using med spa equipment, lasers, and things like that. And so I had to ask him, I'm like, how's a psychiatrist transition to med spa? And he's like, well, you know, we now know in psychiatry that a big part of depression, anxiety, a lot of those things are hormone imbalances. And so I treat first line with bioidentical hormones before I put them on an antidepressant or anything. Or maybe if they're really severe, I do it concurrently. And then as soon as possible, once I get their hormones optimized, I start backing them off those other medicines because of the side effects. And he said, once I got people feeling so much better, they're not depressed, they're not anxious, then they're like, oh, I know my skin looks better. What else can I do? I want to fix this. I want to fix that. And he said it became a natural progression. And I thought, wow, that's interesting.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: But, yeah, you're seeing a lot more on hormone replacement therapy in the psychiatric world, probably non OBGYN or urology, even.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: As sad, which totally makes sense because you do feel like when you're in the middle of it, that you are a little bit crazy. Like, you do feel like you're going crazy.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: And it totally makes sense that that would calm all that down, because it is a hormone problem.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: It is.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: It's not that you're crazy. And you know how many men say women are crazy? Well, we're not crazy, but we're going through a crazy period because of low hormone.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: That makes total sense.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: We're so forgiving for women's hormones going nuts when they're going through, like, IVF or, you know, fertility treatments or during pregnancy. But we don't recognize the same things happening when they're going through perimenopause and menopause. And we need to be as gracious, but we also need to treat that too.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Women talk about it all the time when they're pregnant, how their hormones are going crazy. Or we were just talking about a podcast earlier with she just had a baby and post pregnancy and how she, you know, her hormones are all over the place. And it's true. And it's the same thing when you're going through menopause or post menopause, all of it, you're just. You feel a little crazy.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Just thinking of You. You said pregnancy. And we now know that postpartum depression is primarily because their progesterone levels are high when they're pregnant, and they bottom out as soon as they have the baby. And if you put somebody postpartum depression on some little progesterone, you. You. You cure them. They don't have to go through months of feeling horrible that they're not bonding with their baby and can't get out of bed. Put them on a little progesterone.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: And what do doctors put them on? It's like an anti. Anxiety.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:33:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Which is sad.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: Because that's not what they need.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: It's not what they need. And they come with their own set of side effects.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: Like they.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: They may not be crying all the time, but they're walking around like a zombie, you know?
[00:33:51] Speaker A: Yeah, they have. No. They're.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: No.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: I just listened to a podcast the other day, and she had.
She had it after her second. Our first child, and she went on it, and her husband talked about that she was, you know, just the tin man, that she had zero emotion. She never cried. There was nothing. And how awful that was, you know, and how she was so glad to get off of them because she did just have nothing. It was just like stone cold on everything. I thought, well, that's a terrible way, especially as a new mother with a new baby and you have zero love or just. It's just like. Yeah, just a zone.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: You're not excited about that baby's first smile or their first laugh. How sad is that? Yeah.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Wow. It's a whole world out there with this. We could probably go on forever.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Yeah, we could.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: And you've got a lot of knowledge behind you. So I guess the thing is, is if you are even slightly interested in hormone replacement therapy, definitely call you.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Be happy to see you here in Tulsa at Kinetic Clinic, 918-574-2376. If you're not in the Tulsa area, find somebody that truly specializes in hormone replacement that's got lots of training in it, Functional medicine, integrative medicine, naturopaths. And that makes sure, you know, that they're up to date on their knowledge and research and get some help. You don't have to live like that.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And we have. She has an Instagram account, Kinetic Clinic, and then Facebook is also Kinetic Clinic. You can follow her there. And then, of course, this podcast.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And then our web page or Our website is www.kineticclinic. net.
