Hormone Harmony from Within: Building the Foundations of Health Naturally

Introduction to Truly Healthy MD 0:00

But finally, I think as a society, we're really conditioned by advertisement, but also our medical system that just reinforces the idea that a pill will solve your problems. And we're all so busy that that sounds like a really nice answer. But unfortunately, if you just take a pill or whatever form of medication you're taking, You might have more side effects from it. You might need to take more of it. And then that leads to more side effects, more complications, or it can just, you're not going to get as much out of it.

Like it might make things better, but it's not going to heal your body. Like setting up good foundations is helpful. Hi, I'm Dr. Monica Haragy and welcome to Truly Healthy MD. I have one question for you. What's really behind the way you feel? As a functional medicine doctor, I'm passionate about helping you uncover the hidden causes of your health concerns and finally connecting the dots. From balancing hormones, to overcoming Lyme disease, boosting brain health, or just finding new ways to feel your best every day.

This podcast is packed with insights and strategies to help you take control of your health and live holy. Ready to explore what's possible and be truly healthy? Welcome to the Truly Healthy MD podcast. I am Dr. Monica Hareke. Today we are going to talk about hormones. I know that 99% of my patients ask me about hormones. I love talking about this, teaching about this. Today we have two naturopathic doctors, Dr. Serena Russam and Dr.

Hormone Health Background and Patient Demand 1:33

Heidi Codino, they are doctors at Blossoming Longevity. They service the Portland metro area. They have telehealth visits available in Oregon and Washington. But even if you're not in Oregon and Washington, if you are somebody who's interested in learning more about not only hormones, but root cause ways to improve your hormone health, please listen to our podcast today. Welcome Dr. Serena, Dr. Heidi. How are you guys doing today? Great. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I am so excited about talking about this.

This is definitely something that I feel there's so much interest around and a lot of information on the internet. Some of it might be misinformation. So I love talking to other clinicians about this so that we can set the record straight and make sure that we get some very good quality education out there. Such an important topic for most people. So tell me all about yourselves, help our listeners understand your background, what led you to focus on hormone health. Sure. So I'm Dr. Heidi and I've struggled with hormones my entire life.

And so I've always been kind of a part of it, but never knew anything about it. And when I became a naturopathic doctor, I went to school with Dr. Serena and we ended up starting a family medicine practice. And then we saw firsthand, you know, how much need in the community there is and how much or I should say how little we knew about hormones because we learn about it, but I feel like we don't learn enough in med school. And so that's kind of how we started going was just really us and our patients that have had to deal with things and not getting the help that we need.

So we just started diving deeper and doing clinical things that actually led us to where we are now. Yeah, and to add to that, because Dr. Huddy doesn't like to share anything about herself, both of us have struggled with our own hormone problems from younger ages. And when we would go to doctors, we just felt like the options were so, so limited. And we felt like there was more out there. And we, you know, did the work and did deeper dives. And now we want to bring that information to other people.

Yeah, that's wonderful. So much education needs to happen so that people really understand and embrace their own hormones. A lot of people feel like hormones are a problem that they have to deal with. No, our hormones are amazing. If we can embrace them and make the most out of our lives, that is such a vital part. And as you said, there's a lot of people struggling from a very young age, from the time girls go through their first cycles.

Foundations of Hormone Balance 4:10

Oh, yeah. young women, women who are in the middle of their reproductive years, women who are in perimenopause, women who are in postmenopause, and also such an important topic at most ages. So I do know that both your practice and my practice is very much focused in making sure that people are healthy and focusing in on The foundations of health, it's not just jumping to, hey, let's put in a pellet. I'm not saying that hormone replacement doesn't have its place, but we definitely need to work on the foundations with every single person on ourselves also.

So how do the foundations of health come into play in the context of when we talk about hormone balance? So, you know, everything balanced in our body needs to be starting from the foundations of health. So let's kind of define what the foundations of health are. So it's your core lifestyle of like nutritional movement, physiological principles, optimal function through all of your systems. So really it starts with healthy lifestyle choices. So regular movement, managing stress, getting quality sleep.

Those are all essential to hormone balance, but just your whole body as in a whole anyways. Also nutrition is huge and You know, we do live in America and you hear the sad diet, the standard American diet, and that is not nutritious pretty much in any way. And so nutrition is huge. We need a diet rich in whole foods, healthy fats, quality proteins, a lot of fiber, key nutrients that are going to fuel our body and our hormone processes. So like on the flip side, eating too little or relying on poor quality foods, that can really throw everything off hormonally.

We also need to make sure that we're protecting our detox organs, especially liver gut bowels. All of these are critical players in metabolizing and eliminating either excess hormones or working well with hormonal balance to make sure that you are reabsorbing your hormones so that you can use them again. Really, it kind of just, again, brings it all down kind of to the gut. We all love to talk about the gut, but that's how we get rid of things. That's how we get all of our neurotransmitters, our hormones.

That's how we are able to use all of those things. So it's really huge to make sure that we are supporting our liver and gut. And you can do that in healthy ways with all of the things that we've talked about already. And finally, you know, we really can't ignore environmental factors. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are found in plastics, pesticides, personal care products. They can mimic or interfere with our natural hormones. And so it throws the whole system off. Together, all of these foundations is what we like to call hormonal harmony.

And so even tiny little disruptions from poor sleep or unmanaged stress or being around too many toxins or, you know, using the wrong kind of products or eating the wrong kind of food. it can just lead to huge symptoms and throw everything off in our body. If you like this discussion, please hit the subscribe button and consider leaving us a review. It really helps people find us and we truly appreciate your support. I do get a lot of patients that come to me since I prescribe hormone therapy and they just want that quick fix.

They're like, hey, I heard that if I take some estrogen or get an estrogen patch. My problems are going to go away, but absolutely supporting the gut. I always remember that, you know, they say that you are what you eat, but what we add on on functional medicine is that you are what you eat, but you're also what you can absorb and what you can't excrete. So making sure the gut function is intact so we can absorb all those good nutrients that we're working so hard to if we're trying to eat an organic balanced diet, you want to be able to absorb them, you want to be able to excrete all the stuff that our liver filtered and our bile is trying to get rid of.

So you're not only what you eat, but what you can absorb and what you can excrete. So absolutely focusing on gut health is one of those things that we have to talk about with every patient basically on every visit. And absolutely, I do get so many patients who just jump straight to, give me hormone replacement therapy and don't talk to me about all the foundational things. Why do I get so many patients that do that? What's your experience? Well, I think it's a lot to do with not knowing how important foundations of health are or just how much they impact our overall hormonal health.

And I think a lot of people think that like, you know, when I was younger, I didn't have to think about those things because my body just dealt with them. Well, you know, unfortunately, the longer we live, the more, you know, we get exposed to things, things build up. I mean, the body just starts needing more support throughout life. So it's important to make sure you're setting those foundations throughout life, but especially as we get older, when we're typically talking to someone about hormone replacement therapy.

But I also just think that we're often marketed things as healthy, which aren't and can really confuse people. I like to use the example of like yogurt. I mean, like yogurt should be a pretty healthy food. In most cases, it's like high in protein. It's typically a whole food, but A lot of brands are just full of sugar and so then it becomes a not so healthy food or you know if you're dairy intolerant that's not going to be a good food for you. So it gets a little bit complicated when people like don't know what to eat or what to focus on when there's like foundations of health can be really overwhelming and if you try to do everything at once it's impossible honestly even if you know everything you can't do everything.

about it. And so food can be really overwhelming, cutting out toxins can be really overwhelming. So I think a lot of people just get really overwhelmed and they think they're doing healthy things when they're not.

Why Patients Want Quick Fixes 10:11

But finally, I think as a society, we're really conditioned by advertisement, but also like our medical system that just reinforces the idea that a pill will solve your problems. And we're all so busy that that sounds like a really nice answer. But unfortunately, if you just take a pill or, you know, whatever form of medication you're taking, you might have more side effects from it. You might need to take more of it. And then that leads to more side effects, more complications, or it can just, you're not going to get as much out of it.

Like it might make things better, but it's not going to heal your body. Like setting up good foundations, helpful for sure, for sure. And so. When I try to educate patients, definitely we talk about sleep, exercise, stress management, nutrition. But I think the hardest one to educate about is nutrition because there's just so many things to talk about. So when we're focusing on hormone health, what are the basic things that you discuss with your patients, with the people that you're educating regarding nutrition and hormone health?

So really, I was a nutritionist before I went to med school. So this is kind of my forte. I love it. And I really break it down simple for them. So we do a lot of this before we even test for hormones or what we need to do. But really, you can't eat the standard American diet. You need to feed your body real whole foods, not processed, not high sugar, not with a bunch of other toxins, microplastics, all those things, because those are all going to disrupt your hormones. So we really want to make sure that they're eating a nice whole food, whole food diet that's got lots of fiber.

And then eventually, so we get them started kind of with that, right? So we start them on as much organic as they can possibly do and as much whole food as they can possibly do, cut out the processed foods, cut out sugar. And then we go into more of how we want them to eat for their hormone health. So there's different types of things that you can do. There's fasting, there's intermittent fasting, there's cycle syncing so that you're actually doing all those things with your cycle, if you're still cycling.

In perimenopause, you are still cycling, but it's kind of harder to do that because your cycles are very weird and off. But there's lots of things you can do with that, too. Typically, I'm not opposed to fasting. I don't think it's right for everyone. But if you are going to fast and you are cycling, I just tell you to do it in the first three to 14 days of your cycle because you don't want to really do it in your luteal phase. You need more. food and I think that's one of the other things especially my generation growing up in the 80s and 90s is everything was oh calories in calories out you want to make sure that you don't eat fat you know fat is bad and you know don't have any carbs whatsoever and that's really just not that great for you right like you need fiber and a lot of times that fiber is going to come from either whole grains or vegetables or you know good healthy whole foods And we need healthy fats.

We need healthy fats. That's going to help make the cholesterol. That's going to help make the hormones. And I think people often will kind of cut those out and think that they need to have certain amounts of things. And then we also make sure that they're eating enough protein because protein is huge, especially in perimenopause menopause. But you need protein to help with your regulation of hormones. You don't want to break down your body to a point where it can't even make the hormones anyways.

So you've got to eat a lot of protein. You've got to eat a lot of fiber, nice, healthy fats. Those are what's going to help your hormones stay in balance. just to like add to that is that I do think you should individualize diets to your patients like when we are talking to our patients like those are our

Nutrition for Hormone Health 13:53

general recommendations but there's lots of tweaking because I don't think like everyone's body does great on the same like general diets like there's lots of fad diets out there and people get hooked on them but you know I'm a pretty pro like whole food omnivore type diet just because it keeps things balanced but I do think you need to still individualize even that general recommendation towards people because people can have different food intolerances that you need to cut out because that's going to cause inflammation and then that's going to ruin a lot of digestion if you're not cutting that out or they could have other things going on that you need to eat a specific way for a specific period of time to like heal that portion so There is a lot of individualizing with diet, but like Dr.

Heidi said, the big rules are eat whole foods, fiber, protein, healthy fats. Fatigue, brain fog, mood swings, weight gain. If you're a woman in your 40s to 70s, you've probably been told that it's just aging. But what if it's not? At TrulyHealthyMD.com, we look deeper. hormones, nervous system health, hidden toxicities. You're not broken. You just need a doctor who really listens. Visit trulyhealthymd.com and book a consultation today. It's time to feel like your real self again. absolutely definitely much different than most people who are eating out there if we just look at the general statistics of what the standard American diet is definitely not having enough of those things so yeah and personalizing not just for the things that you mentioned, also genetic factors, cultural factors.

There's things that we need to take into account as clinicians when we're recommending a specific diet. So it drives me crazy when people are like, oh, I read about this diet on. social media, I watch the TikTok and that's what I'm going to follow. It's like, did you take into account that that's just not one hit, it's all. And so, like we mentioned, apart from nutrition, another thing that we want people to work on just as a foundational thing and Probably the hardest thing to work on. I tell my patients if I had a magic wand and I could fix just one thing, I would fix stress.

Well, stress is just so ubiquitous. We all struggle from dealing with stress. Stress is part of our lives. It's part of the world out there. Turn on the news for two seconds and you know that it's a stressful world. We can't escape stress, but teaching people how to deal with stress, how to manage that, stress is part of also our circadian cycle, how people sleep, and how that affects all our hormones. And when we talk about hormones, people might think, hey, we're talking about estrogen. But no, we're talking about everything.

We're talking about cortisol, we're talking about insulin, progesterone, testosterone, estrogen, all of thyroid hormones, these all interact. So how would you explain to our listeners the relationship between stress and all of these hormones, which are in a web and they all affect each other? I am the worst with stress, so I'll let her take this one. I struggle with it too, but as far as the science behind it, yes, I do like it. It's kind of a long-winded answer, I'll forewarn you. But stress, whether it's mental, emotional, or physical, like lack of sleep, or poor nutrition, or feeling stressed out because of work, it affects your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal access, but really it affects your hypothalamus, and your hypothalamic-pituitary access affects ton of hormones, but let's focus on the HPA first.

That controls your stress response. And so when this system is activated too often or for too long, cortisol levels rise and elevated cortisol starts to interfere with blood sugar regulation by increasing glucose production. pressing insulin release, impacting insulin receptor function, leading to insulin resistance, then this creates more internal metabolic stress and that metabolic stress is another form of stress. So it goes back to the feedback into the HPA access. and it signals the body that it's under a continued threat, which raises cortisol even more, creating like this vicious cycle of blood sugar imbalance and hormone disruption.

So if that's one way that it is stressed out, then we can add other types of stress onto that. So then once that disrupted stress access, is going off it also throws off our circadian rhythms including our sleep-waste cycles which further increase our stress response adding into that vicious cycle and then that poor sleep becomes yet another stressor and that further breaks down the system. And then when you get into like other types of hormones, that's when your hypothalamus pituitary gonadal access or like your brain to your ovaries or your testes access comes into play because they're all connected to that hypothalamus pituitary.

That's like where your brain like sends the signals to your organs that make those hormones that says, hey, I want you to make these hormones. So if that upper control center is disrupted, it's going to impact all of these things. So when it's impacting your HPG access, that governs your reproductive hormones and chronic stress doesn't just affect the metabolism, but it also directly affects like estrogen and progesterone regulation. When the HPA access is constantly activated, then it suppresses the HPG access, and that can lead to reduced signaling from the brain to the ovaries or testes,

Stress, Sleep, and Hormone Disruption 19:38

resulting in lower production of hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. The downstream elevated cortisol can also speed up hormone metabolism, so then you burn fruit, so those hormones faster, so you You know, not only could you be making less, but you could also just be burning through them faster than you normally would. And then on top of that, cortisol also binds to hormone receptors and blocks those hormones from binding to like where they're supposed to do their job. So your brain tells your other organs to make these hormones and then those hormones go off and they do all these things.

But then cortisol can get in the way and actually like block the road so it can't get there to do its job. and so it really creates this really big vicious cycle and unfortunately we live in this stressful society like you said and once we're in that stress state it can be hard to get out of it so usually when i'm trying to help my patients get out of it i usually start really basic because it's super hard struggle with it personally but i usually say let's decide on one non-negotiable that we are gonna do.

Whether that's once a day, once a week, or once a month, we're gonna start somewhere and we're gonna pick the one thing that makes us feel less stressed. And so I know a lot of people are big on like meditation and stuff like that and that's fine, but that doesn't work for everyone. So sometimes I break it down to as simple as like, okay, you get up and you have your cup of coffee in the morning. You're just gonna sit there and enjoy that cup of coffee before you do anything else. That is just going to be your time to sit there and just be present, enjoying your coffee, not checking emails, not multitasking, trying to like prep breakfast.

No doom scrolling. Yeah, no doom scrolling. I know, right? It's scrolling. That's hard. That's hard to avoid. Yeah, so it could be as simple as that. And it's like, you know, that's five, 10 minutes, 15 minutes a day that I think everyone can really try to carve out if they're really serious about wanting to improve their health. And then that gives you those few minutes to calm down and not be stressed out. If you can't start there and you want to start with like well once a week I'm going to take a bubble bath or like whatever it is for you like I don't care but we just agree on a non-negotiable and we start there and we build off off that.

Yeah, little baby steps sometimes, right? Sometimes we want to change everything all at once, but that's just not how humans work. We need to find little things that are actionable and don't feel like an insurmountable task. We can do it. We can do it. We can move with things step by step. I'm all about the baby steps when it comes to trying to set up those foundations of health. It's a baby step process for a lot of people. You just pick the one that you can agree to and stick to once that becomes a habit and you move on to the next one.

Yeah, we do that a lot. Yeah, and breaking things down for patients so that they understand. It's a stepwise process. It didn't take you one day to get where you are. You're not going to heal overnight. It's going to be a process. It's going to take time. It's going to take focus. But that is what a lot of us do in this type of medicine. We try to not just be prescribers, but healers. And we're partners in our patient's health. Walking that walk with our patients and taking time to do those things is definitely a thing that's a calling for us and not just, hey, I went to medical school, I'm going to follow the park call.

Exactly. It is a lot of cheerleading that you get to do. That's a good way to describe it. You get to really celebrate their wins. no matter how small it is. That's the other thing that I feel like a lot of people, they beat themselves up for not doing enough fast enough. And I'm like, no, you made a new habit that's healthy. That is a huge win. That is a big step. Let's just take a moment to appreciate that. And then let's pick the next thing. You ate vegetables today. Yes. whatever it is, it's like it is the celebration.

For sure, in the fast-paced world and how artificial things are, I think one of the most toxic things in our lives today is social media. People make it sound like you can become super healthy from one day to the next. It's so artificial and it makes us feel like we need to be perfect from one day to the next once we decide to do something that is not real life. Being more realistic about our goals is one of the most important things that I can do for patients and not set them up for failure, be like, hey, from now until I see you in a month, I need you to change everything.

That's just not to happen. Yeah, and then they're just overwhelmed and don't change anything. Yeah, so. Yeah, I know, right? There's so much that people need to do, especially, obviously, when patients come to us. Some patients are already, they've already been working on themselves for a long time. Some people might have excellent foundations as far as nutrition, stress management, or exercise. But the honest truth is that most people have a lot to work on, on all these separate things. And so number one is, education, understanding how these things affect us.

Number two is awareness of our personal habits. So it's crucial for us to get to know our patients and see how they are individuals. And to me, it's a lot more fulfilling to have this type of practice as compared to when I was just doing 100% conventional medicine and people were just a list of diagnoses and pills that I recommended, right? So definitely a lot more fulfilling for me. And I know that my patients have a much different experience now that I've gone the functional holistic integrative route and learned so much from so many people.

I learned from naturopaths like you guys every day. I learned from health coaches. I learned from my patients. I learned from just so many different patient people so that I can personalize this and help patients. The last thing I think we can fit in in the last few minutes that we have together is gut health. Oh my gosh, this is a huge topic. We might even have to leave that as a cliffhanger. But again, we, as those of us who are in holistic health that look at the whole patient, we often start with gut health, even if the patient comes to me for migraines.

I'm gonna start with their gut health. And they think it's so weird sometimes. But yeah, also, when people come to me for hormone health primarily, I'm not just gonna look at their hormones. I'm gonna ask them about, do you have joint pain? Do you have fatigue? Do you have brain fog? But I will always, always, always start with gut health. And so just to try to make that a little bit less confusing for patients, why am I asking them about gut health when they're coming to me? What's the connection there?

So for gut health, I mean, starting with nutrition is really important, but you also got to get out the things that are inflaming your gut. So getting out your food intolerances is a huge thing that I don't think is talked about enough. And also like how we test for food intolerances can be like a whole nother Question that we should dive into at a later date But the summary is got to get out your fruit intolerances and you got to eat a healthy diet That's not going to eat like not consuming things that are inflammatory But just to kind of tie in how it comes back to hormones is that you know, the microbiome is a hot topic but Within our microbiome, we have something that's now starting to come to the forefront in research called your estrobolo.

I know that is so interesting and I honestly sorry to cut you off, but I honestly do not have a One-sentence answer of how to tell people what that is. So if you can help me explain that that's huge Yeah, so it's a subset of the bacteria that produce a specific enzyme called beta-glucuronidase,

Gut Health and Estrogen Metabolism 27:28

which helps regulate how much estrogen is resorbed into your bloodstream through a process known as heterohepatite circulation. So when our ovaries make our hormones, or in this case we're specifically talking about estrogen, it goes through our bloodstream, but then eventually it's going to come back into our digestive tract because our liver is going to process it, it's going to get dumped into your GI tract, and then when it's getting exposed to the bacteria in your gut, If there's a lot of beta glucuronidase in there, that enzyme, it's going to be broken down faster.

If there's not a lot in there, it's going to be broken down slower. When it's not broken down, it can be reabsorbed back into the bloodstream because that's how our gut works. We absorb things into the bloodstream. And so that's how it can drastically affect your estrogen levels throughout your entire life. But just as like a cliffhanger we should get into next time, it super impacts perimenopause and menopause. And yes, So yes, and those hormones also impact your gut health at that time because like we talked about, cortisol can make leaky gut.

Your estrogen or lack thereof and progesterone and testosterone levels can also affect if you're having leaky gut and increasing that inflammation. And then those hormones can also affect your microbiome because your microbiome changes as you age. which then impacts this whole extra volume period. So it's really complicated, but that is kind of the short and dirty is that your hormones are processed by the little bugs in your gut and they determine how much gets to go back and play and how much gets to leave after.

And that really impacts other symptoms down the line. Yeah, that's a really good way of explaining it. I think the main thing I would add, whether this is something that our listeners or general population understands, is that when we say estrogen, there's no such thing as estrogen by itself. There's a ton of things. There's estrogen, there's estradiol, there's estriol, and then those get metabolized meaning change in our body when we make change them into the active form they change into the two hydroxy four hydroxy 16 hydroxy and we want to try to make sure that we have mostly the two hydroxy i know this is getting crazy and there's not going to be a quiz but It is important for those people who are very interested in hormone health because these are the terms that your clinician is going to use.

These are terms that you're going to come across when you're trying to optimize your health. And so we want to make sure that our gut health is healthy enough where we get rid of excess of the four and the 16. If you build these up, they will become inflammatory they will give you all the bad symptoms that you correlate with hormones like oh my I have breast tenderness I have moodiness I have inflammation and so our gut will help us get rid of the four and the 16 and we want to have predominantly two and so obviously that's super simplistic those people who are researchers that might be listed as they're like rolling your eyes they're like that's simplistic but just in very general terms.

It's not like, yeah, I maybe have too much estrogen to a little estrogen, but what matters more is the balance between the two 416 and how we as humans are. What I like to tell my patients is there's so many like things on TikTok like, oh, do this detox. Actually, our bodies are naturally made to detox every single day. That's what our body's doing all the time. That's what your liver is doing. That's what your microbiome is doing. So you just need a support. That's what our poop and our pee are.

People don't realize that. That's what our poop, our pee, our sweat. That's what it is. And our sweat. Yeah. Absolutely. And so we are already primed to do that, whether or not we are supporting that in the amount of fiber we eat, in whether we're exercising and sweating. That's where the practical tips come in. But if anybody really wants to understand, especially estrogen, that's what they need to understand. There's not just estrogen in general. That's not a thing. That's just a term we use to simplify things.

There's Estradiol is the type of estrogen that we will really focus on, where we're going to measure the most, because that's the most active type. But if you really want to understand your hormones, you got to understand 2, 4, 16. 2 is the one that you want, having good nutrition, good sleep, good bowel habits, making sure you're pooping at least once a day. That is what's going to keep the 2 higher, the 4 and the 16 lower. And so a lot of things to know, but in general, I do think the summary of what we've talked about today is if you are worried about your hormones, whether you're a teenager and you're like, oh my gosh, my hormones are making me break out in acne and my PCP wants to start me on a contraceptive and I don't want to because I don't need it for contraceptive reasons or you're going through menopause or you're on replacement, everybody out there, and men also, men also need to understand that your lifestyle, how much exercise you're doing, how you're managing stress, how your gut is doing, that is the cornerstone.

Please do not go to a low T clinic if you have not already at least thought about these things. Yeah, low T clinics are great. A lot of people have great outcomes with replacing hormones. I prescribe hormones to all my patients that qualify for that, but I will absolutely not ever prescribe a hormone to somebody who has not looked at the basics. We prescribe hormones all the time. We love hormones. Hormones are great. Hormones help your body. That's what's great for longevity. But we don't give them an ultimatum or anything, but we're kind of strict about it.

Like you need to change these things. You need to do these things. Also, you can't just have hormones because nothing's going to change if you just add the hormones and you have to do all of these things to make your body healthy. Yeah, absolutely. And I've had several perimenopausal women where we're thinking, both me and the patients thinking, oh my gosh, your symptoms are going to get so much better as soon as we start you on estrogen. And they get worse. I mean, I have had some cases where the patient comes back to their follow-up visit.

They're like, I got so much worse on the hormone. I'm like, but it says that your estrogen's low. And it's because they had things like mole toxicity, overwhelm of all their detox mechanisms. So they weren't able to, process the hormones in a natural way. Absolutely. So many things for us to educate the public, tell our patients. As you can tell, I get super passionate about this because- I know, we get really geeky about it too. I love it. You can talk about this forever. I love having conversations with other clinicians like you guys because I feel like the most frustrating thing for me is to be looking on social media and seeing misinformation and I know it's out there and I'm like, one of the main things I want to do is set the record straight, make sure that people understand these things so that they're not just trying to have, like we said previously, the quick fixes or trying to change a lot of things that are not going to help.

So anyway, I so much appreciate you guys being on here and we will definitely have a part two. Like I said, we got to finish talking about the gut because that's such a large topic. We could probably have like hours of conversation, but We got finished thinking about the gut. I wanna talk to you guys about testing. That's a question that I get a ton. Going through cases also helps my listeners and patients understand a little bit more, something more personalized, let's say. And what I do like to talk about hormones over time.

Obviously, if we're talking to somebody who's on hormone replacement, they're in their 50s, 60s versus a teenager that I get that's like, hey, I need help with my hormones, but I don't care about what you do with your 60 year old. talking about that. And finally, I think the most important thing we could do to educate the public is even though we obviously can't get medical advice to people who are not our patients, we can definitely talk to them about things that are actionable steps that everybody needs to know so that they could go ahead and start making a difference in their everyday health.

Hormone Testing, Personalization, and Takeaways 35:48

So one quick thing, if you could tell our listeners, hey, we've talked about so many things, What's the takeaway here? What is the takeaway for our listeners? But either our patients or not or They're like hey, I really want to start learning more about hormone health, but My mind is a little bit too full. What's what would do the key takeaway be about this conversation? I would say that if you focus on your foundations of health wherever you're gonna start whether that's reducing your stress improving your nutrition or you know getting more movement in your life because movement is medicine too.

Start with one of those and you will see improvements in your life, in your symptoms, in your hormones. So pick something that feels actionable and slowly make those changes over time and you will see improvements. So you don't have to understand all the science to make those changes and you'll start to feel better. I do also think finding a good practitioner that actually knows what they're talking about in regards to hormones too is really, really important, especially for the younger women who are going through puberty and going through all those issues and like perimenopause and menopause especially.

So those two groups I think are the biggest ones that really need to find somebody who is really knowledgeable and up to date in the research so that they can get the help that they need and not kind of be dismissed because I see a lot of people dismissed a lot like oh you're too young for that to happen to you or oh it's okay it's just puberty you'll live through it and it'll be fine but there are things we can do for these kiddos and and for women in perimenopause menopause you don't have to suffer through all these transitions Yeah, we didn't work so hard to develop medicine to just be like, oh, that's just part of life.

We want to make life better. Yeah, absolutely. And all our listeners, they need to be their best self-advocates. And sometimes, yeah, you might hear something from the first. clinician that you talk to, second clinician that you're like, that doesn't make sense. It's okay. There's a lot of resources out there. There's a lot of us who are practicing more cutting edge medicine that are not just based on the protocols that were made 10, 20 years ago. And so everybody who is likely listening to this podcast, you're doing this because you want the best health for yourself, the best health for your family.

And so whether Serena and Heidi can or myself can see you as our patients because we're limited by wherever we're licensed, it's okay. There are clinicians in every single state who can help you keep listening to these podcasts, inform yourself, be your best advocate. And thank you so much Serena and Heidi for being here. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much for having us. All right. Thanks. Bye. Thanks for listening to Truly Healthy MD. I'm Dr. Monica Harry Yee, and I'm so glad you joined me today.

Remember, your health is in your hands, and every choice, no matter how small, can move you closer to feeling your best. If you found today's episode helpful, please subscribe, share, and leave a review. It means so much to me. Until next time, take care of yourself and stay truly healthy.