 Welcome to Resiliency Radio, your go-to podcast for the most cutting edge insights in functional and integrative medicine. I'm Dr. Jill, your host. In each episode, we dive into the heart of healing and personal transformation. Today, we're talking with Dr. Lindsey Berkson, who specializes in complex cases, high-risk hormonal patients, and severe GI types of symptoms and cases. I want to introduce her and then we'll dive right into the interview. Dr. Berkson is a thought leader in functional medicine with an emphasis on hormones, nutrition, digestion, and intimacy. She was a distinguished hormone scholar at the world-renowned estrogen think tank at Tulane University because she wrote one of the first breakthrough books on endocrine disruption, hormone deception, published by McGraw-Hill in 2000. Today, stay tuned, women, men, we're going to talk about hormones and why you can live life vibrantly into your 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond when you optimize hormones. Yes, Dr. Berkson has taught, re-licensed, seminarized her professional, MDs, pharmacists, chiropractors, naturopathies, acupuncturists, nutritionists. That's where we've met in some of the training and teaching and formulated the first female nutraceutical line for physicians in the U.S. She has a wealth of knowledge. We're going to dive into crazy and sane hormones and how to have some sanity in a crazy world today. Welcome, Dr. Berkson, to the podcast. So great to spend some time with you, Dr. Jill. I really think you're one of the most authentic and smartest thought leaders that I know. So to have time to hang out with you and have a narrative that your audience can get in on, I'm so excited. Very delicious. Thank you very much. You are welcome. Well, you are very in demand as well, and it is such an honor because we kind of last minute, we're recording on a weekend. We're like, can we do this? Yeah, let's do this. And so I'm super excited. It worked out for both of us. And today, our topic is hormones. And right before we went on, we were comparing arms stories and like strength. Yes, exactly. Look at that. And I think you don't mind sharing your age, do you? No, I just turned 75 about a month ago. Unbelievable. And if you're listening out there, you're like, well, that can't be me. That's why we're here today. Because we both believe that when you live in a way that's authentically, when you take care of yourself, when you optimize hormones, we're going to dive into how you can too have that kind of a body of Dr. Berkson and the health and more than just the body is the health and the vibrancy in the mind. You put out an incredible blog every weekend, every time the topics. And I just always, I feel like, I mean, the body is amazing because we can be strong. We can hike. We can do things with our friends, but the brain may be even more important, right? So let's go back though. How did you get into hormones and optimization? Let's go back to your story first and then we'll dive into what people can do. First off, I love the title of your podcast, resiliency radio, because it's all about resilience. Life hits any of us. Crises occur just in a split second and how you have lived your life or the tools that you have in your tool bag and the team that you've assembled when something hits or shows up so that you can get back on track and not worse than before. That is the real deal. And I'm honestly a hedonist. I love to feel good. And much of my younger life, even though I early on heard about organic gardening and that your body is the temple and detoxing and I lived in India in ashrams. I was a yoga teacher. I was doing everything right, but I kept getting cancers and feeling awful. So I have struggled with how to come from what the doctors then called a lemon body. I remember when I was in my mid fifties, Dr. Blevin, my endocrinologist here in Austin, after I'd had my kidney removed from kidney cancer, after I'd had breast cancer, and I'm living in the life that people go to once they're diagnosed with cancer and they clean up their act, he said, you're just going to have to accept that if life is a book, you're in your last chapter and you just are never going to be one of those people who have really great health. You just have to suck it up and accept it. And now in my seventh decade, I, and it's been a fought for prize. I have the best health that I've ever had. I started a woman's kiking club here. I go dancing. I work out at the gym every day. I've been flying in September in the first week of October. I was on 22 airplanes, lecturing in five cities and working a four year contract one week a month in Naples at Dr. Pearl Mutter's old clinic. So I have been in place in a place where most people are in their 20s in a career that's taking off. And that's what I want to share that how you can feel good. And when you don't, when something shows up, then get back on that track. And we're not taught that, which is why I love your podcasts because these are the tools I know you're sharing. I love that. I've always loved you. And I love you even more for sharing what you've been through. And I'm sure the story is way more than you just share, but to go through cancer, multiple cancers and not only just survive, but you are clearly thriving and we want to know your secrets. And I think it's so important for people to hear not that you and I are unique because I've overcome cancer too. I know we have a sisterhood of that. We do. But that they, if you're listening out that you might be like, you might look at us, well, they can do that. What about me? And we're here to tell you, you have this potential as well. And that's what resiliency is. That is exactly right. Where would people say we're, my most male listeners, there's more women than men, but there's a lot of men out there too. But let's talk to women for a moment, 35 to 65. And maybe we're catching them a little bit before you and I, where we've had cancer and had to recover. What kind of advice would you start with for the 35 to 45 year old woman before they hit menopause? First of all, it's always good to start developing every, everything that you do is a habit that becomes a tool that helps. So it's great to start developing an awareness of how you occupy yourself, body, mind and spirit. And that's a lifelong journey because in our world today, because we're all doing, doing, doing, many of us are in our heads and we need to be in our heads to succeed in this culture. But we occupy body, mind and spirit and how congruent and how deep and so I can, when I go into the gym, I can spend some delicious time tuning in and seeing where do I need to stretch, what needs more of a workout, combining some prayer and mantra affirmational kind of processes while I'm working out. I've developed these tools. If something, if I tweak something, I've heard something, I can attend to it. I don't always have to go to a professional. So I think it starts with the desire to develop an awareness of all the levels and the bodies that we occupy and see and figuring out what do I need to do if I'm off on some of these areas? Who do I go to? What do I need to do to get it tested or evaluated so I can get back on? And I always think the larger your toolbag that you develop as you move through your life, the better you are. Like having a pharmacy in your home of some antibiotics and some ivermectin or whatever you in nutraceuticals, whatever you've got, you're ready, you don't always have to go to a professional, but there's a learning curve to get to that point. So I think it's about awareness and then action from that awareness. And then of course, we're always looking for that set of easy answers or that synolytic medication like rapamyzen, the anti-aging med, but true life is a tapestry of many, many things. And it's important because we live in a body, mind, spirit to attend and care take yourself on a number of those levels without driving yourself crazy. You don't have to be perfect all the time, but most people don't push themselves. Most people don't get their hormones evaluated. Most people don't get their biomes evaluated. And these are things or have a relationship with incredible healers. So if you get ill, you can go get some ozone and whole blood radiation and you even know that that's available to do. So that's the kind of thinking is that maybe too much at once. No, it was perfect because one thing that really heard as you were talking that I've learned and I know you've learned it. I want to share with our listeners is when we're going, at least for me in my 20s and 30s, I was going hard. I was training for medicine and it was just how do I survive and suppress my body so that I can move forward. And in that suppression, that dissociation from actual pain, feeling what I did was I disconnected my mind from my body. And my mind was like, shut up, body, behave. I need to do this work, right? And in doing that, I got disconnected from, oh, my stomach is a little upset. I need to rest or, oh, I have a queasy feeling in this room of people. There may be some dysfunction or bad energy or all these things that I'm giving silly examples. But the bottom line is our body gives us signals every day of what we need to do and how we need to take care of it. And that's what you're describing in the gym. Instead of going in and we do online, we have an influencer that tells us we need to do this core workout every day. Instead of that, you're saying, what if we actually touch base with, what do we, like sweetheart, what do you need from me today? Like talking to yourself with kindness and loving compassion and checking in. And I think so many of us, especially if we're professionals or working hard, we've lost that connection. And what you just described is at the gym, you're kind of checking in with your body. What do you need from me today? And that's such a kind way of being and our body responds so much better than that. Let me like, shut up, I've got to run five miles today. Right? That is so exactly right. Sometimes I get in there and I feel like, you know, I just need stretching today. I don't need to push myself today. It's been a little too chaotic. So I go to a place that was right before the pandemic purchased by lifetime, but before that it had been owned by this private owner named Beto that had, I'm in Austin, Texas, and it had one and it's on a lake. So the gym owns the quarry lake right behind it. And there's one more opposite Whole Foods, the corporate headquarters downtown. And he had printed on the doorway to both of his two gyms that saying, never, never, never give up. And I used to, when I walked into the gym, it was so, this was a sacred time because life can pull you apart if you don't have the tools to keep yourself comfortably insanely together. So I would read that, never, never, never give up. And I would instruct my molecules, do you hear that? Do you get that? And I would start the conversation with my molecules and through my day. And I don't do this all the time to make you drive yourself crazy, but I have a conversation with my molecules on body, mind, spirit to check in and see what's going on. I live in the Great Hills, so I have a steep home with steep stairs. And I run up those stairs and sometimes often I give thanks at every single step. And when I come down, I think of the people in my life who've contributed to me and I give thanks to them. And you're just adding in little moments to me of graciousness, which seems to somehow not be culturally trendy, but I feel better when I surround myself or act within graciousness. So that was great of you to pick that up. That's exactly right. I love that. And we know there's actually science between love and gratitude are one of the most coherent states of ourselves and our mind and our body. So there is real science behind continuing to daily moment by moment, keep going back to that state of gratitude and love, because it really ourselves love that state energetically, right? Something else you mentioned. So hormones, I think hormones is our core, optimizing them. So many women out there, I get texts and messages all the time. Oh, my doctor said, I'm fine. I don't need hormones. Let's just kind of give a big overview. Why are hormones important lifelong? And what's the landscape that's really made this dysfunction and this insanity around hormones? Wow, what a well said question. So first of all, my life was ruined by hormones. And my life is honestly been saved by hormones. And within the context of the story, I'll go to that in just a few minutes. But who knew that my whole passion would be hormones? And hormones are extremely confusing right now in this culture. Most women, when they inquire of their well intentioned physicians, am I a candidate for hormones? They'll often hear, I don't believe in hormones, but they're not a religion. They're not muslimism or Christianity. They're a physiologic fact. But no longer are hormones really taught in med schools, osteopathic schools, naturopathic schools, chiropractic schools. They're pretty much relegated to, I don't understand it, but urologists, gynecologists, endocrinologists, they should be the people right that we would think we would go to for our hormone health. But most of them are either just handing out birth control pills or in men that are 60 when they ask their well intentioned doctor to run their hormones, the doctors comparing their reference range of levels to a 60 year old man. When ideally with hormones, you want to get to the reference range back to when you were 25 or 30. So why are hormones even important and why are they not really honored in the medical curriculum anymore? So hormones, hard to believe are not just about reproductive and sexy things. And that's how most people think of hormones. I don't have to pay attention to them unless I'm metapause or I'm pregnant, or I have, you know, I want to freeze my eggs or something like that. But the real unappreciated extraordinary role of hormones is that your body has an internet system and cells get emails to be told what to do to carry on your life. And the most powerful cells are the ones that get the signals that can put their hand deep inside your archival library where you get all this legacy information from your parents and your grandparents and all your genes are in there. So hormones are the only molecules that can really get in on genetic information and pass that genetic information on to cells to tell cells what to do. There's other signaling cells, but they, these are the pre premier cells that can get in on your genetic activity. And why vitamin D is so famous at the moment is that it's also a vitamin, which means we need to take it in every day. We don't make it, but it also now is a pro hormone, meaning that it also can speak to genes. So vitamin D now is part of that exciting family. So we've got a hormone nuclear family of molecules that literally wherever there is a satellite dish in the body to receive the email system from this hormone, those hormones act. So you have these satellites all over your brains hormone having hormones have incredible influence over your ability to think, to be aware, to store memories, to have motivation. You have hormones lining your vocal cords. The woman who does my pedicure, she always says, you're so old, but you don't have old lady voice because I've been taking hormones or we learned in COVID that the lungs are lined with progesterone satellite dishes and progesterone signals help heal and repair lungs. So Mount Sinai just published the results of an experiment where they took men in the ICU with severe COVID. We know that they're at risk of ground glass appearance of their lungs and complications from ventilators. And if they gave these men a hundred milligrams IM BID, meaning twice a day, if they gave an injection of progesterone to these men, they could have a, they had shorter times in the hospital. They didn't get that ground glass complication in the lungs. They healed faster. So wherever there are hormone satellite dishes, really smart practitioners can utilize hormones, not just for menopause and sexy things and pregnancy, but to actually heal the body. Like we hear about leaky gut. I know you're a really big gut doc and you overcame inflammatory bowel disease as well as breast cancer. So you have this passion and these tools now to help other people. Well, part of keeping that gut wall safe are these little adhesive proteins that allow enterocytes, the single cells that make up the real thin lining of the gut to open, close, open, close. And if it stays open too much for a variety of reasons, then we can get autoimmune diseases and leaky gut and so forth. Well, hormones, they have satellite dishes all over these adhesive proteins. So progesterone and estriol and estradiol, they help the gut wall. And I, my gastroenterologist let me give a presentation to the gastroenterologist at Austin Regional Gastroenterology, because I had six or seven of their young female patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Some of who were told they needed a colectomy stat and they didn't have cancer, but they had so much dysplastic cells and cells that were changing abnormally and this and that. So I literally utilize hormones wherever there's a satellite dish. So I gave estriol and progesterone and testosterone and small amounts. These are women in their early twenties, along with low dose, naltrexone and identifying their food, et cetera. And within two, three months, literally two, three months, their follow-up colonoscopy showed tremendous improvement. And at the sixth month period, all seven of these cases that I presented to Austin Regional Gastroenterology, they were all clear looking like they never had disease. And I said to my gastroenterologist, who I really like so much. I mean, when you need a colonoscopy, you need a colonoscopy. We need each other. We need everybody. But I said, I don't know how you practice gastroenterology without also embracing endocrinology because you've got satellite dishes for hormones all up and down. Like I've created a new treatment for baris esophagus, which used to be thought to have no treatment and the cells are starting to change in the lining of the throat, making you at increased risk of esophageal cancer. So we know that there's oxytocin receptors, another hormone. We think of it as the love hormone, the pregnancy hormone, the orgasm hormone. But oxytocin has tremendous activity in the gut. And so I mix it with something called mucilox that helps adhere it up to the esophageal wall. And with pre and post endoscopic imaging, I haven't done it on more than like at this point, five or six patients, but we've reversed and gotten rid of barits within a year. And so I presented that to my gastroenterologist. But the way medicine is set up today, everything so compartmentalized that he said, that's amazing. That's fantastic. And all that data you're sharing is from our own journals, from gastroenterology journals. But if we had a hormone issue, we'd send them to the endocrinologist, we'd send them, you know, there isn't this crossover yet in the body, there's this crossover. So I try and go around educating people, especially now that we have the planet is encircled in many whirlwinds and like layers of multiple endocrine, potentially endocrine disrupting compounds that are now in the amniotic fluid of millions of healthy young Americans. And we have microplastics in the sperm in the egg and placenta in mother's milk. So we the genetics for your life are set up in the womb by the health of the mother and father before they got pregnant and how clean all those fatty rich tissues, the egg, the sperm, the placenta will be, and they're not clean anymore, they're filled with plastics. And so we now have kids 13, 14, 15 in their 20s that are having hormones, the level of 60 and 70 year olds, like everything is changing. And we are wondering how this is a Tulane, what are where I was a distinguished hormone scholar. We had several main questions that the scientists were always in incredible conversations on. And one of the questions, and this is 20 years ago, is gender bending coming down the road. And I mentioned this in hormone deception. And then I wrote a book called sexy brain, where I claimed that we had the threat of environmental castration. And this was published in 2017, where I said, we don't want to connect anymore in the old ways of connecting. But how much of this is really due to chemicals, not necessarily our true choice, because hormones rule your brain. So the outer world has gotten in on our hormonal inner world, which should be the most powerful internet system we could have, but we have email freeze going on. And earlier than we ever thought. So does that download it in a nutshell? Oh my goodness, I'm just thinking so many wonderful things as you're talking. First of all, as I just was silent, you have gotten such a great way of explaining things for the like the satellites and the way you describe it is so practical for those listening, because of course, like, Oh, yeah, the signals, we need these signals and all ages of life in all areas. So a couple of things I want to comment on and get your ideas and thoughts. Hey, everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, unexpected finding resilience through functional medicine, science and faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein bar and mold and biotox and related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you want to get your own copy, stop by read unexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. So grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. First of all, you mentioned progesterone. We know I'm years ago with concussion, right? Progesterone, there's good studies on healing the brain. So there's all lung, who would ever think this and in medical school, I can attest to this. We were taught, oh, if you don't have a uterus, you don't need progesterone. That was the old saying. If you don't have a uterus, you don't need progesterone. That's the only thing it does is protect the uterus, right? And now we know all over the body, men and women, progesterone is crucial. Now this is a little more complex than we can go into here because what you want to end up doing is finding a good anti-aging functional integrative doctor that is trained in hormones that really can assess all of this because we're not saying that you really do need a physician or a trained practitioner that can understand and test because even for me with breast cancer, probably for you as well, we want to say, where is that going? And is it going down pathways that could cause damage to DNA because it talks to the genome and cause breast issues or endocrine issues of any sort? But I want to go back to one thing that was so important and interesting. You talked about inflammatory bowel disease and the lining of the gut. And of course as a survivor, I've known this, but you mentioned oxytocin. So I want to go on a little tangent with oxytocin and I wanted to just make you a book that's not out yet is on oxytocin and I'm really having trouble with the title. Maybe you know the title of that. Awesome. We'll talk about some ideas. Oh my gosh. And that's a great, such a, because in the mold world, so maybe seven, eight years ago, I started, it was kind of an accidental thing. And then there was data to support it, but we saw low MSH, which is melanocyte, stimulating hormone as a huge part of mold related illness. Because when you have no MSH, it's hard to regulate the symphony in the pituitary and hypothalamic access. So your ADH, which is antidiuretic hormone, which is also vasopressin or these things. Right. An oxytocin and vasopressin are right on the same receptors all throughout the gut. Yeah. Exactly. And on the posterior pituitary, they're both, they're, they hang out there together and the only two on the posterior pituitary. So I can't remember if it was an article I read or what, but I started in clinical practice saying, let's try oxytocin with those with low MSH. Guess what? No surprise. It improved it. But here's the link to inflammatory bowel that's going to blow your mind. There are studies in mice that will induce, in a mice model, they can induce Crohn's and Colitis-like inflammatory bowel. By making them, by making them knock out oxytocin mice. I have those articles in my new book that's going to be coming out. And that's how I got onto the idea of using oxytocin for lesions in the gut wall. And then, then I talked with the pharmacist, I lectured a lot of pharmacies. So I become, I love compounding pharmacists. They're just some of the best people ever. And so Jim Hensier helped me figure out how to put it with an adherent molecule to get it up there. That's exactly it. That's what I'm hearing this. I'm like, I know the mechanism because what I would start to see is then the gut wouldn't figure out because when you have no MSH, you're going to have leaky guy. So what you were doing is actually modulating oxytocin MSH together because they kind of, and again, I don't know the mechanism. Maybe you know more of this, but for some reason, when you give oxytocin, it will actually show, at least in my clinical experience, raise an MSH. So it's kind of this, an MSH is required like oxytocin for intestinal permeability. So I think they kind of link together somehow. And again, I don't know that. So now I'm going to have to take a dive into that and look at that. You can probably find, anyway, just a side note I wanted to mention because I think that's so valid. Oh, I love that. I'm going to talk about oxytocin. Let's talk a little bit about the many, again, many who are finding sex hormone, post orgasmic, you'll get more when you hug your child or your dog, but it's way bigger than that, right? Let's talk. Oh yeah, you know, there's, I have some practitioners that are mixing it with ketamine as a nasal spray and getting rid of major depressive orders in a few hours. But not in everybody. Oxytocin is very team player hormone and it requires healthy thyroid signals. It requires healthy estrogen. That's why women respond to it a little bit better than men because it's best friends with estrogen. So women tend to respond a little bit more women make more oxytocin when we orgasm. That's why we bond more in the, Austin's like the epicenter of ethical non monogamy where the young people say marriage didn't work. And so we're going to have these transparent new relationships. But women make so much more oxytocin. If you make love with someone consistently, it's very hard not to fall in love with them. But so I was just lecturing at A4M in Vegas. So that's one of the anti aging programs that certifies. That's where you and I met because we were both, we've both been professors for the anti aging. It's very well respected and it's a four to five year program. If someone's already a doctor or nurse practitioner. So this year in Vegas, the theme was longevity and anti aging. And I think I was the oldest speaker there. And there was a sea of young doctors, 5,500 young eager doctors really wanting to know all this information. And there were 30 speakers that got to speak to the main hall. And half of these speakers said that hormones were the best thing ever. They were anti aging. Even after a stroke or a heart attack, you should go right back on because they helped the healing processes. The other half of the speakers said the exact opposite. They said hormones drive cancer. Hormones are dangerous hormones. McGregor who just wrote his book how not to die. He was like a really big guy saying hormones accelerate aging. And I could see the confusion in this sea of bright faces. Suddenly they deflated and they were confused. So out of this, I have really upped my game to get the message out about what the science says. And also the clinical translation for who are the people that are really aging. Not a 20 year old that's a green drink, guru influencer picture. But let's look at somebody who's battled blindness and cancer and this and that is in her 70s and 80s or 90s and isn't and really has that resilience that your show is named after. So I got together with David Brownstein, who's one of the most famous physicians and hormones and has many phenomenal books on it. And I said, David, we need to have a two day online ready for Monday morning, CMEs for MDs and nurse practitioners and put this on. And we need to have a narrative online of let's talk estrogen safe, dangerous. What's the truth? So last week, we put on with Dr. David Rosen, sweet, who's now a major influencer in the hormone domain, but he happened to be one of my doctors 30 years ago when I had breast cancer, the fickle finger of fate. And then we also had Dr. Angela De Rosa, who's unbelievably brilliant and incredible. And we had Carol Peterson, who's a doctor of compounding pharmacy and worked for international women's international in Colorado for 25 years. We had all of us talking about and we invited all of the main doctors who are so phenomenal, but they don't believe in hormones, or they just give testosterone to a breast cancer patient and they'll give them aromatase inhibitor and not let them get any estrogen. We invited everybody and only the people who were pro hormone wanted to come on. Just like in the COVID, I wish we would have had town meetings where we could hear both sides respectfully and hear their thinking and we could make some of our own decisions. I wanted to create that, but what we ended up creating was a really huge discussion and narrative on the true science and where it went astray, which I imagine we want to touch on. So I would love to make available for your audience the link for Let's Talk Estrogen. They can get that for free. And then I'll also, if they could pass on the link, if you've got doctors that are on the fence, they don't really know how to do hormones. We have CMEs for MDs, nurse practitioners, nurses, PAs, and nature pass. We couldn't get them for chiropractors. They're the hardest group to get CMEs for, but we did get all that. I just paid the bill for it. So I know we got it. I've usually lectured where other people did all this. I've never done this kind of thing. So I'm just so impressed with what you put together. And I'm just going, this is something I'm going to listen to and sign up for. So just if you're listening out there, this is worth it. And you mentioned before you had a program, but I didn't know all the details. I'm so excited to share this. It's going to be a game changer because you and I both know there is such power to living vibrantly and well. And we're talking optimized in a very safe way. So maybe for the layperson, we've got two audience here. I do have a time positions listening. If you're listening, you can be sure we're going to have the link wherever you're watching this in the bio in the show notes on my website. You can find this link. But let's talk first like for the layperson would they want to maybe share this with their practitioner or where would they start with just navigating their own hormones? So the first thing they would want to do is listen to let's talk estrogen and understand where we went astray and why in the United States today we vilify. We vilify and we women are terrified of estrogen. And there's a lot of Facebook groups that are estrogen dominance, making estrogen a nasty like a dominatrix and everything like that when when actually estrogen signals are responsible for the evolution of humanity. And Abraham Morgantaler, who it was an associate professor of urology at Harvard, and just retired from opening up the Boston men's clinic is on exactly the same mission with testosterone for men as I am with estrogen and hormones for both genders because we all have the same hormones. And we had the honor of lecturing together in Miami a few years ago. And he said exactly the thing I say like why would mother nature make the very hormone that drives humanity and pregnancy and brain development be pro-carcinogenic? It doesn't make sense. It's much more involved than that. So if you most doctors are on the fence because they're teaching in med schools today hormone. So David Brownstein's daughters just graduated both from med school. They're joining him in practice. I said, what did you learn? And they said hormones cause cancer. Never write a script. We know nothing about hormones. So when you ask a well intentioned doc, you have to understand they're used to giving answers. Doctors are there to try and help you and give an answer. They're going to give you an answer. But most likely, even though they're good people, you're going to get the wrong answer. So if you could take this, let's talk estrogen and listen to it and pass it on. And then I hope we have a little chance to talk a little bit about how things, at least in my opinion, and what I interpret as the science of it, of how we went astray. But know that hormones are so helpful to keep you healthier longer if you know how to keep your own hormonal family healthy, that in socialized countries around the world, where they pay for everything with medicine, Finland was the first country to do this. They have breast cancer registries, adverse heart event registries, death registries, and they track what people do. And when they end up in these registries and how much they cost the country, because the country pays for all medical stuff. Whereas in the United States, we've got emergency rooms or we've got functional care, we've got off the grid, on the grid, we're kind of a pot worry because we're the capitalistic go to people, right? That we could do it on our own. There are about now, I don't know the exact number, about 20 socialized countries that have seen that hormones, women on hormones, men on hormones, when they start them in the perimenopause or early menopause, and then they track them and track these registries, that the women on hormones have less heart disease, less cancer, less neurodegenerative disease, and they live longer. And because of that, they now give hormone, they offer them hormones for free. If you want them, the country will pay for them. And yet, in contrast, in the United States, our doctors don't get in on any of those narratives. They're told hormones drive cancer and don't prescribe them. So that's kind of where I'd like to go is how did that happen? And what's, is that okay to go there now? Let's go right now. Are we okay? Okay. I think it's so important for people to know this, because what you just did is to reiterate, and then you'll jump into this. So I've walked in their doctors, and I've had this with my patients, I asked my gynecologist about hormones, and she said, I don't know, they're risky for cancer. And we're not vilifying the doctors, because as I was trained, I wasn't taught anything. So this either has to be a doctor who outside of their medical training goes to some of these courses, A4M or IFM or some of the courses that are actually teaching this and learns about the safety and efficacy and science. And it's not their fault. But you do want to find someone who understands this, because you're going to live longer, better, healthier, if you really do optimize your hormones. So go ahead and dive into the- Okay, well said. That's well said. So we're not vilifying the doctors. Everything comes from exposure and perspective. And the more that you know science, you can readjust. I'm reframing my perspective. And people at the moment right now in medicine have the wrong perspective on hormones. And now I'm going to dive into that moment. So Britain first started with the first country to start hormone replacement about the mid-50s. And it was really catching on like wildfire. So by the 1990s here in the United States, because we picked up on it from whatever happens in Britain and Canada starts happening in us, we're all really, really close nations. And we love our fellow nations. And we got in on those hormones. And the promise of it was is that if you were on hormones, you'd be, quote, feminine forever. Hormones were given for decades here. If you had a stint put in, if you had congestive heart failure, they were given hormones and women were clinically doing better. So by the time that around the later 1990s came around almost 20 million women in the United States were on hormones, but in the United States were more run by big pharma than Europe is. So the hormones we tend to use are ones that are patentable and they can make a lot of money for the people that put stock into the company. So the most common hormones were Prempro, which is a combination of conjugated equine estrogen, which means pregnant horses urine, along with a synthetic progestin, madroxy progesterone acetate, or it was just the horse estrogen. That's what most women in the United States were on. Whereas in Europe, almost everybody has been on natural estradiol, natural estriol and natural progesterone, although they have their own issues about stuff that's going on. But so coming into the 1990s, we have a lot of women in the United States on these hormone medications that were some of the top selling medications ever in the United States. So we're an aging country. And it's prophesied that by 2030, the majority of Americans will be over the age of 65. And everyone is very concerned, are we going to topple Medicare? That's what socialized medicine has all those registries for, because they want to be able to control the dough, you got to control the dough and follow the dough. So we're an aging nation. So they figured they formed something called the Women's Health Initiative, which was 40 different prestigious institutions under the onus of the NIH, the National Institute of Health. And we're going to take a look. And the first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at women every which way, because they live longer than men. So we have a lot of more older women than we have older men. So if more Americans are older, the majority of them are going to be women because they're widowed, they're divorced, et cetera. And they looked at women every which way, bones, cholesterol. But the first big test that they did was hormones. They figured let's prove with a random set of randomized trials that hormones do what we say they do. And they had two arms, one with the estrogen from the pregnant horse and one from the combo job, which was a prempro. And they early stopped the combo arm because the combo arm looked at first blush, like women were getting a little bit more heart disease, a little bit more breast cancer. But the estrogen only arm never showed that. It never showed that there was more breast cancer. And in fact, they started becoming very uncomfortable with the Women's Health Initiative because of these early premature findings, which were eventually found out not to necessarily be accurate. But the estrogen only arm when it was tracked at several months, two years, three years, 16 years, 17 years, and its final reanalysis by its original authors in 2019, every which way they stopped the estrogen only arm at five years because it was oral estrogen. And some women were getting a little bit more heart issues, never breast cancer issues. And in every evaluation, women taking estrogen only had less breast cancer, statistically significant. And if they did get breast cancer, they had a much better presentation, a much less aggressive cancer, they died less at the 20 year reanalysis, which was presented in 2019 in San Antonio, where they once a year get together for the San Antonio Breast Cancer Convention and scientists share information to try and help women out. They shared the reanalysis saying women who are on estrogen replacement for an average of five years have a 23% less risk of ever getting breast cancer. And if they do get breast cancer, they have a 44% reduced fatality incidence. Nothing ever has protected you from for staying alive from a carcinogenic event as estrogen has. But somehow because of that misinterpretation of the combo arm, estrogen got vilified. And now we have so there are some studies that suggest that estrogen drives cancer, I won't lie. But there's many more studies that say the opposite. And if you really dive into the majority of these studies, not all of them is because they have synthetic versions of hormones, synthetic versions of progesterone, oral, and when you go to the natural, there is never, never, never an increased risk. So, so Agnes Fortnay did a huge French study called the French cohort, I think it's called I3E and it's a difficult name to remember. She tracked 80,000 women and the women on the synthetic progestins had a 65%, 650% increased risk of breast cancer where the women on natural progesterone never had an increased risk. And the brain health, we have so many people with dementia, so many people on these new expensive unhealthy new meds, we have huge facilities, this complex nursing home, industrial complex, when so much of the brain, we wonder how many of those cases would the people wouldn't be in there if they were allowed to be on hormones, because the University of Arizona published a few years ago, they looked at 400,000 insurance reports, we had all the data, and women on hormones had statistically less Alzheimer's disease, just less. And if you were on natural steroids, you had almost 70% less risk of getting any of these issues. And there's a huge study that's still in peer review, I'm a peer review scientist for a number of journals. And that means that when a study first comes out, a group of scientists evaluate it till they give it their blessing to then be published in what we refer to as peer review. And it's the largest study ever run on hormones by our NIH, our own government, and the National Library of Medicine, and they looked at 7 million American women, 65 and older, and they said how many of them are on hormones. And there was 1.5 million women. So they had all the data, because when you're in Medicare, they've got all your medical records, everything. So they knew how the women were taking the estrogen in, that means the delivery mode. They knew exactly how long the women lived. They knew they were diagnosed with a cognitive issue if they had, and they looked at five cancers. They looked at breast ovarian, uterine, lung and colorectal. So they found, again, the same thing that was exactly what the real true interpretation of the Women's Health Initiative found, they found that women who were on estrogen for an average of five years, and it doesn't really matter when you initiate it. It really can be even later than we thought. You can stay on it longer, but the benefits of five years actually last another 15 years. They've only gone out to the end point of 20. They had statistically less of every single one of those cancers, the topping breast, less breast cancer, less lung cancer, less ovarian cancer, less uterine cancer. They lived 20% longer. The oldest women with the worst cardiac disease, where we're all told, if you have heart disease, you're not a candidate for hormones. You can't do hormones. You're high risk. The highest risk older ladies lived the longest and had the best quality of life, and they evaluated quality of life by ease of movement with no pain and how much you were doing in your life. Like, how much can you keep living? And it was really phenomenal. It was an incredible study. The study has not come out yet, but it's the largest study ever. But we are denied estrogens while socialized countries have it, while the science doesn't really say it. We think estrogen causes breast cancer, and many of our doctors think this way. So that's the mission that I'm on. Absolutely amazing. Dr. Brickson, I love, I mean, this is just amazing for people to hear and amazing for doctors to hear. And I love the work you're doing on what is the name of the course. So the name of the course is everything hormones. And we're making it where we talk about the efficacy. We're giving you lots of research, and we're also giving you, by the way, disclaimers, lawyer based disclaimers to have everyone sign everything. Although if a woman gets breast cancer and she's been on hormones, she's actually better off. And if you educate your patients about that, you're much less at risk to get sued. And we're going to go through everything, the delivery how you give it, whether it's oral, whether it's vaginal, whether it's topical, the bases, what are the differences between the bases? How do you write the scripts? It's going to be A to Z of hormones. And we're also going to talk about the global lowering of hormones in younger women and younger men, and the randomized trials that are being done right now and published by Harvard and at General Mass, the Neuroscience Institute have been looking at 13 to 24 year girls who have body dysphoria, anxiety, insomnia. They have your regular menses is one of the flashing red lights if you're, because the regularity of your period translates a bit into the health of your body. And when that goes off, that's a flashing red light that something's going on. So we're going to talk about, and there's a lot of young men who are being given testosterone shots who shouldn't be because that makes them be infertile now. So we're going to, what do you do if you've got a young man that's been given a shot? How do you reboot his fertility? What do you do with these young girls? How do you track giving hormones to a patient? How do you know that it's really doing something deep in the tissue? So by Monday morning, it'll be a 16 hour CME and they can take it at their leisure because it's online. We are launching it live, but it will be online. And we also are going to follow up. So we're going to have more meetings with you after you've been on this course where we can go over case reports and answer questions. So that when you go home and you know, things don't work like you thought you heard, we want to be able to help you fix that glitch. Unbelievable. I'm going to be the first one to sign up truly. And again, I do hormones. I know hormones, but I think this is the next level. A few little pieces I think that are important to pull out one thing that you said. And so again, lay people who are listening, our physicians, one of the big problems is progestin versus progesterone, right? As you talk about this arm, I just want to make that clear because a lot of people like your lay person, you might go in and the doc says, Oh, let's give you a mini pill or they'll give you these things that you don't really know the term. And they say doctors will actually use the term progesterone when they mean synthetic. They don't always even know the difference. So maybe just speak to very briefly, what is the difference between synthetic and actual progesterone? And why is that night and day with the outcomes of health? That is fantastic that you honed in on that. Thank you for taking me down in that direction. I love it. It's perfect. And that is part of the problem is when people say hormones cause cancer. A lot of times those hormones are part of that hormone mix has a synthetic version of the molecule of progesterone. It can also have a synthetic version for estrogen, but a company to patent a molecule needs to alter it a little bit to make it something that nature's never seen before to make it patentable. But you don't know how a million people out of, you know, who's going to be able to handle that variation on that molecule. So natural progesterone that looks exactly like the one that both men and women and boys and girls need. We use high dose, for example, progesterone and ADHD and autism in young kids. I mean, a forward thinking neurologist uses it in lots of varieties, as I just said, those satellite dishes are in a variety of places, right? So where was I just going with that? So progesterone, progestin, the natural one is really progesterone when it has been altered molecularly. So it doesn't look like your natural progesterone molecular shape. If you think of that, you look in a mirror, you have a shape, molecules have shapes, they have a right handedness, a left handedness, and they alter all that when they patent it. Those are called progestins. But in the medical literature, those two terms have gotten completely messed up and interspersed. And most doctors don't even know the difference of that. And it's really the studies that have progestins in them that show that increased incidence of breast cancer, not progesterone. And where do we know this better than ever? This is proven over what we call replicated over and over again is birth control pills. There's no study that doesn't show that swallowing oral contraceptives doesn't raise your risk of breast cancer significantly. And then that risk stays elevated. We only know if you've been on it for five years. I think the duration studies have been done for five years. We know that your increased risk goes on for five years. We haven't really done the research. I have some breast cancer patients that come in and they've been on, were on them in their history for 30 years. We don't know their increased risk, but they're made up birth control pills are synthetic progestins. And they're often combined with ethanol estradiol, which when I worked at Tulane as a distinguished hormone scholar, we were the think tank first saying, Hey, there's chemicals that can mimic hormones and can disrupt especially in the womb and affect fertility of the human race and other things like cancer. And our two model compounds were diethylstabestral, which was 50 times more powerful than your own estrogen. It was given to 38 million pregnant women from 1938 to 1971 and prenatal vitamins and it is injections. If you had a spotting and it turned out that the offspring from that had all these problems that were the canaries in the mind of what's coming down the road. And now they don't teach DES, which is the nickname for that in any med schools anymore, it's gone. It's just gone that information. And I think I've pondered that a lot. Why would they not teach such a public health tragedy that it was the most powerful cancer causing was banned in 1971 is a class one carcinogen. It was given to pregnant women like crazy. And now it's not taught in med schools. And maybe I am only theorizing, but maybe that makes women a little bit more open to taking an mRNA vaccine that's not been tested on pregnant women when they're pregnant, because their doctor hasn't really heard about the travesties, except for maybe thalidomide. But it was a huge public health tragedy. And the other estrogen we used was eclinial estradiol, because it's an endocrine disruptor. But that's what's in birth control pills that became OTC available over the counter, like a month or two ago. So how do we make those, we pass them out like M and M's, which turn off all our hormones and make they're really at the base, you know, they, they instigate a lot of inflammatory bowel disease, if you've got the right genes. And yet at the same time, we're not letting older women have access to hormones. We're terrifying them of hormones. So something so right with this picture, you've just, oh my gosh, you've laid it out so clearly. And one last thing on this that I think is so important to you is what's your thoughts on, I know some of the science, but oral versus transdermal, our bodies kind of make them. So say a woman who's, you know, going into menopause wants to replace them as a doctor who's educated with a course like yours, and is able to prescribe. And of course, I'm sure you talk about this, but just for a little bit of little teaser, let's talk briefly about risk of oral versus transdermal. Okay, well, I love that. So getting a hormone into you is called a delivery mode. And you can get a hormone into you in a wide variety of ways. And each one has its pros and its cons. And at some point in your life, one might be better than the other. But most of the research historically has been done with oral estrogen. And when estrogen is swallowed, it goes through the digestive tract, then the liver and the liver metabolizes it, making metabolites that act in different ways than the parent compound. So that's called oral delivery. And we don't recommend that because it has that first hepatic pass, making more pro inflammatory, pro coagulative, that's why we saw more clots and heart disease in the permanent only arm in the WHI. Now we totally know we understand the whole lay of the land rather than estrogen is bad. Estrogen was swallowed. And it was horse pregnant estrogen, which there's better, although in the seven million study, even horse estrogen protected breasts against breast cancer. So what we learned from a number of studies at hormones are so important that maybe sometimes even altered forms are better than none at all, but not synthetic progestins. They're really the biggest bugaboo of all. And yet they're available OTC. So oral swallow, but you can swallow progesterone because you want the metabolites that the liver makes from progesterone. So the liver makes these great neuro protective molecules once you swallow it. So a real savvy doctor knows the difference. Well, if you take this hormone orally, you get your body makes this and you need that. Oh, I could do that. But if you if you have a thickened endometrial lining or you've got polyps or you're starting to make you have issues with your uterus, maybe I'll give you your hormones as a first vaginal pass right up into there. Rather than guessing if you swallow it will get your uterus and help out. So there's a variety of ways depending on what the doctor wants to do to help you out with that help. That is perfect. And I love that we there's a million things we could talk about those few little things because a lot of docs, even what's nice is even if you don't compound, which you and I both do and use these pharmacists that are amazing, that can help us make exactly what that patient needs. There are commercially available transdermal estradiol patches and creams that are bio identical. And there are commercially available oral progesterones that occur. So there are actually pharmaceuticals that you could get at your local CBS Walgreens, whatever that are bio identical. And that's kind of I think more important for the docs that are maybe on the fence and not really understanding how to compound because you can actually get good safe ways of doing this commercially. You know, it's crazy. So right, I got really into oxytocin when I was working at in Oklahoma, because I was working with care first pharmacy, these brilliant pharmacists, and we were seeing incredible results by giving oxytocin in a variety of delivery modes sometimes inhaled as a nasal spray sometime as a liquid that you swallow sometimes as a roll on with low dose naltrexone for an analgesic or a pain. So we were doing we decided to make an over the counter oxytocin so people could get a standardized one because the FDA allows 15 international units. That's how oxytocin comes in as international units. And within three, four months after we opened up this company, they made it illegal for compounding pharmacists to ship to other states unless they had a licensure. So we couldn't stay in business, but there is a product that I've wondered about now that I can't sell my own available of all things at Walmart. And I was keynote speaker at a pharmaceutical conference for PCCA in Calgary, Canada, about the beginning of the summer this last year. And there were a bunch of midwives and doctors that specialized in OBGYN. And they said that they didn't want to use ptocin anymore, because it goes against the characteristic of oxytocin, which is pulsed, where ptocin is continual. And there's a case to be made, are we damaging oxytocin receptors by that delivery mode? And so they said they were using this Walgreens oxytocin over the counter for their pregnancy, and it was working like a charm. Oh my goodness. That's amazing. And who knows? And first of all, I can't wait for your book to come out. Do you have a pub date for the oxytocin? Not yet. Not yet. I'm going to need, I need to talk to you about that. You're so much better at titles. I'm, I'm, I'm bad at titles. You're good at titles. So I need to talk back to you about the word and episode when you have the book out. Dr. Brickson, it is, I knew this would be fun and I knew it would be very worth the Saturday morning spent with you, but it is beyond my expectations. I hope that those listening know what a gem you are and what a brilliant researcher and teacher and just devoted to the science and really devoted in a way that is going to train the doctors, which are going to care for the people. So just thank you from the bottom of my heart for your advice. That means so much to me. You just, you know, when you have, you've been through so much and all of this is so much effort, but you have a fire in your belly. Yes. You and I are sisters of the heart with our own, with our fires in our belly, but to be seen, to be seen as such a gift. And thank you for seeing me and all this work and for the opportunity to have conversations to all these people out there that might be listening. Please pass forward. Let's talk estrogen. Listen to it yourself. Get some gals together and have either, you know, a wine night or a green drink night or whatever your inclination is and give it to your docs that are on the fence. I was just, so one of the things I do on a regular basis is I get ozone and whole blood irradiation because it reboots your mitochondria and aging picks up speed with every decade and I want to stay strong. So when I went into the office the other day, he had just heard, let's talk estrogen and he was bowing down to me. It was so sweet. He's a hospitalist that now has become, he had a heart attack and didn't want to do the 22 meds that suddenly he was faced with at 41 and he bumped into functional medicine and now has opened up a whole facility and he was literally saying every patient that comes into this office now we're giving that talk. So it's free, get that talk, pass it on if you've got docs that you'd love to see if they could get a little fluffed up with this information and not be so concerned and also let them know that we're putting on this course. Dr. Brownstein has been doing hormones for 30, 35 years in teaching and he has about 12 or 15 bestselling books out and he's like a brother to me. He's one of the smartest people we have in the United States today. So he and I and then Dr. Angela DeRosa is going to do an hour and Dr. Carol Peterson is going to do an hour and we are going to try and bulk and mind melt the practitioners with hormone science and what to do and ready on Monday and then be available for you for questions. So that's like a because we notice when we go to A4M one group will say you can never give a woman testosterone which is crazy and another group will say you got to start low and stay slow and that's another thing because hormones really need to be at the right dosage to really get the satellite dishes humming and strumming to make sure that you feel even though you've hit 75 you feel kick-ass great right so resiliency radio that's the deal. Oh my gosh this has been so fun so if you're listening you're like where do I find this just don't worry wherever you're listening um you will find a link we will get that put in the show notes and if you have any trouble on my website jillcarnhandling.com all of the full transcripts with all of the links will be there as well if you can't find it on Spotify or iTunes or wherever you're looking but we will have those so stay tuned um Dr. Brooks and thank you so much from the bottom of my heart not only for your heart your willingness to come on on short notice and just for your wealth of knowledge because I know how much time and energy that takes and also just for being a living vibrant proof of of showing up in what we're talking about thank you so much. Much love much love. Well that's a wrap with Dr. Brooks and thank you again for tuning in to this episode of resiliency radio I hope you've enjoyed the show stay tuned for more empowering episodes with new episodes released every week you can find all episodes on iTunes Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast you can also try find full transcriptions and videos on jillcarnhand.com my website and you can find all products and services that we provide at drjilhealth.com if you like this video be sure and hit like if you want to see more hit subscribe and if you want to be notified hit the bell to be reminded of upcoming episodes thanks so much I'll see you next week