Fixing Female Hormone Imbalances - PATIENT EDUCATION

We are going to record this tonight. If you guys um have friends or family or you want to listen to it again, we'll be sending out a link. Um I think I have my camera running hopefully. Hi everybody. Um you can minimize the camera. You can make the camera bigger. You have control over that on your end. Okay? If the camera is annoying, then you can stop it. Some people really like it, some people don't. But you can make it bigger or smaller on your end. So, um, just take a look at your settings and you should be able to to make it all work on, uh, sometimes people feel it kind of fills their whole screen up.

Okay, so we got sound, we got camera, we got action, and we're going to talk about female hormones for a little while and maybe also talk a little bit about things are happening around the Kish Institute. So, let's see. Let me just fill you in on what's going on. So, um, right now I have a part, you know, practice. I work with patients over the phone. Uh I do a lot of this female hormone stuff, have done for 25 years. Um right now I teach a doctor training program which is pretty exciting. Um we have a couple hundred doctors at any one time going through classes with me and um really enjoy that work as well.

And um something pretty big happened this year. I'll just show you real quick, but this is directly related to our topic tonight, which is that we published a research study uh with the Mayo Clinic, which is a big deal because the Mayo Clinic is a big deal. And here's the study copy of it. You guys are welcome to get a copy of it. We can email it to you. But Sue Kutchaw, Larry Birdstrom, and myself looked at using functional medicine protocols in women with fatigue, stress, and digestive issues. And um this was many years in the making. It took a lot of work and it was very exciting for me to to actually publish a paper on the Kish method. And we used all the supplements and all the labs that I always use, but it was all overseen and and and funded by the Mayo Clinic. And it's a big deal. They're the, you know, the kind of leading research institution in the world. And um little did I ever think I would see the name Daniel Kish in the same line as the name Mayo Clinic. Anyways, they're very open to this kind of work there and were really supportive. We had about four or five practitioners from the Mayo Clinic took my training program a bunch of years ago and we decided to do a study on this.

So anyways, you guys are welcome to read a copy of that later if you want. We can email out uh copies of the study and basically the short version of the study is what we're talking about tonight. The the short version of it is that we showed that you can really help women who are stressed, not doing well with their hormones and um you can do that in a way that's safe and effective uh and you know an alternative for for treatment for people that are suffering. So nice to get that stamp of approval from Mayo. Also just that this stuff is you know it's not so far out as it used to be when I first started doing this. Really is not.

So, you know, a little bit about my history. You know, I um started off life as a chiropractor, but when I was still in chiropractic college, I went to a seminar that was led by a man medical doctor named John Lee. And John Lee later went on to write all these books about progesterone and female hormone balancing, John R. Lee. And um when I was in, this is kind of funny really I think about it now, but when I when I was in the chiropractic school clinic in like my third year of school, I would call Dr. Lee who was a medical doctor, right, for every new female patient and ask him about the case and what should I do? And he was retired. He didn't have anything better to do. He would just talk to me hours and hours. He every case he would go over with me and used to go to his house and look at all his files. But anyways, he later went on and wrote all these books um what what your doctor may not tell you about menopause, a whole series of books before he died. And he was the first person that really introduced me to this idea that you could correct female hormone imbalances pretty easily with natural treatments. And he is a medical doctor in his earlier career in the 1970s when he was a young man in his 30s and 40s put a lot of women on synthetic hormones for HRT and he watched a lot of his female patients die because he had prescribed these really high dosages of estrogen and he was smart enough as a researcher to understand that what he had done in prescribing these hormones was actually really dangerous and harmful and so he devoted the second part of his career to understanding how to undo, you know, the damage that he had done. And he really led the charge on the use of natural progesterone. And so, just like all the doctors in the late 60s and 70s who were prescribing estrogen in really high dosages, unopposed estrogen, really high dosages, you know, he was doing what everyone else in his profession was doing, but he was smart enough to understand that the science behind it was really weak and that what he was doing was dangerous and that he needed to change. So that was my first teacher. I met him when I was still in school and and never looked back. And so from the very first year I was in practice, I started doing female hormone protocols. And we're going to talk about, you know, all the stuff I've learned over those years uh tonight condensed into like an hour.

All right. So when I when I think about now the model, you know, after all these years of doing this and and how I've um tried to create systems and models around what is a relatively chaotic and hard to understand area. So hopefully tonight you'll get a good understanding about these different uh aspects of treatment. So we can have an underlying cause to a health problem that then leads to predictable physiological damage. Certain tissues in the body are damaged certain ways that leads to a failure of body systems. And tonight we're talking about female hormones. Could be other systems as well that end up eventually at the very end of the road leading to a symptom. Okay? And so the symptoms are what bring people in. People don't come in ever and say, "I think the underlying cause of my health issues is blahy blah, but I don't have any symptoms yet." You know, we only start to address problems when there symptoms. That's just how we are. That's how human beings are.

So, typical symptom, most common one for women suffering from hormone imbalances is weight gain. They can't burn the body fat off like they used to be able to. Second most common would be, I'm tired all the time. Sometimes we also see depression and anxiety, digestive tract problems, and of course actual sex hormone imbalances like low sex drive, infertility, hot flashes, night sweats, these kinds of things. But the key point here is that any one of these symptoms in the symptom box over here could be triggered by any one of the underlying causes over here. And this is why functional medicine is so exciting and also why functional medicine is so challenging. You know, it's a difficult difficult thing to correlate because we cannot rely upon symptoms as a guide for what we're going to do in terms of treatment. That is the main issue that we're dealing with. We can't rely upon symptoms as the main guide for what we're going to do in terms of treatment.

And you know, this is true for many other areas of life, isn't it? When I think about three of my closest friends that I grew up with, as a matter of fact, for some random reason, I have a picture of these guys. I'll show you in a second. But three of my closest friends that I grew up with and were the Berkeley boys and we grew up in Berkeley, California. Known these guys since I was like 12 years old. There we are. That was at Christmas time. That is not beer on the table. And that is not a glass of wine. And that is not chocolate cake. But the Berkeley boys, we still get together. Been friends since we were little kids. Three of those guys are contractors, right? And they build houses. And so one of them when I was buying a home a little while ago, I had my friend Matt, who's in that picture I just showed you, came over. I'm like, "Okay, Matt, should I buy this house?" And the first thing he did before he did anything else, he just went into the basement. He's like, "Why is he going to the basement?" He looked at the foundation. And then he went upstairs and he looked at the roof and he was like, "Yeah, you should buy it. It's in really good shape." you know, he didn't look at any of the stuff I wanted him to look at. He was looking at the foundation of the structure and the roof and then analyzed it and realized that the house was in good shape and that anything else could be fixed. And in fact, you know, if we had found like the windows and doors were all kind of tilted in the house, he would have figured that out because the foundation.

So, we're we're we're always thinking symptomatically, you know, in every aspect of our lives. But when you look at someone like Matt who's good at analyzing structures or you look at someone like me who's good at analyzing human suffering human you know human condition related problems then you know what we really see is that the symptoms are rarely ever expressing themselves in direct correlation with the actual underlying cause. Sorry I have to plug something in here. And so the problem with that is that we have a symptomatic oriented culture and we all think in terms of symptoms, but that's usually generally not the best way to go.

So what we want to think about tonight as we talk about the female hormones and the body systems crashing is that it's rarely, if ever, really never, the female hormones in isolation that are the problem. There's always an underlying cause. And we're not going to talk about all the underlying causes tonight because tonight's talk is about female hormones. But I just want to point this out in the very beginning so you kind of get the overall schematic that the female hormone problems show up, you know, pretty late in the process of the person having various different kinds of health problems. You never see female hormone problems show up in the earlier stages. Okay? You'll see emotional or spiritual problems, dietary problems, gluten sensitivity, GI tract infections, toxin related issues, super common. Maybe a genetic issue, some structural or physical problem, lack of sleep or something like that that's leading off the issue before it sort of translates into female hormone symptoms. However, female hormone symptoms are annoying and problemsome and, you know, ruin people's lives and are well worth treating. Okay. So, we definitely want to fix female hormone problems. That has to happen.

All right. Now, let's take a look here at the way that we approach this. So, I think the the basic understanding is to just look at the cycle. And I want to spend tonight mostly looking at labs so you guys can see how this actually works. Probably know more about this than most doctors by the time we're done tonight because doctors don't usually do these labs, strange as that may seem. So the first way that you have to understand this is just looking at what the normal cycle is like. So let's isolate here and look at this particular diagram. And I'll try to highlight this so you can see. And there's not a whole lot you need to understand. There's only two hormones that we're talking about, estrogen and progesterone. And they fluctuate throughout the month. Growth hormone estrogen causes growth and you can see here estrogen as it comes up in that first part of the month okay triggers the uterine lining to get thicker and thicker. So over here is day one that's the first day of bleeding and as estrogen levels go up in the first part of the cycle the estro the estrogen causes growth of the uterine lining gets thicker and thicker. Progesterone is named for what it does. It's the pro-estational hormone. It promotes gestation. It promotes pregnancy. Okay? And so the progesterone levels, look how flat they are in the first part of the month. So the progesterone output of a 30-year-old woman who is menstruating in the first part of the month, see how flat it is there, is the same as her 90-year-old grandmother. In fact, the progesterone output for a woman in the first part of the month could be identical to the progesterone output of a man. It's very low. But after you ovulate, progesterone levels shoot up. You see that huge increase there. And why? Well, after you ovulate, you could potentially get pregnant. And progesterone shoots up to hold the uterine lining in place in case you get pregnant so you can have a baby. So estrogen causes things to grow. Progesterone holds the uterine lining in place. Estrogen comes up in the first part of the cycle. Progesterone is flat during that time of the month. And then progesterone skyrockets in the second part of the cycle to hold on to a potential pregnancy. If there is no pregnancy, both the hormone levels drop at the end of the month. That's the signal for the body to shed the uterine lining and they start to bleed. Okay.

So again, we're going to look at a bunch of labs. So I'm going to go over this one more time. Day one is the first day of bleeding. Estrogen levels come up. The first half of the month, progesterone is really flat. After you ovulate, in the middle of the cycle, progesterone skyrockets. So, just keep a mental picture in your mind about this graph here. And when we come to the labs, it'll make sense.

All right. So, female hormone imbalances, they can be caused by all kinds of different things. And in turn, female hormone imbalances cause a lot of different symptoms. You know, hot flashes, night sweats, that's kind of obvious, PMS, mood swings, but you can have things like um craving for wine every night of lots of female patients in their 40s who drink a glass of wine every night in an attempt to modulate low estrogen. You know, who would have thought? It works really well, but you know, obviously not so great to drink that much alcohol. You can have hormone imbalances that lead to an inability to lose body fat, to hair loss, to insomnia, anxiety, all kinds of problems can be a result of these hormones falling apart. Okay? So, we want to make sure that we look at the deeper level as well as the symptomatic level.

So on the symptomatic front, we have pretty straightforward causes, you know, and the nice thing about the human body is that when it does break down, it breaks down in really predictable ways. This is not unlike a car. Like how many things can really go wrong with a car? You know, like the electrical system can fail, the brakes could fail. There's a limited number of problems. You can get a flat tire. It's the same with the human body. And so I've broken it down into three categories of stress that really start to throw off the female hormones. And it's 99% of the time one of these three could be mental and emotional stress, dietary stress or pain. Could be coming from the GI tract. In other in other words, the digestive problem is causing the hormone issue. or very commonly these days it could become coming from an environmental toxin because a lot of the environmental toxins are what we call endocrine disruptors meaning that they disrupt or mess up the hormones. So most women that have female hormone problems have either a stressor that's generating it a GI problem or a toxin related issue. That's actually what's behind the female hormone symptoms. Again, female hormones rarely disrupt in isolation from the rest of the body. Okay.

Now, now some people can't see the charts. I'm not sure why. I think most folks can. So, it may just be your computer screen. You can log out and log back in if you're struggling with that. That sometimes just fixes the problem. Or you can try to minimize the camera. Okay.

So there is also this very strong connection specifically between the adrenal glands and the female hormones. So this is our stress sex hormone connection. And you see that most women this is kind of a no-brainer, right? The more stressed you are, the more likely there is to be a female hormone imbalance. And so this is a kind of gross oversimplification of what's going on, but I like the diagram, so I use it a lot still. Um, basically when we're stressed, our cortisol levels shoot up and that leads to destruction of progesterone, testosterone, and estrogen. And if it was on here, I'll write it as a T, and thyroid hormone production. So, when we're stressed and cortisol goes up, progesterone drops, testosterone drops, estrogen drops, and the thyroid hormones drop. All all of them. That's a bummer, but that's the way that your system is set up. All right. And the it's not a bad system in some ways. I've, you know, kind of questioned it over the years, but now I kind of appreciate that basically when we're our bodies prioritize survival over reproduction. Meaning that if you're stressed enough that your stress hormones are going crazy, it's okay that your sex hormones drop. Okay? Because not a good time to have a baby if there's that much stress going on in your life. But you know for most of human history that much stress has meant you know wandering across the tundra because your tribe is out of food or something like that. But we do find in general with the treatments at least half of female hormone symptoms are relieved by addressing the adrenals and the stress component. Okay that makes a really really big difference for people to deal with that.

And then I talked about this already. Estrogen causes things to grow. Progesterone holds things in place. And it's the balance of these hormones that makes the biggest difference. This is a picture from Dr. Lee's original book actually. There was a day I went over to his house 25 almost 30 years ago. He gave me copies of all his diagrams. It's pretty cool. I still have them. This is like 30 years old. Female hormone production hasn't really changed in the last 30 years. It's still relevant. So again, remember progesterone flat in the first half of the month and goes up. Here's your estrogen. It's kind of the fancy British spelling. Estrogen goes up right when you ovulate. And so the key point here, and when we look at these labs, this is going to make a big difference. So I just want to emphasize this, is that there's a process going on here where when the estrogen spikes that triggers ovulation and the release of an egg. When the egg is released, what's left behind is this sack called the corpus luteum. And the corpus luteum then turns into a progesterone factory and starts to produce these massive amounts of progesterone. That's how the system is set up. And the timing of this is very tightly controlled. Like it all has to happen at the right time. So if you ovulate really early or really late, this whole cycle will be disrupted. If you produce your progesterone really early or really late, the whole cycle will be disrupted. It's a very delicately balanced system in order for this all to work. We also find a connection not only between progesterone and cortisol, but also between estrogen and DHEA and testosterone and DHEA, which is another one of the adrenal hormones that's important. Okay, so we have all these different pathways and connections. This is kind of a complicated way of saying that when you're stressed, the sex hormones are depleted. Okay, so when you're stressed and your DHEA levels drop, your estrogen tends to drop. When you're stressed and your cortisol goes up and then goes down, your progesterone tends to drop. And so there's a really strong sort of stress/sex hormone relationship.

Now, another relationship that's pretty significant is that um let me show you here. This one's super important. Is that the HPA axis over here? And that's basically hypothal H stands for hypothalamus. P stands for pituitary and A stands for adrenal. So HPA axis is the connection between your brain or your hypothalamus and pituitary and your adrenal gland. And basically what's happening here is your brain is deciding what to do. And your brain is saying, "Hey, pituitary, make some ACTH because we need some cortisol." And then your adrenal glands go, "Okay, got the message, brain. We're making cortisol." And in response to that, all kinds of things happen. What should happen theoretically is that when you're stressed and the cortisol goes up, the stress is over and then the brain senses the stress is over and it resets. However, for people that have female hormone problems, this system gets dysfunctional and it doesn't turn off. It just stays on. Just stays on all the time, which is not good because that starts to deplete all these other hormones. So, HPA axis dysfunction or really it's the brain that's at the heart of all this is what we're trying to say.

Now, if cortisol goes up for long enough, there's a down-regulation of the thyroid hormones over here. The conversion of T4 to T3 is dependent on cortisol. So if cortisol is super high, the conversion of the thyroid hormone falls apart and all of a sudden you have a thyroid problem on top of everything else. So stress causes low sex hormones, low thyroid hormone production, and high cortisol all at the same time. And here's another diagram with the pathways.

Right now, let's take a look at these different stages of female hormone imbalances. I want to show you on the labs here how all this works. So, there can be problems with distribution, meaning that you're not making the hormones at the right time. We'll go over this a few times, okay? There can be problems with production, meaning you're not making enough of the hormone. And there can be problems with timing, meaning you're not making the hormones at the right time. So, I'm going to show you some examples and then we can come back to this because once you see it, I think it's a little easier.

So, here's some samples of tests. And remember what the normal was supposed to look like? Remember how the normal was the estrogen was spiking in the middle and then the progesterone came up in the second part. So these are labs where you actually measure the whole monthly cycle. And I'll tell you, you know, when my teacher, another teacher of mine, Dr. Timmons, who's the man that taught me how to interpret these labs, um he got his hands on this salivary lab testing technology. And this guy, he he's dead now, too. All my teachers are dead. I don't know what that's about. But anyways, you know, he was like a he acted like a 16-year-old kid half the time, you know, but when he got his hands on this salivary testing technology, you can just see his eyes lit up, you know, and he's like, "Wow, why don't we just measure the whole female hormone cycle?" I mean, believe it or not, no one, you know, it's it's still even not that often done. I mean, these guys were making this stuff up 30, 35 years ago, okay? It's still not very often practiced. You think that everyone would map their cycle? Do you think every girl should get her cycle mapped? That should be like something that happens when you're a 16-year-old and you get a checkup. But, you know, these tests are never really done in conventional medicine. And they ran when they first did this, he and Dr. Ilas, uh, they went up to UCLA and they got like three or 400 women. I think it was like ages 18 to 22 who had no menstrual problems and they tested them and they just start to map out their cycles and look what you know to figure out what was normal and abnormal physiology and now you can just map out your own cycle and compare it to what the norms are those graphs and charts that I showed and and see what's actually happening in terms of your production.

So here are some examples and I'll I'll show you some salient components of this. Let's see. Let me find one that's easier and we'll get to the harder ones later. And we have I have a whole, you know, doctor training program. We spend a couple months teaching people how to do this. But I think as an initial hit, you can kind of just see this. And I'll I'll draw over what the norm should be. So remember how we were talking about progesterone? Let's just look at this. This bottom graph here is the progesterone, the red. So I'm going to draw what the normal should be in yellow on to and superimpose it. So the normal for progesterone, remember, should be really flat and then it should come up and stay up and then drop. So you can see this woman is spiking her progesterone levels at all kinds of crazy times. And when she is going up in the middle of the cycle, she's not staying up for very long. So that precipitous drop of progesterone doesn't feel very good. And the beauty of the month-long panels is that you can see all this. You don't have to guess about what's happening. Uh here that's what Let me find another really easy one. We'll go through all the Oh, and you can see how each one of these is different, too, right? It's like a fingerprint. Oh, there's a good one. This one's pretty easy. Each one of these is completely different, but there's normals sort of normal parameters that every woman should be within. So, in this case, you can see the you can see the progesterone is sailing up and sailing right back down. So that means this whole time in here, I'll highlight in yellow, she's deficient in progesterone. That is going to be a horrible, horrible feeling when your progesterone goes up for a day and then comes right back down. So again, you can see these are timing issues. These are production issues. And let me get a little more detail on what that means now. And you've seen some examples.

So the distribution problem means that the total production or the amount of the hormone that the woman's making is okay, but it's not being distributed properly throughout the cycle. That's usually one of the earlier stages of the problem. And then if it gets worse, then there can be a production problem. And that just means that you're not producing enough. So you're just not making enough progesterone, you're not making enough estrogen, something's not being produced enough. And then you can ultimately end up in a really bad place where there's a timing issue. Meaning that that surge of estrogen is not happening at the right time. And that is a big problem. And it's usually much harder to correct. And now the cycle itself is kind of thrown off, right? The cycle itself is not in sync anymore. And so let me show you some more examples here. We'll talk through this.

Now you can also obviously just do you know for women who are going through menopause or perimenopause you can do um simpler programs for those we just measure um estrogen and progesterone once you know and then and then you know correct it but the month-long the month-long labs you don't get a chance to see these very often so I thought it was worth talking about so let me just show you what a typical test is like you do a series of saliva samples is all done from spit because who wants to get their blood drawn every other day for a month. You know, you do a series of anywhere from 11 to 14 saliva samples and they map out what your levels of progesterone are in each day and then they do the same thing for your estrogen. And then from those saliva samples, you're basically spitting every other day into a tube. They map out your actual pattern of production. And so we can start to look now again I'll superimpose upon these labs what the normal should be and we saw that in the earlier test. Okay. Again why these are not standard is just like mind-numbing to me.

So remember how the estrogen is supposed to be flat and then come up right before you ovulate and then drop back down again. So what is clearly happening with this particular person and this is not even very difficult to see in a way once you have the lab is that she's spiking her estrogen levels early. That is not a good thing. Remember I said it's a very tightly regulated cycle. Her estrogen is peaking right here which if you just draw a line down you can see is around day eight. That estrogen is supposed to be going up around, excuse me, around day 12. So, that is a big problem. If you have four days off in a cycle that's only 28 days, that's a significant issue. What does that mean? That means, let's go back and I'll show you. See how that's happening four days early, right? So, let me show you on the PowerPoint. You'll see instantly why that is a bad thing. We'll go back to our normal drawing here. Beginning I think this is the best one for this particular purpose. Yeah, here it is. So, imagine a cycle where things are four days off. So, you have but remember if we look carefully here, here's here's what we're looking at. Yeah. So, you're supposed to spike your estrogen right around day 12. What if that was happening around day eight instead? Just look at it. There's only 12 days here to work with. If it's happening 30% earlier than it should. The uterine lining has nowhere near enough time yet to get properly thickened in order to maintain a pregnancy. So, this would be a woman who would have a really hard time getting pregnant. In other words, remember her estrogen is spiking. Instead of on day 12, it's happening on day eight. So, look, it's too early to be, you know, to be um preparing for a pregnancy because the uterine lining has only had a couple days to get thicker. It hasn't had enough time yet. So, that patient that we're looking at, again, her spike of estrogen happened four days earlier, but you can see in this diagram, what that means is that she hasn't had enough time to lay down a sufficient uterine lining. So, that could be an infertility case right there. Not good. And remember again, look here. See the progesterone comes up right after the middle of the cycle. And what happens to it? It stays high. Goes up and it stays up. You see that nice curve up? It stays up. So, let's look at some progesterone levels. Now, we just saw a problem with estrogen. Let's look at some problems with progesterone. We saw that one already. Let me find another fun one here. You know what's actually really scary about all this too is that uh oh gosh, there's a good one. Let's use that one. Um this is happening to younger and younger women. You know, when I when I was, you know, I'm not that old. I'm 52. I've been doing this 25 years. Um, when I first started my practice, we would get most women in the ages, let's say 18 years old up to 30 years old. Most women in that age range had pretty close to normal labs, you know, pretty close. And now, 20 years later, you know, it's rare to see a woman in her 20s with a normal lab. I mean, things have really changed. Stress levels have changed and I think more so than emotional stress. I think you know environmental toxin levels really are becoming a problem. I don't know. I just read in the paper this morning the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is mostly dead now. You know I mean this we're actually changing the environment. We're changing our bodies with all the really strange things that we're dumping into the environment. And a lot of the chemicals that we dump into the environment are um endocrine disruptors, meaning that they focus on destroying the endocrine system. Okay? So, cuz I don't know that the emotional stress levels of women are that much higher now than they were 15 or 20 years ago, but I know environmental toxin levels have skyrocketed.

So, here's your progesterone. And I'll try to draw in uh a different color here what's supposed to happen so you can remind yourselves. Supposed to go up, remember? And then stay up and then drop down. And look what's happening. First of all, here's day 15. The progesterone levels are going up way, way early. And then what happened? Did they stay up? No. Plummeting down. Plummeting down. What day are they dropping? They're dropping on day 15. Okay. So, the progesterone is going up pretty early and by day 15 it's dropped. So, let's go back to our handy dandy diagram here. And see what would that mean for a woman who's having hormonal symptoms. Well, right off the bat, you can see where this is potentially heading, right? Let me show you here. I can pick a good color. Pink is a good color for female hormones, right? So, her progesterone, remember, first of all, it went up right here on day 15 instead of over here. So, that's not good. And did it go up and stay up? No, it went up early and then came right back down. So, she does not have progesterone production here. So, what does progesterone do? Well, in addition to holding on to the uterine lining, progesterone impacts your brain. When progesterone levels are low, women get menstrual cramping. They get irritability. They get a lot of depression symptoms. They get all kinds of mood swings, sugar cravings. So for this poor woman from remember she start this problem started on day 15. So from day 15 all the way to the end of her cycle she's missing out on all this progesterone. And there's no way that that is going to be an okay thing. Okay? There's no way you can feel good when a major hormone is completely missing for half of your month. Okay? So again you can see from the lab specifically then what would you do? Well, we would use natural progesterone starting on day 15 to rebalance and reset the system. Now, the good news in all this is that the ovaries are very amenable to change. And you know, you've all heard of studies where they put a bunch of women in a college dorm together and eventually they'll start to all menstruate on the same day, right? So, female hormones are very sensitive and you can manipulate them really easily. And if you see the lab work and I'll show you what the correction would be for something like this. If you see the lab work like this, then you know, oh, okay, on this day all the way through to this day over here, she needs some natural plant-based progesterone support. And when you give progesterone, it has a stimulating effect on improving female hormone production in general. And when you work on the adrenals and the thyroid and the diet and all these other things, you can take the strain off the ovaries so that you can reset these patterns back to normal. And then if you do a program for six to 12 months and you retest, you'll see that the progesterone instead of dropping is staying high.

So, I'll show you a few more here. I figure I don't know. I mean, I train a couple hundred doctors a year, but might as well just talk to patients directly about this stuff and you guys can start to demand your doctors do the tests or you can come see me and I'll fix it. But this test should be done more. Oh, let's look at this one. This is not again this is not overly complicated when you look at it if you know what you're looking for. And you know, there was many years where I would on Thursdays take off at 1:00. I would leave my practice, drive down to Dr. Timmons' office in my little beat-up Honda, and he was always scared of me driving that car. It was one of those really old old Hondas. It was tiny. He's like, "Oh, you should get a different car. You're going to get killed in that thing." But anyways, um I drive down to his office and then we would just look at lab after lab after lab after lab like I'm doing tonight. And that was how he taught me this stuff because there is no one lab, you You know, I mean, there's the idealized stuff I keep showing you, which is out of the textbooks, but every woman is completely different in terms of how she produces these hormones. You just have these general parameters and rules that you need to adhere to. And what are the rules? They're really simple. In the middle of the month, you should ovulate. Right after you ovulate, your progesterone should go up, okay? And it should be around 28 days. What's happening with this woman? You can clearly see her estrogen spike is happening on day like seven. That's not okay. It's supposed to be happening on day 12. So her estrogen is going up, but it's going up really early. Now, if you did a single sample blood test for these hormones, you would never capture this dynamic that we're looking at. You can't tell what's going on if you just do one sample. You can't tell what's happening with an entire monthly cycle. One sample could be completely misleading. In fact, I've had so many patients over the years, women who have been told that they are no longer ovulating. They have what do they call they have it? They call it premature ovarian failure. Not a very nice you shouldn't put the word failure in a medical diagnosis but anyways you know they have premature ovarian failure because doctors only do a single sample test and they don't see this dynamic like like here here's another example let's look at this one you can see how easy it is to misdiagnose look at this woman is spiking her estrogen when it's on day six if you're looking for her to ovulate in the middle of the cycle you would say you have premature ovarian failure because we're not doing a month-long panel and we didn't see that you ovulated like a week ago. Can't tell you how many times I've had that happen. Patient gets diagnosed is they're not ovulating at all and that's their main problem. And there it is. It's just happening either early or late. Look at that. That is the spike of estrogen. You draw the line down. It's happening right around day six. Supposed to be happening in the middle of the month. That is early ovulation, not ovarian failure. And then of course the progesterone goes up early too. We saw that half of this graph already. Everything's happening really early. Now if you started to ovulate on day six, what do you think that would do to your overall hormone balance? Here's the spike of estrogen supposed to be around day 12. And this woman we just identified, it's happening around day six. So all kinds of bad things are a result of that. It's the balance of these two hormones that keeps you healthy. If your estrogen levels are coming up that early and your progesterone is falling apart, you're not going to have the right ratio of these hormones, and that's going to be bad for your brain and for your bones and your body in general. It's really devastating.

Let's look at a few more here. And oh, and this is this test is um it's a month-long female hormone panel. I use this company called Bio Health. Oh, you can see their name here. Bio Health Diagnostics. Um they're my favorite lab. There's other lab companies that do the month-long panel as well. You don't have to use Bio Health, but I like them, so I use them. And I've known them for years and years and they do really accurate testing. Let's just maybe look at one more then we'll wrap things up. See, let's find one that's a little different than the other ones. They're all There was one in the very beginning I think that was pretty good. I see. Let's look at the hard part of this is just getting someone who knows how to interpret these. Oh, yeah. Oh, there's a good one. Let's try that. So, now this is a good example because this woman's actually ovulating at the right time. So, we finally found one where the ovulation is happening at the right time of the month. See the spike of estrogen is right around day 12. And then the progesterone is going up and then dropping and then going up and then dropping. Remember how it's supposed to go up and stay up. So it's very hard to maintain a pregnancy if your progesterone keeps dropping because it's the pro-gestational hormone that holds your uterine lining intact. Okay. It's also really hard to avoid mood swings or night sweats or hot flashes or whatever the things are that happen when hormones drop really suddenly in women. So, if you get a big old drop of progesterone like that, there could be a migraine headache on that day. There could be, you know, a husband who is just being berated, you know, and then, you know, when when the hormones drop significantly, it's really hard for women to keep things together emotionally. You know, it's really hard. They just have all kinds of irrational thoughts that don't make sense because the hormones are just like dropping like a rock and they're not supposed to, you know. And I I find that most women that I work with seem to kind of cover that over, but once in a while it leaks out and they take it out on their kids or on their husband or somebody kind of gets a little blast of energy.

And here's another good one. Sorry, I said that was the last one, but we'll just do one more here. They're all different. You see this? Isn't this kind of amazing? So remember progesterone is supposed to be flat and then go up and you can see how erratic this is up and down and up and down. So imagine that you were trying to do a single sample test on this patient. If you did a test on this day, you would think something very different than if you did a test on this day and you had something completely different if you did a test on this day or this day. So unless you have the whole month-long panel, it's really hard to put things into context. That's the big problem, right? So again, you can have three levels of problems and we've seen all of them here. Didn't explain them all, but I'll kind of highlight it now. You can have just not enough of the hormone being produced. The levels are overall low. You can have a a distribution problem, meaning like this is kind of a good example, distribution problem. Maybe she's making enough, but it's just at the wrong times. Or you can have a timing problem, which we saw with all those estrogen levels that were off. Okay, so those are the three big variables. I'll go over that one more time so you get a general sense of this here. Uh yeah, so first stage, usually this is progressive, right? Distribution of progesterone or estrogen is out of sync. You're just not making you're making enough of it but not at the right times. The next thing that can happen then is there's not enough of the hormone going around. That's usually harder to correct. Now there's more symptoms. And then the last thing that can happen we saw a lot of is the midcycle timing is off. Right? So that means the entire structure of the cycle has been thrown off. So again three problems distribution, production, or timing and that's what we're looking for with the labs.

Now in terms of symptoms again this is progressive. Generally women go from bad to worse with these things. So in the distribution problem phase that can be uh like PMS the week before your period. That's sort of classic. A drop in estrogen that's all of a sudden typically triggers a migraine. Okay. Sometimes it could be the progesterone and it's not always um I mean it could be anything from cramping to sugar cravings in terms of the PMS symptoms. Now when the output is low that's a more you know month-long kind of problem. So now most women will complain about low sex drive, poor memory. It's not something that just happens for a few days right before they menstruate. Something that's a little more widespread. And then when it escalates to a timing problem, that would be your classic infertility case. Remember, because she is not not having enough time to put the estrogen uh to have the estrogen, you know, get the uterine lining to get thicker. So these are the three main issues that we see. They're progressive. They tend to get worse over the years. A lot of this is triggered by the issues we talked about in

The beginning, stress, digestive problems, environmental toxin exposure. So, the basic take-home message here is that female hormone imbalances can cause symptoms anywhere from PMS to depression.

Understanding the normal cycle and the normal pathways is important because once you look at the normals and you see what your lab is like, you get a really clear indicator of what's wrong. And then you can have these different stages of imbalance, distribution, production or timing issues. All of this stuff is correctable. Okay? And it's correctable how? By addressing the gut problems, the toxin issues, the stress issues, and then using bioidentical or plant-based progesterone to to reset the cycle.

And we don't have time really to go into the protocols. The protocols are pretty complicated. Usually takes me like couple three or four months to teach doctors how to to do them all. It's not something that's intuitively obvious, but um like I said, we sat for years with Dr. Timonss by his side just learning how to do these over and over and over again. Okay.

Now, let me end on a final thought because we got a couple of minutes um which is uh what about women who are permenopausal or postmenopausal? And maybe in the coming year we can do another talk just on parmenopausal stuff too. Okay. But I just want to cover it just a little bit here so you can see.

Cuz for pmenopausal, post-menopausal women, I don't want to say it's easier, but it's easier because you're not worried about the cycle anymore. The cycle is now relatively flat, right? It's not they're not cycling anymore. That's the whole point. So if you're in if you're having permenopausal or menopausal symptoms, that would be hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, and your period is erratic, it's fading away, your age is 45 to 55, somewhere in that range, then typically the solution is really simple. We do a single sample test because we don't want to measure the whole cycle. You don't have a cycle anymore. we see where your progesterone, estrogen levels are along with your cortisol and DHEA and then do a integrated program to balance all these hormones. And so for women who are somewhere around the age of 50, don't want to have a child, they're no longer resetting their cycle. It's relatively straightforward. You do a single sample test and the corrections are are a lot easier uh in general to execute. Okay, I don't want to say that it's easy, but it's easy to do those programs compared comparatively. Um that that kind of problem is usually something that clears up pretty quickly.

Now, let's see. I'm going to I think there's a few questions that came in. Let me see if I can get to a few questions since we have a minute here. All right. Um, let's see. Yes, we can definitely do another webinar on the post-menopausal ones because it's it's pretty simple. I just talked about it for a minute. Um, someone asked if I'm still using the Dutch tests. I'm kind of back to the salary right now. I did the Dutch testing on a few patients for a few months, for a little while, and it has absolute value to it. I'm not against the Dutch testing at all, but I found more utility with the salivary. So, I'm I'm mostly doing the salivary testing. And there's some patients like I just had a patient um on Tuesday, that was yesterday. Seems like a long time ago, Tuesday. Yesterday, I had a patient we did both. We did salivary and Dutch testing on and compared them. So, I've been doing that a fair amount, too. There's something to be learned from all these things, you know.

Um and let's see other questions. Yeah. Now, I don't recommend people self treat for hormone problems. It's pretty complicated and you can really screw things up. You can throw your cycle off pretty easily. This is one thing it's worth seeing a doctor for if you really have a hormone issue. I think it's it's pretty important, you know, to have someone who's been doing this for a while uh check all this out for you.

Um, and then question about progesterone cream. Progesterone cream is really hard to dose accurately and women absorb it in different ways. So some women absorb it a little too readily. Some women convert the hormone in the cream into other hormones. So your your skin is basically an endocrine organ. This is how actually one of my medical doctor students explained this to me yesterday. I'm passing this on. She she it was a very eloquent e explanation. Her name is Lee. Wonderful wonderful woman doctor. Um she said your skin is an endocrine organ and and it's true, right? So what happens is when you rub the creams onto your skin, you have no idea what your skin is going to do in terms of converting that progesterone into other hormones. If you take it orally in drops or liquids or in a pill, you don't have to worry about that. So the creams are a little dicey. You have to be really care careful with the creams. They're also really hard to di um to dose properly. Okay.

Uh, let's see. We got a few more questions in here. Um, anyone who ever has a question about cancer, I highly recommend you check out Dr. Nolini Chiloff. Nolini, hard to spell. N A Nini L I N I. Nolini Chiloff. C H I L K O V. any kind of question about cancer. She is the best natural cancer doctor on the planet. Super smart woman and anyone who's ever had cancer or is even worried about cancer, Nolini Chilkov is the woman to see. She's incredible. I'm actually going to be seeing her on Friday at a conference she's speaking at. It's really wonderful woman.

Um, what company do I use for GI testing? I use the GI MAP test from Diagnostic Solutions along with the 41H from Bio Health. Those are my two go-to favorites. Uh what kind of doctors use these labs? It's generally functional medicine practitioners, you know, who have some advanced training in hormones. Um any one of the doctors that I've trained, you know, had to sit through me talking about this for months. So, they should be pretty good at it if you look at the Kish Institute website and you can get referrals off of there.

Um, okay, let me write this down for you guys. Hang on one second. I'll post this here. This is an important one because it's hard to find really good cancer people and I don't treat cancer patients at all. It's a whole area specialty, you know, that I don't have. She's in Santa Monica, but I think she works with people over the phone like I do. Here she is. Nolini. Nolini Chilov. Check her out if you have a cancer problem. Okay.

Oh yeah. Now, good question, Isabelle. When when the whole point of these protocols is to reset internal production, and I'm glad you reminded me. I forgot to mention that. The whole point of these protocols is to reset internal production. So, your body starts to make the hormones properly on its own. And that can take anywhere from a minimum of six to usually a maximum of like 12 to 18 months. But the cycle wants to be reregulated. You know, there's a very strong tendency for this to happen. uh a strong push, I should say, a strong incentive almost for this to happen. So, you know, it makes a really big difference, I think, to reset the cycle.

All right. So, oh, and postmenopausal women, they usually respond within 3 or 4 weeks if you're doing a complete program. But post-menopausal, remember, we do adrenal and female hormones together. Address the GI and toxin related issues. And you should be able to clear up, you know, 90% of female hormone issues that are per post-menopausal within a couple months without having to take hormones forever. Okay? We're not into the hormones forever kind of theory here.

All right, gang. Thank you for entertaining your time with me tonight. I appreciate very much. We're going to be doing one of these every month going forward. So stay tuned for the next in this series and we have um everything that I just said recorded and we will send out the recording automatically. You guys will get copies of it in the next day or so. Okay, have a really great rest of your month. I hope you all join me next month for the next talk as well. Thanks. Bye for now.