Perimenopause: It's Not Just About Hormones | Webinar

[Music] [Music] welcome to integrative you radio hosted by Dr Nick KS and yours truly Dr Nicole Rivera this is the place where you become Limitless we are covering the latest and greatest topics of course in a disruptive fashion around Integrative Medicine mental health and human behavior we are also covering how those topics affect the human and family Dynamics we will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our health preneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve Healthcare if you are Health curious and growth focused you are in the right place but buckle up because this is real this is raw and this is disruptive this is integrated view [Music] radio hello everyone welcome back to another episode of integr of you Dr Nicole Roland solo today and we are talking about menopause and so when it comes to menopause I cannot tell you how many women come to me and say I'm in menopause or I think I'm in menopause or I'm in per menopause and we dig in we do the Diagnostics we realize that their hormones are not the root of the issue their hormones are an effect of other things that are the root of the issue which we're going to talk about today and then they start their healing program and some are happy about it some are not they get their period back even late 40s 50s late 50s Etc and so I want to talk more about about this idea of menopause because there are so many different scenarios that we hear about as women we hear about women that have horrific menopausal symptoms we have other women that say I I just stopped getting my period I had no other symptoms and it's difficult for people to to know where they're going to fall and it's also difficult to wrap your head around like how do some individuals have such extreme symptoms and others have zero symptoms how does that make any sense because if if it was just menopause is menopause then everyone would have somewhat of a similar experience but it's not the case at all and so there are a lot of factors from different medications that you've been on in your life if you've gone through chemotherapy treatment for cancer there's those are there's a lot of pieces that can contribute to menopausal symptoms but if we want to backtrack and we want to zoom out and we want to look at even if the it was medication induced chemotherapy induced and so in the event that an individual is having menopausal symptoms let's call it moderate to extreme there's a theme and this theme didn't start with the loss of the period This is a theme that has been going on diagnosed or not and this is something that unfortunately is overlooked by most conventional medicine but I will tell you this what we're about to talk about is a problem for more than 90% of the population and what we're talking about is blood sugar disregulation and liver issues those are the two that I want to start with I do want to shed light on different reproductive uterine vaginal things as well that are also connected to gut issues that's going to be the second part of this but the main thing that I want to drive home right now is the health of your liver and the health of your pancreas are two determining factors of what menopause will be like for you so if you have diabetes if you have insulin resistance if you have uh type 1 diabetes the autoimmune if you've had pancreatitis in the past if you have fatty liver if you have autoim immune liver if you've had elevated liver enzymes if you've had your gallbladder removed because your gallbladder is connected to your liver if you've had any of those things you are going to probably have some significant symptoms when it comes to menopause and this is why insulin is one of the hormones made by your pancreas that helps you to regulate your blood sugar insulin is a hormone insulin Works in tandem with your sex hormones estrogen progesterone testosterone and then we have your liver and your liver is the primary organ that helps with the with metabolizing excess hormones specifically estrogen so what that means is your liver says oh there's way too much estrogen floating around chop it up and get rid of it metabolize it break it down so if your liver can't do that you're going to have excess estrogen which is then going to create problems with your other hormones everything is about a balance so if one goes up there's going to have to be a counterbalance of the others it's like a domino effect the same thing if your insulin is constantly up down up down and then it gets to the point that you're insulin resistant which means that your cells don't even know how to use insulin anymore and your blood sugar is elevated not only do you have a boatload of inflammation in your body and you probably can't lose weight and you're a little puffy and your rings get tight and your feet get big by the end of the day and all that fun stuff but you're also going to have a Cascade effect into your hormones because if you have excess sugar in your blood you're going to drive up your estrogen and estrogen dries up your fat tissue and then your fat tissue makes more estrogen so I'm not asking you to follow every single one of these biochemical Pathways that I'm mentioning right now but the moral of the story is is if your liver is jacked up and your pancreas is jacked up you're going to have hormonal issues which is probably in your non-menopausal years causing you to have Painful periods or causing you to have endometriosis or causing you to have irregular periods or having you get migraines or diarrhea with your periods it's causing all of those things and then your menopause kicks in and now you're going to have significant symptoms with your menopause from your hot flashes to your completely being drenched at night to your hair and your skin changing fatigue all of it so let's kind of break down what liver and pancreatic issues look like in the average person so let's start with the pancreas and the blood sugar so the average person with pancreatic dysfunction that is going completely unrecognized is the person who wakes up with no appe appetite in the morning they have a cup of coffee it suppresses their appetite a little bit further now they're getting into maybe 11 maybe 12 some people even into the 2 p.m complete afternoon by the time they have their first meal of the day but by the time they actually eat they're starving so int intuitively their body wants carbohydrates that carbohydrate might be something healthy it might be a smoothie Bowl it might be a sushi with a bunch of rice it might be a rice bowl or it might be full-blown just unhealthy carbs like pizza french fries Burger Etc so now you eat and your blood sugar spikes really high because it was so low because you didn't eat spikes crashes now you're tired now you're trying to grab a cup of coffee maybe you're getting caffeine from a soda from the vending machine maybe you're looking for a little bit of chocolate now you're getting into the evening hours again oh my gosh I'm starting you're prepping dinner at home you're snacking on your chees and crackers cuz you can't even wait for dinner to be ready and now you eat your dinner and you're like oh I want to get on the couch but where's the ice cream very very typical of a roller coaster blood sugar SP crash by crash by Craft the longer that goes on the more difficult it is for your blood sugar to do what it is supposed to do your insulin to do what it's supposed to do this is something that starts to lead to brain fog low energy levels weight gain and you're not getting diagnosed with diabetes because it takes a long long time for that to happen so you're going to your primary care and they're testing your glucose levels and they're like you're fine everything's fine in reality there are a variety of markers to be ran to look at your pancreatic function from your insulin to your amales to your lipase to your glucose to your hemoglobin A1c those are just a couple of markers that you should be able to access through your primary care now the liver on the other hand this is the primary one that goes super super undiagnosed if you've listened to other podcasts you've heard me say this before it was probably eight years ago now that I discovered an autoimmune liver panel and it was actually by accident I thought I was running a different panel that code was expired so lab corpor quest will run the code that's most similar and the code that was most similar was an autoimmune liver panel and it came up positive for this individual and I was kind of like what is this panel how have I not known about it and so because the liver is such a primary focus for me working with my clients which I'll explain why I was like I'm going to start running this panel on most of my clients because I want to really know where their liver is at and the reason I say this is because the typical markers to run to look at the liver is a and ALT those are two two enzyme markers that are only going to come up elevated when someone has acute liver inflammation meaning like there is something happening right now that is making their liver super inflamed but the thing is that most people had chronic issues with their liver it's been going on a long long time because nowadays kids are being born with a jacked up liver one of the primary reasons for them being JIS there are liver issues from day one and the reason is because their studies now proving that there are almost 200 chemicals in the amniotic fluid so kids or the fetus is floating in amniotic fluid filled with chemicals so your liver helps you to break down and metabolize chemicals toxins medications caffeine any of these chemical compounds it helps to break it down so I would laugh when I talk to people and I'm like oh your liver is showing up stress or inflamed I don't even dink I'm like drinking is like the teeniest little part or I don't want to say the Teen part it's one of the smallest things of all the things that can stress your liver from tap water to the pesticides on the food to all the chemicals in the personal products that we lather our bodies in shampoo our heads with to the the Vaseline you put on your baby's butt to the the cleaning products in your house to the fertilizers in your yard the mosquito spray that you spray on your property the the chemicals that are on golf courses like shall I go on the medications the Tylenol the pamperin the the pharmaceutical prescription drugs like you're liter has to break down and metabolize all of that it has to break down that cup of coffee you drink every day or multiple times a day that is the reason why people will say oh I was F when I was young and now I'm now I'm 25 and I have one glass of wine I feel like I'm going to die for five days like that's not the wine per se don't get me wrong most wine is [ __ ] unless you live in Italy or France but it's it's the fact that your your liver is already congested it's already inflamed by your teens and your 20s so it can't metabolize things the way that used to and so if that's what's happening is like you can't drink caffeine anymore you can't drink a glass of wine anymore like you're allergic to everything everything [ __ ] up your stomach like that's a sign that your liver is completely messed up if you're you can't lose weight no matter what you do your liver is messed up if your skin looks like [ __ ] your liver is messed up your head to toe eczema deral myositis whatever like that that is it's a liver issue your liver is at the center of almost any disease from brain fog to autoimmunity to skin hormones Etc and if I if I didn't say this already over 95% of the people that I test that autoimmune liver panel it's positive in eight years kids included it is a huge problem the other thing the past year I've been testing heavy metals in the urine just through lap corpin Quest and for those of you that are seasoned functional medicin you know that that's not a good test and I ran it because I was having a lot of difficulty with using a private lab for a kid and we were only trying to do urine now was like let's just do this one test and let's see if it yields any valuable information this kid's arsenic level was through the roof I was like that's kind of interesting so tested a few other people that are big golfers because golf horses have very specific pesticides that are arsenic based and so everyone in the past year elevated Arsenic and it's definitely hard to say exactly where it's coming from but another very interesting fact about arsenic is arsenic is something the organic version of arsenic arsenic is in the Earth's crust like the organic version then there's inorganic versions of arsenic where are the toxic man-made forms so organic arsenic from the earth can actually be absorbed by the body when the body is trying to protect itself from radiation and how many of us are walking around with an iPhone 12 13 14 15 in our pockets in our Lululemon belt bags wearing it right over our heart so it's radiation is a huge part of it and that could be addressed force behind the arsic I'm derailing so the moral of the story is is those two systems need to be looked at in the event that you're having horrific menopausal symptoms and chances are they are the Catalyst but the other thing too is that there are so many women walking around with silent urinary tract vaginal infections so many women people will ask me all the time time they're like why are you running this urine panel for like chamia and goria and I'm like no no no I'm like yes the panel has those in it but the panel is looking at some bacterias that are left talked about like urop plasma micoplasma that are in the urinary tract or vaginal tract or both that are going undetected but are the reason for women needing a bade iions for women having bad menopause bad periods endometriosis fibroids cyst Etc and so that's another Avenue that has to be investigated the other thing go hop on Google I never tell people to hop on Google because it's like you know terrifying usually when people Google things but if you wanted to Google the anatomy of the pelvic Bowl the anatomy of the urinary tract bladder vaginal tract uterus and rect you're going to find that they literally line up they share walls here's your rectum here's your vaginal tract here's your urinary child as a woman obviously and so a lot of people are walking around with gut issues some they're diagnosed some are just like e my gut's just not great I don't poop very well you know I have blood sometimes I have hemorrhoids so on and so forth and what I find is that if those problems go on long enough and now you start to have ulcerations or you start to have leaky gut which essentially is ulcerations or permeability in your gut you can have the bacteria of your gut now start to get into the lymph nodes of your pelvic bowl and then eventually get into the urinary and vaginal tra so there's a huge correlation to women dealing with reproductive issues that are it's actually all coming from either diagnosed or undiagnosed gut ISS issues so these are all things that have to be taken into consideration because the first thing that we're told Is bioidentical hormones or hormone replacement therapy and I'm not going to say that doesn't make you feel better if you if if your hormones are messed up because your hormones will be messed up with this going on you fix the hormone problem and you will start to feel better but the problem is is that your body's really really [ __ ] smart and so if you want to put hormones in then your body is going to adapt it's going to say where where did that come from okay shut down the pituitary gland of the brain which is the stimulating for hormone production shut down adrenal function because that that might be why we're producing too too many hormones so you start to create a lot of problems when you put exogenous hormones in because your body knows how to do its job there's obviously obstacles like the liver like the pancreas the insulin the infections those are the obstacles that are messing up the hormones and your body adapted your body adapted to those issues so now you disregard those issues not saying intentionally and you go and you start putting hormones in because your hormone test is messed up and nobody looked at anything else and now you're creating a different set of problems and also is anybody talking about the long-term effects of putting estrogen creams on your body or using estrogen based depositories and how that can be a catalyst for um weight gain that could be a catalyst for cancerous growth nobody's talking about that either or that could be a catalyst in neurological degeneration so it's really understanding your body knows what to do but your body will adapt we call it disease but it's really distress and it's your body adapting to the current circumstances we need to think differently about disease we need to think differently about pathologizing everything and thinking your body failed you your body doesn't fail you your body adapts to the stressors that exist and that is what nobody's [ __ ] talking about your body adapts a cancer cell is an adaption everything is an adaption so are you going to look at the root cause and figure out what the [ __ ] is wrong so that you can solve it or are you just going to keep using poisonous Pharmaceuticals that are not solving the problem they're just creating a batet of side effects that you need more medication for later like the system is designed very very intelligently and we need to think outside the box and we need to understand that we have the power to change those circumstances and not rely on these exogenous compounds it's it's just it's a crazy idea when you really think about it from a different lens we like how long have medications been in the picture the past 75 80 years what did people do before did everyone just die people more people are dying young now people survived way longer even without Pharmaceuticals without vaccines without all of that people are sicker than they've ever been kids are sicker than they've ever been and it's an adaption to the stress from pollutants from actual mental stress from this skewed culture that is not about people it's about don't trust people hate people watch your back you know there's so many [ __ ] layers to it like I could be here all day but the point is is that you have the power to find the root cause it takes Diagnostics it takes data but there is always a solution and remember when you're when you think your body is failing you it's an adaption your body is doing intelligently what it knows how to do which is keep you alive and that adaption can look like really bad menopause that adaption can look like a quote unquote disease it can look like pain it could look like a cancer cell it's a matter of figuring out what caused the stress that caused the adaption going to mic that drop that 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