Use of Progesterone in Cycling Females

And good evening everyone. Thank you for taking time out of your, I'm sure, a very busy day to drop in and listen to a little talk. We're going to talk about female hormones, and I have a different philosophy and approach now to teaching this stuff. I'm just going to show you all the stuff that we actually do in the mentorship class that used to be, you had to pay a ton of money to get. Because there's so much new content in a mentorship class that, well, it used to be my prized special knowledge stuff. It's like, whatever, you know, I'm just might as well just teach it for the free classes because we have so much other stuff going on in the mentorship. And I'll talk about that in a moment, a little bit about what's going on around here, okay? But let's get started with the subject matter first so we can jump in.

I'm also gonna do everything kind of backwards today. This is like backwards day. So let's start off talking because everyone always asks this question eventually. I was gonna, what, what do you use, right? So we're gonna talk a lot about female hormone imbalances and how to treat women with the cyclical augmentation programs that are really cool and kind of complicated. And so there is a variety of different products you can use for this. There's a new one that's on the market that many of you may know about already. It's made by a company called Designs for Health and it's called Progesta-Vail. It's a topical serum and it's a bioidentical or natural progesterone in a liquid. So that one is fair game. If you like Designs for Health, which I do, I think they're a great company, you can use their stuff. There is the old-school one that's been around for a hundred years. I mean, this has been around since before I've been around, and I'm an old-timer. And that is from Bez-Wick. Most of you again, probably know Bez-Wick. And that their progesterone product that I use is called, this is complicated. This is like when you're buying new tires for your car, you got all these numbers like a 185/17, this, that. It's Progan BL4X. So it's Progan BL4 liquid, 4X, four times the strength of the other Progan BL. That's how confusing this is. So make sure that you buy the Bez-Wick Progan BL4X if you rather use that. Again, a liquid delivery for progesterone. And then there's a new product that just came out, which is a wonderful thing. And that is called Pro-Adapt. And that, that is made by Bio-Matrix. The brand new thing just came on the market recently. They used to make this years and years ago. And again, it's a liquid progesterone. Okay? So you can use the Pro-Adapt, the Progan BL, or the Progesta-Vail. All three different liquid progesterones. Is there one that's better? I don't know. They're kind of interchangeable in my mind, depending on which one these companies like more. You know, there's going to be different complaints from patients about each one. You know, they burn or this or that, you know? So I think they're all about the same. No, to be honest. Okay, so we got the product stuff out of the way. I would, well, I would might mention one other thing about probably just don't carry all three of them. That would be crazy. Just pick one and carry one of the three, otherwise you just be, you know, too much.

Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about treatment models and where this all fits into a bigger picture. Because it's easy to think that female hormones are the pressing concern because, you know, they generate a lot of complaints, whether it's, "I can't have a baby," or "I'm having migraine headaches all the time." But we want to look at this in the context of underlying causes, the heart and soul of functional medicine, different kinds of damage that occurs in the human body, other symptoms that may be going on, you know, besides just the female hormone complaints. So we're looking at a single topic tonight, but, you know, it's in a context of these other bigger picture things. And I also want to do things a little differently. This is more like a regular class like I teach when you're in the actual mentorship. We're just going to look at some labs and review them, and I'll show you how to, how to actually do this stuff. Okay? The way that I learned it from my mentor many years ago. And so it all starts off with this one diagram, which is right here. I'll circle it for you. We just want to mimic normal estrogen and progesterone production. And it's pretty simple. If you see a low level of progesterone at a certain day of the month, we want to bring that back up to the normal level with a supplement. And the idea is that we're using physiological dosages, meaning we're seeing what day and what time and what amount the progesterone is low, then attempting to replace the missing progesterone so you have normal circulating levels of progesterone in the system, and the brain starts to reset and produce them on its own. So you're trying to trigger a restoration of the cycle. We're trying to trigger the cycle to come back to normal. So every time we look at one of these labs in a few moments here, just look at, you know, compare it to this normal where you have, and I'll highlight this so it's real clear, doo-doo-doo-doo, you have this gradual rise of estrogen that peaks in the middle of the cycle and then it drops a little bit. That's part one. Part two is progesterone levels are very flat that first part of the month, then the woman ovulates, and then the progesterone goes up, and then it drops. And that drop of the hormones at the end of the month triggers bleeding. And then you can see here, day one is the first day of bleeding, the uterine lining is shed, the uterine lining builds thanks to the increase in estrogen. Estrogen is a growth hormone, it causes things to grow. Then the woman ovulates in the middle of the month, and then the progesterone starts to really dominate. And then if she does not become pregnant, then the uterine lining is shed, and the whole thing starts again. Well, the key point is that we're going to look at these progesterone markers, and you want to see a flat progesterone in that first part of the month, and then you want to see the progesterone skyrocketing up in the second part of the month, and then dropping out. That's the curve that we want to emulate. That's what we want to try to reproduce when you design a program. And then the hot, the symptoms of this could be anything from food addiction to insomnia to, "I can't get pregnant," to, "My hair is falling out," right? A million different things can be triggered from an imbalance with these hormones. And that can come about because of, because of gut problems, because of liver issues, you know? So we're not talking about underlying causes now, we're just talking about how to fix this one lab kind of in isolation. And there's always an adrenal or a thyroid or a brain component. So again, the female hormones never gonna spontaneously malfunction. So we're always looking at the whole body and all the hormones here, not just the progesterone. I mean, tonight we're just looking at this one little box here, but just want to, you know, mention that we also want to address cortisol and DHEA and C-reactive protein, right? How important that is, and B5, and all the other components that go into this. It's not just progesterone is gonna save the day by itself. And so, and I'd like to think about this really simply. I have one, a one-liner for each of these. No estrogen causes things to grow, and progesterone holds the uterine lining intact. Those are the two major components of each of these, right? Estrogen is a growth hormone and causes things to grow, and then progesterone holds the uterine lining intact. So, you know, having a one-liner that you can just share with patients so it's really straightforward. And again, another view that of what we're about to look at with the labs. Let's say we were trying to restore this normal cycle. So the estrogen comes to a peak mid-cycle and then drops off a bit. The progesterone is very flat and low in the first part of the month, we saw that earlier, and then skyrockets up and then drops back down again. So that monthly rhythm is what we're trying to reestablish by signaling to the brain, hypothalamus, and the pituitary, a normal pattern. So when you see on the lab, there's a deficit of progesterone, we want to give some progesterone during that time of the month to mimic the normal pattern. If the brain sees this normal production of progesterone month after month after month because you're supplementing with it, the idea is that you're resetting the normal production. And then you stop the progesterone, and the normal cycle continues. Okay? So in, it's very much, you're trying to trigger a resetting of the program, a resetting of the cycle. There are, you know, adrenal variables that I mentioned, right? So DHEA can be a component in problems with estrogen. So let's keep that in the back of your mind. And DHEA converts over to cortisol. So there can be a stress component in most of these cases as well. And the more stress the person has, men and women both, you know, the lower the sex hormones go. And there's an adrenal and thyroid component to all that, right? Which we're not really talking about. And here's the, the diagram though. This is super important because we've got the HPA axis, which we're trying to reset as well. And that's more about the adrenal hormones. And maybe that's for a different day. We can talk about how you do that. And then also taking into account the thyroid and the thyroid's role in all of this. And then some, some how progesterone sitting so right in the middle here, right, being impacted by adrenal and thyroid hormones. But it's a really good skill set, I think, to just know how to knock out these female hormone programs. So I thought it's a worthwhile sort of separate subject. You cannot underestimate the importance of vitamin B5. See how it's right here? And you have to have the B5 to make all of these hormones. So if you're kind of up against the wall and things aren't working well, you know, run an organic acids profile, start to look at their vitamin, their B vitamin levels. I do a lot of the organic acids testing, and it's really important for hormone programs overall. Okay? So when we look at these labs, you want to think about these different stages. There could be a distribution problem, a production problem, or a mid-cycle ovulation timing problem. Okay? So the progesterone could be distributed at the right time, I'm at the wrong time. So they're making enough progesterone, but it's not at the right times of the month. They can just be low in progesterone, they just need more progesterone, or you can have a mid-cycle or ovulation or timing problem. So as we look at the labs, we want to distinguish: Is there a distribution problem, a production problem, or mid-cycle timing problem? Okay? And that guides the treatment. Once you figure that out. So distribution problems are usually in the beginning of the female hormones not doing well. The adrenals are usually just starting to fade. They're making enough progesterone, the timing is okay, but it's just being, in terms of timing of ovulation, is okay, but the progesterone is not being distributed properly. So ovulation is okay, but progesterone levels are failing at some time in a month. A low production problem, in my mind anyways, these are sort of progressive. I don't know if that's true or not, to be honest, but just in my mind, that's how I classify them. So now the progesterone levels are, right, low. Okay? It seems like this is a more advanced problem. It seems like, you know, intuitively, just kind of obvious. This has been going on for longer. Now the woman's not making enough progesterone, the levels are just low, and usually the symptoms are quite a bit worse. And then the third level that this can go to, the third stage that this can go to, is that that spike of estrogen that should happen in the middle of the month isn't happening in the middle of the month. So now you've got a really big problem because that sort of definition of a follicular and luteal phase is just gone because, you know, things aren't happening at the right time in the middle of the month anymore. You're gonna either have a super short or super long follicular or luteal phase. And this is chaotic, right? Because ovulation, the sort of centerpiece or the center, you know, of this whole cycle, is now, as one of my patients says, caddywhompus, right? It's like been thrown upside down, and you're gonna have a big, pretty big problem. So in terms of patient's symptoms, what you tend to see in the earlier stages, you might get some symptoms, you know, PMS symptoms a week before. When you get into this more advanced thing, and now there's just not enough progesterone, it's not just like, "Oh, I have a headache right before my period." It's more like, "My sex drive is just gone like every day of the month. There's no sex drive," or "My memory is just not great every day of the month," right? It's a more constant, persistent, month-long problem that's still hormone-related, but it's happening in a more global way because her progesterone throughout the month is just low all the time. And then a timing problem, you know, you, you know, naturally would associate with fertility issues. And if you can correct the timing problems, you can really help with the female hormone stuff. Okay?

Alright, so let me, I mean, let me just show you. Apparently, these are the marketing slides, so I have to do the marketing part now. And then we're going to start to review labs for the rest of the class, okay? I promise. So if you need a break and you're not interested in taking my class, you know, online, and I don't know, read the New York Times or go up and get a glass of water or something. But I want to show you guys the new stuff that we're doing. So a couple of big things have happened. We have now a pretty, I don't know how to say it, pretty, you know, advanced, robust platform now, and it's just getting bigger and better all the time. And here's the basic platform from which I teach. So we have hundreds and hundreds, really actually now, it's thousands of hours of content in here. Oh, here, look, here are some new doctors that are coming in. This is Phoebe. So we have a community where when you join my class, you have access to this amazing community of other human beings, as well as case studies and all kinds of resources. At this point, I think we have maybe two thousand plus case studies. So if you type in, for example, into the search box here, let's say infertility or fertility, and you're just in the female hormone section of my course, you'll see experts that I've interviewed. You'll see case study after case study. And all the case studies and all the interviews are transcribed. So you can watch the video or you can read about the case. And some of these go on and on and on and on. And you can see, let's see, let's do another. How about like hot flashes or migraines? Then, you know, each one of these cases, you actually learn a lot, right? Because we're going through, here's case study number twelve thirteen, not an adrenal fatigue, but dealing with bad hot flashes. And there's a huge amount to learn from here. In addition to that, you have a weekly call, you know, where people submit, the doctors in the class submit their labs, and we go over those labs as a group, which is really quite wonderful. We have an additional area here of clinical topics. And these are just again, hundreds of hours of stuff. We just did this health coach interviews about how to do health coaching. I'm really getting into in-depth on interpretation of organic acids or Dutch test. So we have a lot of information about organic acids or Dutch test now. My main teacher at the current day is this man here, Richard Lord, who many of you have may have heard of. He wrote the book called Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine. And he's the original scientist that developed the GI-FX test, the organic acids test, which has turned into the new Dutch test. He's really the, the main scientist in our industry. He's been retired. I have physically dragged him out of retirement. And now when I say, you know, special specific aspects of the organic acids test, this is, you know, Dr. Richard Lord teaching me, and then me spreading the word to our students. So we have some really wonderful information in there. We also have a lot of practical business stuff, like this is a talk by one of the doctors in our group, Duncan MacDonald, all about internet online marketing. He's an amazing guy. He's been very successful with marketing, just giving a talk and telling you how he did it so you can copy what he's doing. Everything from osteopath to medical doctors to EMR systems. We've got, you know, IBS lectures, and then lectures about how to hire people. Okay? It's a pretty amazing and robust platform now. And every one of these things is in a video, and it's all transcribed. You want to hire somebody? Well, you probably spend an hour just listening to this amazing advice about how to hire people. And it's either me speaking, or it's this expert in the area. There's a whole variety of information that's in the course now. And then, of course, as a regular class, we have a regular curriculum that you go through over the course of either six months or a year. And that's basically in our actual content stuff. So I'll show you the course resources here. And that's, you know, lecture, the orientation, the lectures. We have tons of information like new patient paperwork, new patient interview skills documents. I have a lot of things that are scripted out for you so you can learn how to sell lab kits effectively. Tons of patient education material in here. Really want to give you all the tools that you need to make the practice work. Okay? And so we have now small groups that go through. I don't know, we get 10, 15 doctors typically in a class. I teach all the classes myself. We are going to have Richard Lord starting to teach for us twice a month coming up in July. So we'll have another expert in the area that's going to be giving advice to people too. We've got the community, we have the actual curriculum, and then we have a special offer. You got to remember this code: VIP June 2018. You save a grand off the one-year mentorship. We're going to be starting another class towards the end of June. If you want to just talk, schedule an email, or, you know, email and schedule. We have Marc Herbert who does initial screening calls and just tell you more about the class. I'm happy to talk to you as well if you're interested in taking the course. It's really been up-leveled in the last two years with my work with Richard Lord. It's a, used to be just kind of like a Dr. Dan home, like, "This is what I do in my practice." Sometimes a really good course, I liked it. But now we've taken the lab analytics to this whole other level. And pretty excited about that. As a, what do you call it? As a, I don't know, you'd have to have taken the old course and then take the new one to get it. But it's, uh, in my mind, my clinical knowledge in the last two years working with Richard has about doubled from what I had learned in the previous 25 years. So in my mind, when I'm teaching now, I have about twice as much information in my head as I used to. And that is all being directed to, you know, right at students. And that's why I was kind of joking in the beginning where, when I'm going to show you right now, it used to be a big part of the class and I would, you know, kind of insist on people spending a lot of money to take the class before I teach them this stuff. But we have so much material that, um, you know, it's just a whole different world now. Okay? I just got a note from Peter. Yeah, I think the slides are working for other people. Peter, it may be that if you only see me sometimes, that camera gets a too big, and then you don't see the slides. In any case, Peter, everything's being recorded, so you can come back later on this into the recording too if you're not seeing everything.

Alright, let's see. Let us get down to it now. So in a regular class, there's a Q&A call, right? And we just basically get on a webinar and we start talking about labs. So this is, we're gonna kind of mimic that right now. And let's look at some tests to do, do-do-do-do, and show you how to interpret these and set up programs. Okay? So number one, I don't care what lab you use. Any of these salivary labs are great. I use this company called BioHealth because my teacher started BioHealth. I'm very loyal to them. His son now runs the company, Brian Timmons. They're as good as anybody out there. But, you know, there's many really good quality, solid, great companies. Just make sure you associate with one of them that does the month-long panels. But Bob, and let's look at, I'm gonna superimpose a graph on here. What should be happening? And let's kind of zoom in and look at the progesterone first so you guys can see in a bigger view here. And again, this is just like what a regular class is like. The dot, you would have said, "Oh, you know, I've got this patient, she's got really bad migraines at the end of the month, or she can't get pregnant, whatever the complaints might be. You know, what are we gonna do about this lab?" So remember, progesterone is supposed to be flat in the first part of the cycle, and then it's supposed to shoot up and drop right back down. No, and stay up and then drop down. Yeah. So you can see her progesterone shooting up and then dropping down. So she's got a deficit of progesterone right in here, which is gonna cause a lot of symptoms. And so you would expect for this woman around day 24 for her to get a migraine, for her to get PMS, for her to really, you know, be grumpy, moody, irritable, crave chocolate, whatever it may be. That's huge drop of progesterone that's happening too early is a pretty big problem. So the first thing we do when you're analyzing, well, first of all, you see there's a progesterone problem, right? It's not being produced in accordance with what the normal graph would be. And then the next thing you do is you go up to the top here and you see where the estradiol is, or estrogen. Here's the estrogen. And you're like, "Okay, well, we know that the estrogen is supposed to spike right around day 12 or 13." It does go up a little bit there, but then it really comes up to a peak around a 17 or so. So let's look at our reference point here. This is this diagram. So I'm scrolling around, will fire areas, and look at what's supposed to happen. Does estrogen go up a couple of times? No. Does the estrogen go up around day 17? No. It goes up right here. It's the pre-ovulatory spike. It has supposed to happen before ovulation, right before the middle of the month. So again, look at the normal here. It goes up once and then drops. And let's go and look at the lab that we're analyzing. And oops, sorry, it's the wrong one now. Sorry, pull up the right one here. Here it is. And you can see what's happening. It's going up, dropping a little bit, going up again, and dropping, and then going up again, and dropping. Okay? That's not, none of that's supposed to happen. So we know there's a, we may be the kind term would be like an erratic production of estrogen. It's not quite at the right time. And we know that the progesterone is shooting up and then dropping right back down. It's not being sustained. Okay? So now if you just put on, you're like, "What the heck do I do about this?" You would think, "Well, if we want to give some progesterone, we would want to start it around here and give it during that time of the month when she's not making enough of it." And in fact, we may even want to get her progesterone to come up a little faster and make that more, making the arc more normal like the graph that we showed that showed the normal, right? So again, we want to make it more like this. And so in order to do that, we use these cyclical augmentation programs. Cyclical augmentation programs. Cyclical augmentation programs. And I'll show you how easy this can be to do. If you, real, I'm just waiting for this document to load, sorry. If you really want to upload, up-level your, your practice, if I get a hold of the right doctor at the right time, you know, I know the class is expensive, it's like 12 to 13 grand or whatever. If you get the thousand bucks off, I think it drops it down to 12,000 for the year. It's like a grand a month. I price all these things about a grand a month. You will make that money back, you know, before the class is over, just in patient consults and all the new stuff you're learning. Okay? Anyone who I get my hands on who's in good shape emotionally and can actually do the work, you know, you'll, you'll make the money back pretty quickly. Okay? Hopefully before the class is over, you will have paid for the class.

Alright, so here's a basic cyclical augmentation program. Again, what are we using? You could use any three of those drops. What did we call them? Progesta-Vail, oh, that's the new one, that's cool, from Designs for Health. Pro-Adapt is the new one that's from Bio-Matrix. Or the old-school one, they got to remember the name because it's complicated, Progan BL, but not regular Progan BL, Progan BL4X. Now, we're not going to use the progesterone in the first part of the cycle. We're going to instead use it in the second part of the cycle. And then you can customize this cyclical augmentation program based on the lab. So let me show you how to do that. So where does her progesterone start to rise? Well, it really starts to kind of kick in around day 20. If you look back at the original graph that I showed in the beginning, you'll see that she's kind of missing out. They should be, it should be coming up more like this. So we could start giving her the progesterone around day 15 and try to bring it up to this peak and then drop it back down. Alright? Let me show you again here with the drops. And I think this is a little high. So let's say, and cyclical means that we're very, let's say we start with eight drops, and then we bump it up after a few days to ten drops twice a day. And then after a couple of days, we really bring it up to, let's say, 12. And then we stay at that 12 level as a plateau for around five days. One, two, three, four, five days. And then we want to taper it back down again. To say, to 10, and then to 8, and then to 6. Okay? So we have a three or four-day taper up. And that's a little too long here. We have like a five or six-day peak. And then a three or four-day taper down. So let me say that again. I'm, excuse me, a three or four-day taper up. There's the taper up. A peak of five or six days as our peak. And then a three or four-day taper down. And then you're saying, "Well, Dan, why do you do that?" Well, we just go right back to the regular old graph. And that's what your body does, right? There is a three or four-day taper up right in there. There is a peak of five or six days, maybe seven, you want to be nitpicky. And then there's a three or four-day drop. Or just mimicking normal production. That's all we're doing. The beauty of this is that you're not even trying to do anything. You're not trying to pull anything over on Mother Nature. You're just acknowledging that Mother Nature is control, is in control, and you're just going to try to resync the cycle. So again, there's a three or four-day taper up. There's a peak, peak in there. And then a three or four-day taper down. And you're turning what her lab, the mess of her lab, into a balanced and beautiful progesterone production. And that is a cyclical augmentation program. Okay? So let's look at a few others. Did you, these work really, really well, and they're not that hard if you just think about it. Well, there's a good one. Well, never know what you're gonna come up against. Let's see here. Some of these are all patients of mine, or some of these are ones that the lab sent. All right? First of all, is there supposed to be a massive spike of estrogen on day seven? I don't think so. Not in any book I ever read. So that's just an anomaly and not a good thing. Remember how the estrogen supposed to only go up once? So the estrogen rise and drop there, that is crazy making. Women do not like the way that feels. The rest, estrogen rise and drop here, okay, not a good thing. This is going to be multiple migraines, mood swings all month long. There's something in this woman's life is not going well. Okay? And then you can see, similar to the last one, there's this big spike of progesterone and then a really, am, immediate drop. And again, we want to smooth this out. We want it to be more like the bell-shaped curve like that. Let's look at a few more of these so you can get a better sense of what we're talking about. I also find just the Dutch test, you're looking at high volume, is good. And again, these are the month-long female hormone panels. Pretty easy, just spit into it too, but every other day for a month, and the lab will map this out. Again, I like the lab BioHealth, but if you have another saliva company that you like, go for it. Now, this is, I mean, I don't know what we would say. Maybe she'd be charitable and say erratic progesterone. So there's a rise and a drop, or rise and a drop, or rise and a drop, or rise and a drop. In general, on the estrogen, there's a rise and a drop, or rise and a drop, or rise and a drop, and a rise and a drop. Okay? So on the dropping days, not so good. I tell this story all the time, just because I think it's funny, but it's actually true. So what am I, I've been married twice. I'm single, and I'm very happily single right now, just enjoying being single. But during my second marriage, which had its ups and downs, because one moment, this is a totally true story. So I'm, I'm in the kitchen, and Patty, Patty walks in the kitchen. That was like, I don't know, it was like a Saturday or something. And I am doing something that I thought was relatively innocent. I'm putting the mayonnaise away. Putting the mayonnaise back in the kitchen. So the mayonnaise jar, I'm just putting it back in the, right? There's nothing else going on. I'm not doing anything bad. I am just standing there. I'm fully clothed. I'm acting normal. And I'm putting the mayonnaise jar back in this refrigerator. And Patty looks at me and she says, "That is not where we put the mayonnaise jar. You are putting it on the wrong shelf." You know? And I was about to think, you know, this is like a marital situation. I'm thinking, "Well, are we really starting a fight over mayonnaise?" And then I realized, and I thought about it for a second. I thought, "Well, first of all, we've never discussed that there is a special shelf for the mayonnaise. That is just not something that we do in this family." And, and then I thought about just how insane this whole situation was. And then I, and then I realized, "Oh, okay, there's happening. There's something happening to her cycle." And for me, that was just like this crystallization moment. Then I realized that this woman that I loved dearly, just was not of her right mind temporarily because of her menstrual cycle. And me putting the mayonnaise away in the refrigerator, it looked like something really wrong was happening. And in her perception of this, it was in her mind, it was an accurate perception. Okay? That kind of irrational thought, that kind of, you know, getting irritated by another human being doing something which seems kind of innocent. That is generally going to be a moment that precedes one of these major drops. In other words, when women are dropping out in their hormones, 12, maybe 24 hours before a big drop, there's going to be a cognitive shift where they're going to be irritable or have mood swings. Most of the time, most women just kind of stuff it and they hold it together and they don't lash out at people, right? But it's an internally very disconcerting thing. God bless Patti, she would just say what was on her mind, no matter what. So she was fine yelling and throwing plates at me over the mayonnaise jar. But really, I realized, "Well, okay, that it, that drop there, this drop there, that drop there, that drop there." And look what's happening to this poor woman that the progesterone is dropping to, right? So the estrogen is dropping, progesterone dropping, estrogen dropping, progesterone dropping, estrogen dropping, progesterone dropping, estrogen dropping, progesterone dropping. There is no way, I mean, if this was happening to a man, if like I was injected with estrogen and progesterone every three or four days and then it was taken away, any human being, has nothing to do with whether you're female or male, just gonna be yelling about mayonnaise jars, right? Because you cannot have a hormone that surges and drops and surges and drops and surges and drops and surges and drops like that and feel like a normal and happy human being. It's not possible. In my general experience, most women that are going through this are not like Patti. They're not yelling at everybody and screaming. They're actually kind of stuffing and just feeling internally horrible. Okay? So we have to, in this kind of a situation, level this out. Remember, the estrogen is only supposed to go up and drop in the middle once, and at the end once. That's it. The progesterone is supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be flat in the whole first part of the month, and then come up once and drop. Okay? So this is like a worst-case scenario. We have erratic ups and downs of both hormones, and they're just, just want to control for this. Okay? And so the progesterone, you can see drop, the, the first mid-cycle drop is right here. So we want to bring it up again. It's the same bell curve thing that we've been drawing every time, right? We want to do that. But you also want to start to control for some of these earlier problems in here, okay? These things, ups and downs in here. Okay? And so that can be done with an adrenal program or sometimes a thyroid program. You want to look to and, you know, support other levels of the hormones, you know, more than just this progesterone only. But again, you'd want to smooth this over here so that's not such a precipitous drop. All right? And that's a particularly bad one in terms of how that person was probably feeling. Oh, sorry, this is not what I wanted. Hang on a second. Let's find another report here. Yeah, I don't think we did this one yet. So now, and you can see each one of these reports is like a fingerprint. They're unique to that particular person. That's really quite interesting to watch how these play out. So with this particular one, we've got a spike of estrogen and then a drop. That's supposed to happen when you're not supposed to have these others. The progesterone comes up, but it doesn't peak until very late. Here, peaks around, looks like 27. That's a little late, right? Remember, it's supposed to peak more like in here. It's supposed to be like this. And the cycle's a little long. That's going out for 35 days now. For some women, that may be normal. They have a cycle that's 30 days, 32 days, even 35 days. For most women, that you just want to ask them a couple simple questions. You know, "From the time you started menstruating, how long has your cycle been?" You know, usually when they're seeing us, there's an erratic, either they're long or short or something's going on. So if they say, "Oh, it was always 28 days, just like clockwork, until last year, and now it's been 35 days," then you know that you want to reset it back to 28 days, whatever the normal is for that particular woman. Okay? And so if you go to the cyclical augmentation programs, like this one here, you take in the progesterone, taking from day 15 to day 28 would reset back to a 28-day cycle. If it's normal for that woman, let's say that she says, "Well, my cycles were always 30 days and still I started to hit until I started out these problems," then you would want to reset back to 30 days. I'm gonna show you how to adjust for that. It's really easy. You just add a couple days. So if she says, "Oh, 30 days was always my norm," then you see where it says day 28 here, we're just gonna extend it out, day 29. Oh, wow, did that automatically? I didn't know the computer did that. That's cool. It's gonna do a day 30. No, day 30 stop. So again, if you want her to have a 30-day cycle and you're trying to reset this, just push out the regular program so it's 30 days instead of 28. Okay? And again, remember there's these characteristics: you have a three or four-day taper, a plateau of five or six days, and then a three or four-day taper down. So you can extend this in any different way that you want. Like if you wanted to make this one a little longer, you could give her an extra day there, you know, something like that. There's a bunch of different ways you can do it. The plateau could be a little longer, or you can do taper up a little longer, or taper down a little longer. The key point is that you just want to add whatever number of days you need to to make the cycle math work. And where's Kate? We'll go back to our usual 28-day cycle. I just wanted you to be able to see how you can adjust it. Oh, and if she says, "My cycle was always 26 days," and you want to reset back to 26 days, that's fine. Just chop off these two here. And you'd have to make the taper start a little earlier, right? So you'd have to do something like this. 10. Remember, we need a three or four-day taper. 8, 8. Now you got a 20. And then on day 26, you're going to stop. So that would be a 26-day cycle reset. So you just lengthen or shorten it depending. The average or typical program is obviously around 28 days. That's what we do the most of. And then you're going to stop on day 28 for a 28-day cycle. And that should trigger bleeding. And then the person starts back up again. Okay? Let's see here. Let me see if we can look at one more. I think we saw that one already, didn't we? The officer looked at the same eye for a while. See, maybe we covered them all. I think we did. Then what happened faster than I thought. Okay? So I'm going to show you a few other adjustments you can make to the programs. I mentioned one of them, which is length of the cycle that's normal for that woman. You can extend or shorten these cyclical programs. I'm trying to, oh, there's one other pattern that comes up. Well, there's one issue that comes up a lot. Let's say the patient is a mom, she has three young kids, and the idea of remembering what to take on different days is just overwhelming. Then you can just say, "Hey, we want you to start on day 15, take 12 drops twice a day, every day until day 28." So you can just simplify this. You don't have to do the fancy, you know, cyclical thing. You can just simplify it down to the same exact dosage, basically. It's two weeks on, two weeks off, right? And then always remind the woman, day one is the first day of bleeding. Okay? So this would be the simplest way to do it. You start on day 15, 12 drops twice a day, you stop on day 28. The next month, you restart and do it again. And these programs work beautifully. I mean, I've had just such great results with them over the years. You need to let women know it's, you know, six to 12 months to really get this cycle reset. Most women started to feel all dramatically better in the first month with any of these progesterone products. You really should have super happy patients who just loved this. And I've encouraged you to do the labs because the labs are an important thing. You really want to see each aspect of what's going on with that. Okay?

Alright, so I'm going to take a pause here and open it up for questions. Hopefully, that was helpful for you guys to see how all this works. In a second here, where's my thing? Here we go. Good. A reminder, you get a grand off if you sign up using that promo code. Come join us. It's a great class. It gets better every year. I'm kind of peaking right now. So does Dr. Dan ever recommend Vitex? Yeah, we use Vitex. I'll use a lot of herbal stuff. So I'm just talking about the progesterone tonight because I think most people don't know. All right, most people are a little nervous or uncomfortable about how to use progesterone. But yeah, we use herbs all the time. And for pre- and post-menopausal women. Other reading materials on this? You know, I think that there's a couple of books that really influenced me the most. What Your Doctor May Not Tell You. Do you guys know that one? What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause. It's a poor title because it's not about menopause, it's just about hormones in general. And this is my original teacher in this work, Dr. John Lee. So when I was in Chiropractic College, if you can believe this, 1992. Yeah, cause a while ago. Was that 26 years ago? Anyways, 1992, I'm in Chiropractic College and I heard about this lecture Dr. John Lee was giving. And I was like, "I don't know, this guy seems really cool. I'm gonna go to this lecture." And I went. At the end of the lecture, I charged up on the stage. You gotta realize, there's 500 people in the audience. There were like five guys. It was like 495 menopausal women and five men. And everybody in the audience was like, well over the age of 50. And I was like, I think at the time, I don't know how old I was, like 29 or 20 or 30 or some like that. Was young. And so I charged up on the stage. I shook Dr. Lee's hand. And then he became a teacher of mine, and we worked together for several years. So his books are great, and they're, they're timeless. You can still read this one. This is my favorite one, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Menopause. So I highly recommend that. The other book that is just great, and I learned a lot from, if you haven't read this guy's stuff, Susie Rees. So Easy Rees is an OB/GYN, Beverly Hills based. I don't know if he's still in practice or not. I used to get a bunch of his patients back in the day when I was down in San Diego. Great doctor. And this book, Natural Hormone Balance, is just, it's just, it's like a, it's almost like a workbook for doctors. I know he wrote it for the public, but there's so much valuable clinical information in there. This guy is just amazing. And it's a really, really good book. So I highly recommend that for a variety of reasons. Once you read that book, you'll be like, "Wow, that was really good." It's almost like taking a class. Okay? All right, let me go on. More questions here. Do you ever adjust the?

Estrogen level. Absolutely. Yeah, we're just not talking about that tonight. So you can do that indirectly through the use of DHEA, and if you need to, you can do that using some bioidentical estrogen as well. If it's erratic, you say that the rear maintained replacement with progesterone for four to six months, and the cycle levels will correct more like six to twelve months. So I usually tell women that's going to take about a year. That's, you know, have you do this for six months for sure. It's hard to retest because it takes a month to retest, obviously, and then they have to stop taking everything while they're retesting. So usually not going to retest this a whole heck of a lot. Usually I'll say it's a six to 12-month program, but start you off with six months for sure. And then I'll usually want to do a follow-up consult every two months while they're on the program. That usually works out pretty good.

Grams of progesterone in 12 drops of each product. So the, the program that I drew on the board for you is using program B. So you would have to adjust the dosages if you're using a different product and/or Pro it down. I mean, let me show you that. So program B and Pro Adapt have, I believe, the exact same amount per drop. If you're going to use the, what was the other one? Oh, the Pro-Testavail, then you'd have to adjust the dosages. I don't know the math on that. In other words, the program I showed you was for Pro Adapt or program BL 4X. If you're gonna use the progesterone from Designs for Health, you just have to do a little math and get the equivalent on that. Okay. And it's, I believe, 4 milligrams per drop. So 12 drops is 50 milligrams.

So the estrogen deficiency issues, DHEA from an adrenal program can smooth over a lot of that for some women. Usually this is more perimenopausal. We actually can use, you know, a plant-based or bioidentical estrogen, Bez Joaquin Kerry said it's called PhytoB. That's another option, but again, that's usually for women who were in post-menopause. I could do a different class on that sometime. It's a slightly different subject, but you can get the PhytoB and BioMatrix. I will show you here also has a new product. They have the estrogen in a liquid here as well, which is a non-prescription estrogen. So you have two choices on estrogen: PhytoB or this S-Adapt, if you want to use estrogen.

So another question is, when the for women who are on the protocol, can they test? No, because, you know, you're just going to be seeing what's happening with the absorption of the stuff that you're giving. So the best way to do it is, I would say in six months. And, you know, run the initial task. But I want us to program for six months. I mean, if everything's better, you're done. If things are halfway there, let them know we want to do another six months. And some, we're between six and 12 months. If things are not going well, you can stop everything and then retest. But you can't have them on the product while they're retesting, especially if you're using these drops because it's a saliva test. And if you spit into a tube and you have a bunch of this progesterone in your mouth, it totally changed the results of the test. So you can't do that. That's a kind of a limitation to this.

How would you cycle progesterone for postmenopausal women? So that all depends on labs as well. But assuming that her hormone levels are flat and she's fully in menopause, you know, there's two approaches. Why don't you just give the progesterone and estrogen, whatever's needed, every day of the month? And then in other cases, there, you know, doctors will take three to seven days off of the hormones every month to give the woman's body a break. So there's two different ways you can do that.

Why choose saliva over urine? Well, I don't know if there is a 28-day month-long urine test. There might be, but I don't think there is. I'm not sure. So the salivary I do is is because of that. Let's see. Let's see. What about retesting? All right, answered that.

How do you know one hormone panel would be the same each month? And then how about menopausal women? How many issues? Well, you know, you never know. I mean, in my general experience with a month-long tests is you look at the month-long panel. And I don't honestly know. I've never seen a woman who did 12 month-long panels in a row for a year. So you can see their variation. But my general, I mean, if she's having a relatively normal month, I mean, if the month in which you're testing her, both her parents died in a car accident, she gave, you know, you know, notice that her job, and then they had to move from San Francisco to New York. I mean, you could have a month that's not representative of what's going on. But my general experience has been that when you run the labs and you see the patterns and you talk to her about her experience, that there's pretty spot-on.

So in other words, like, let's go back to our really sad one here. Where was the bad one? Where's a really bad one? Oh my god. Yeah. Oh, this poor woman. So, you know, like when you look at this lab and you're talking to her, and she'll tell you, yeah, you know, on day 20, I get these horrible migraines. And then I get them again. And, you know, people will tell you pretty much exactly what the lab is describing. You know, and so I think, you know, if she gets a migraine every month on day 22, you know, you're gonna, there's not as much variation. And this again, unless something extraordinary happens, I think the labs are pretty consistent once a month. Now, sometimes a woman might say, I get a migraine on a different day every month. But most of the time, these kind of patterns of complaints are similar. She'll say, oh, the, you know, the week before my period every month, I get this or that. You know, usually it's pretty consistent. Let's see.

Any recommendations for working with clients resistant to paying out of pocket for testing? That's kind of an eternal question. I think the main thing is that 80, 85% of the world is in America, at least, is tied into this whole insurance thing. And they don't think that they should pay for their healthcare because they want their insurance to cover it. So you're never going to talk those kind of people into doing a test. But, you know, a good 15 or 20% of people out there are looking for doctors who can help them run these tests and analyze them. So I, I mean, I'm really trying to focus on the people who are interested in looking at these tests rather than kind of talking people into doing them. You know, and then, really, I think that the majority people are more insurance-based and don't see the value of all in this kind of stuff.

All right, I'm gonna wrap it up for tonight. I hope this was helpful for you guys and you get some ideas about how to actually treat these problems. And we'll be doing a lot more free webinars later in the year. So I hope to join you all soon for a doc again. Okay, take care everyone. Have a good night.