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In today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of chronic headaches, exploring their hidden causes and pathways to relief with expert Dr. Scott Vrzal. Specializing in natural approaches to pain, Dr. Vrzal shares insights on how headaches reveal clues about our body’s health—from digestive imbalances to emotional blocks stored in physical pain. Join us as we explore the surprising connections between emotions, nutrient deficiencies, and detox pathways, uncovering how holistic health practices can not only relieve headaches but restore balance and vitality to the entire body. This episode is packed with actionable tips and wisdom for those seeking true relief and long-term health.
Highlights:
Intro:
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Ashley James (0:03:13.690)
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is Episode 523.
I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Dr. Scott Vrzal. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and people who are sick of suffering are going to be singing your praises. My heart is so full now because I know that some of my listeners are just so done with the suffering and the pain. Today, you're here to deliver the information that they've been praying for so that they can no longer be in pain. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:03:57.351)
Well, thank you. Yes, that's why I got into it, because I was suffering and I wanted that victory for others.
Ashley James (0:04:03.427)
Exactly. That's why I started the podcast also. I started this podcast eight years ago because I was suffering for so many years from several major medical issues and I used holistic medicine to get better. After being with MD medicine for so many years and under the MD's care, I got worse, not better. I felt sicker, not better, then found true holistic medicine. There's a lot of people these days that call themselves holistic that aren't. You have to buy or beware. I found my mentors and not only did they help me get better through true holistic medicine, true holistic medicine is supporting your body's ability to heal itself and getting out of your body's way. Stop doing the things that are hindering your body from achieving homeostasis, then giving your body what it's missing in order for the body to do the healing, your body wants to heal. It wants to come back into balance. These simple changes make such a profound difference, in the instance of headaches, sometimes no matter what we try, even when we go to holistic practitioners, the pain is still there and we're left so frustrated or the imbalance is still there. That's why we want to come to Dr. Scott V. I know you like to be called Dr. V.
A little plug, your website is headacheadvantage.com and we're going to get into how you help people, of course, we want to talk about your story and what led you to this but before we do, I got to share a little story about a headache in my life with you and because you had asked before we hit record, you're like, so do you have any headaches? I'm like, well, let's hit record so we can get started. My husband who has never suffered from headaches unless we lived in Las Vegas and he forgot to drink water. You do that once or twice. The dose dehydration headaches are the worst. You do that a few times, you learn your lesson. You learn to always travel with water with you, other than that, he never suffered from headaches. Two years ago, he moved in with his parents for five months and lived in a bed beside his dad and did 24-hour hospice care until his dad passed away. He and his dad didn't have the best of relationships. His dad never said, I love you. He was a very stoic person. On his deathbed, he said to my husband, my husband was 54 years old, heard I love you from his dad for the first time. It was a beautiful experience. They both bonded.
I believe it was a very healing, cathartic experience. When he passed away, we weren't all torn up. We had spent a lot of time processing it. It wasn't a sudden thing. It was slow and we pretty much did our grieving and our processing while he was going downhill.
the day he died, my husband had to get a root canal, which was botched. So they extracted the tooth. It was tooth 15 all the way back molar 15. This was about two years ago. He proceeded to develop constant chronic headaches. Now we go to a naturopath. It's been the naturopathic doctors, we eat super clean.
He goes to a really good chiropractor, acupuncturist. We went down the list, and could not figure out what was going on. We went from practitioner to practitioner. We tried everything, homeopathy, everything. Some things worked a little bit temporarily. He had all kinds of different facial massages. He went to three different types of manipulative massages and these headaches would come on around 11am every day, almost every day. Sometimes it was every other day.
Sometimes you get a break and it'd be every three days, but this was for two years. They were so bad. I describe it like a migraine in his neck and it would radiate. It was a tension headache. It would radiate up into his head, typical of either a scalenes trigger point or sometimes it would move and be an upper trapezius trigger point, a very typical radiating pain pattern.
Also he had ischemia in those muscles. The muscles were really hard, like hard as a rock, and we would strip them and get heat on them and everything, but we couldn't get the pain to go away. No practitioner could figure out what was wrong other than he had this problem that would come on and then release six to eight hours later. He would have this pain, but it was like a migraine because he could barely drive. He could barely talk. He'd be wincing. Then afterwards it was like an old neurological event. He would be left completely exhausted, the rest of the day could not function, like just zero function. So he was going through a migraine and that it would exhaust him. Also it would take all of his effort, all of his concentration away.
I was talking to so many different naturopaths and trying to figure out what's the next course of action because I knew that there was an answer out there and one of my good naturopathic friends said, you should try going to Dr. Jeff Harris, who does prolotherapy and he also teaches it. So my husband's been seeing him and now he went from one headache every day to a headache every three days to two a month.
With the prolotherapy and we're onto something because the prolotherapy that Dr. Jeff Harris went, there's something going on with your spleen channel, tooth 15, my husband has a giant scar by his spleen because he had an accident, he almost lost his spleen when he was nine. Also the headaches would start at the same time in Chinese medicine as the spleen time.
It's interesting because every problem a husband's ever had has always been on his left side. That's where the headache is. That's where the spleen is. The problem is, it would add up. He's had a few sessions and just with a few sessions, it's gone from I said, one every day or one every three days to only two a month. We still don't know a hundred percent why. But I definitely feel the trigger was the botched root canal when they pulled the tooth, everything leading up to that. Now we also have explored, is it the stress of doing palliative care for several months with his dad and being in a weird bed and being in weird positions, having to pick up his dad off the floor and all the things that could go wrong there. But the headaches didn't start till after the dental stuff, so that's my headache story is that we tried everything. One thing we saw that temporarily would shift it a bit is fasting. Well, of course you're getting rid of all the kinds of foods that inflame, even though my husband eats clean, for example, corn, which I know could be inflammatory for some people, he might have it sometimes in his diet.
We don't know what's giving him inflammation. When you fast, it's like this amazing elimination diet and you're left, wow, I feel so much better. Well, you might've been eating 90% good and 10% bad and what's bad for you might be fine for someone else. It didn't 100% go to his headaches, but we saw a huge shift. We knew that inflammation was a stressor that played a role, but it was multifaceted and it's fascinating and we couldn't quite figure it out. I'm super interested in talking to you today because I know that there are people out there suffering from headaches and a headache doesn't just have to be in the head. It can start in the neck and radiate up like I said with my husband but there's so many different ways that we can approach it to help the body. But the most important thing I feel is to listen to the body and figure it out. Why is the body speaking this language? ? Why is the body saying, Hey, I'm so out of balance, I'm creating pain and let it be a lesson. Let us learn from the body so that we can support the body to heal itself. I know that's what you do. You've unlocked the secrets to listening to the body around headaches and how we can stop them. My first burning question is, do you also help people end migraines?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:13:14.543)
Absolutely. It all comes down to the location of the headache. In your husband's example, you said left-sided predominantly, but then a lot of what you were talking about sounded all the way up to suboccipital on both sides. Is it both sides or left?
Ashley James (0:13:31.296)
No, it was typically left side, and sometimes now with all the therapy he's done, it stays in the neck, but it's like a headache in the neck. But sometimes it radiates just the upper trapezius trigger point, which is on the left side of the occipital, all the way around the parietal, the temporal, and then kind of above the eye.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:13:58.638)
So a left-sided headache is going to be a stomach issue. Stomach, pancreas, and spleen in acupuncture are all related and have their own emotions. The first and foremost in there is over-sympathetic. Certainly, your husband's having to take care of his dad. There was some strain there. Praise God, they were able to kind of get some resolution.
Unfortunately it was at the end, but that saves him a lifetime of challenge just solving that emotion to finally hear I love you from his dad, which we all need to hear. Dads, make sure you're doing that if you're listening. Left side of the headache is going to be a stomach potentially spleen issue. So we'd want to look at what else in his life beyond the emotions.
Clearing, treating, desensitizing for those emotional challenges are going to help the stomach and the pancreas function better and the spleen, again, they're all in acupuncture related, especially emotionally, that stomach meridian does a ramhorn around the left side of the eye and down the neck as you described into the scalenes and so on. The other potential and why I asked, whether it was all left-sided or both is the overzealous response to stress inhibits the thyroid and can cause the suboccipital, so when it's all the way up the neck and the back of the head, what people would typically call a tension headache, tends to do with that chronic cortisol secretion and ultimately under-functioning thyroid. We want to facilitate thyroid function in that case and the consequences of the chronic stress. That make sense?
Ashley James (0:15:47.478)
Yes, totally, and it's so exciting that you are the expert. You're the headache guy. Everyone who has chronic headaches needs to know that you exist and then go get help from you.
I was just two days ago talking to a friend of mine who is also in the holistic health space. She was telling me about a client. She goes, I have a client who's had headaches since he was born and both his mother and father have chronic headaches also. The father now is on dialysis because he's been put on pain meds for so many years. She goes, could it be that there's mold in their house? We're trying to figure out why this whole family who lives under the same roof, why did they all have headaches? I’m like, it might be, but there's so many factors. There's so many different reasons, but it's fascinating that the whole family suffers from headaches. Obviously we're looking at something that impacts all of them. It could be food, it could be mold, there could be so many factors. Have you ever seen a whole family have headaches?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:17:08.709)
. So our first question in that sort of situation is how is the head? How are the family doing when they're away from the house? If they go away to Disneyland for a week do all their headaches go away, symptomatically or historically, then that helps us know that yes, it's something in the house. I mean, certainly their diet's going to change when they travel. But I mean, yes, mold, there's obviously many different types of mold. But I mean, one of the most common things is mold compromises the immune system and can set up any number of symptoms.
Yes, we see that often and often with the testing that we do we can even narrow it down to where in the house, in their bedroom window there's mold, or those types of things that are compromising a person's health.
Typically in that scenario obviously we want to remediate and get the mold out of the house but then strengthen the lungs because the lungs are chronically compromised from being challenged with the mold so we want to do vitamins A and vitamin C certainly are typical anti-antioxidants to facilitate lung function, or even lung tissue, if you will, in a supplement to rebuild the lungs to help it handle the environment, especially while they're trying to remediate, while they're trying to get that mold out of their environment. Just out of two of those yesterday, clinically, that we had to address. The fun story on that I saw several of them, but one gal said, you have mold in your bedroom. She said, no, you're crazy. That kind of thing is often we hear. She didn't really believe it or hadn't seen it and then she went home and checked the window where it kind of narrowed it down to pulled back the drapes and realized that there's a black stripe of mold down the middle of the window that's over their bed and realized she sneezes, she was sneezing twelve times every time she walked into the room and she'd wake up in the morning feeling doo-doo because she was sleeping with mold, inhaling mold all night. The good news is that it was an easy fix to just clean up the mold in the window and live happily ever after.
Ashley James (0:19:19.321)
. Also do a little bit more investigating because it might be deeper with mold. It's typically what you see is the tip of the iceberg.
I have a few really interesting interviews about mold remediation. Listeners go to learntruehealth.com typing in mold and listening to those. I have at least five episodes with mold remediators that will just blow your mind. But I was also thinking about that family and what people often don't think about is that a lot of food sensitivities are passed down genetically, food allergies, food sensitivities, but also the microbiome.
We share the same microbiome just because of exposure to one another and microbiome, which is from our mouth to our anus. It's not just in the big colon, and your microbiome is in your skin too, but as far as your digestion is concerned, it is the entire digestive tract has a microbiome. It's about six pounds of bacteria and either good or bad microbes, depending on what you feed.
You eat junk, you're feeding the bad army that lives inside you. You eat good, clean food, you're feeding the good army. But the thing is, it's so fascinating. I have two interviews about this with the Viome experts. You can type in Viome at learntruehealth.com to listen to those. That the bacteria in your gut digest your food and produce chemicals. Now, some of these chemicals are really helpful and some of them are harmful and you can actually then have a reaction. It's not necessarily that you're allergic to that food, but your microbiome is producing a chemical from that food that then makes you sick. If you're all eating the same because you're under the same roof and you share the same microbiome, it might not even show up on a blood test that you're allergic to that food. But when you remove that food, you start feeling better.
So, there's food, there's also because we typically as families eat the same or very similar, we typically also suffer from the same nutrient deficiencies, plus with genetics, your genetics can determine what nutrients you're processing more of. I just got some genetics testing back and I think it's fascinating that my body burns through B12 and folate at a much faster rate than others do. So I have to be careful and make sure that I'm on top of those nutrients for myself.
Your genetics, like, one person, and I see this all the time, I see my clients, the wives will say, my husband can eat anything and he doesn't feel sick and then I eat the same thing and I'm throwing up, I'm so sick or I feel miserable when I eat the way my husband eats.
His genetics are completely different. His microbiome, if you're fairly newlywed, are completely different. You could live under the same roof, but there's so many factors. Do you have a checklist that you go through? How do you go through all the factors that could be leading to headaches?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:22:29.633)
So much in that statement you just had I mean first we want to kind of shine light on the fact that that biome you're talking about the lactobacillus organisms are the main producers of B12 or methylcobalamin, which is the main nutrient along with folic acid and B6, but those are the main nutrients that drive that methylation pathway that is so often deficient in the genetic tests you're talking about. That's kind of how that correlates the whole biome with the proper detox of the liver, for example, that methylation pathway gets inhibited by stress, gets inhibited when we're deficient in B12, which again is made from the microbiome, the gut microbiome. so that is also, methylation activates the tumor suppressor gene.
The long term consequences of having say the B12 deficiency and under functioning methylation is opening the door for the big ugly stuff, unfortunately, that's how this whole body concept comes into play. We can take B12. Let's correct that. But ultimately, eat your vegetables. Your green leafies and the foods that are going to feed those lovely lactobacillus organisms that are then going to be in your bodies, if you will, to make the nutrients that you need to thrive and to flourish and to stay young.
It all comes to the whole body concept really comes together. To tie that in, as you were asking, with headaches. The reason the book is called The Headache Advantage is because for me, clinically, a person will come in with a list of 15 symptoms, for example, one of my burning primary questions is what area of the head hurts? If they've got a whole list of say digestive related symptoms and pain in the left pectoral muscle and bicep tenderness and all these other areas that are physically related to stomach and then they have a left-sided headache, I know that stomach is going to be the be-all or the keystone to get rid of a lot of these other symptoms that are going to be tied to it. They could have colon-related symptoms and it's going to manifest as low back pain, all these other things, but if their headache is on the left side, I know that fixing their stomach is going to take care of all these other symptoms. So, it saves me some pursuit and helps narrow down the pursuit of where the chief weakness is in that person's physiology. It makes the clinical certainty and the effectiveness of our natural healthcare just kind of go through the roof utilizing that information.
Ashley James (0:25:11.647)
When you say fixing the stomach, is this the metaphorical stomach? Is it the traditional Chinese version of stomach or is this the Western version of, yes, there's something literally wrong in your stomach, or are you talking about all of digestion?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:25:30.671)
Yes, great question. In this case, we're talking about stomach specifically. I talked about digestion as a whole, if they have symptoms of digestion all up and down the track, if you will.
But when it's a lesson and when their pain is on the left side of the head I know as you called out, fixing the stomach and fixing means either a structural change. Chiropractors are going to adjust t5 or c1 if there's allergies related to it. So we have the structural aspect and we've got the nutritional needs. Are they eating something that's compromised in the way the stomach's functioning or do they simply need nutrients like thiamin, vitamin B1, calcium, zinc. Some of the nutrients to help make stomach acid or have they had an emotional overload of over sympathetic, low self-esteem, disgust type emotions that laid down accumulated and compromised the way the stomach functioned. That's the fun, the art of natural health care is identifying the structural, the nutritional, the emotional triggers that are causing in this case, the stomach to not function up to par and then manifest as symptoms of a left -sided headache. That's what I call fixing the stomach is incorporating the structural, the nutritional, supplemental, emotional triggers.
Ashley James (0:26:51.844)
A lot of people discredit emotion as having anything to do with physical health. But as you just pointed out, that emotion directly impacts whether we're in that sympathetic fight or flight response, in which case when we're in that response, the body is shunting blood away from our core, away from our organs, and it's limiting the acid production.
What I tell people when I'm explaining the stress response, I'm like, have you ever been stressed out and either you're not hungry or if you force yourself to eat, it's sitting a lump in your stomach. Some people when they're under stress, they'll even throw up because their stomach, it just shuts down. It's shunting all your resources to your limbs and we're supposed to run away from the bear and then it's supposed to shut off. But now we're constantly triggering that stress response and our emotions trigger it.
We could be sitting safely in our home, but we start watching TV or looking on our phone or even just thinking about something stressful and we trigger that response. We don't even realize we're turning our digestion off and that wreaks havoc on the whole body.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:28:06.605)
Absolutely, and every organ has associated emotions. A lot of those come from acupuncture thousands of years old that correlated all of that. We talked about the stomach with over sympathetic, low self-esteem, disgust, gallbladder, which tends to relate to -sided headaches.
Those are going to be more your liver emotions of anger, frustration, resentment. So that's where chronic illness really becomes a challenge and becomes more chronic, if you will, because they've got chronic stomach weakness, for example, then they're going to store more emotions in that area, in that now weak link, if you will.
To give you kind of an example of emotions, they totally affect it. I mean, I see every week people or new patients that have seen other chiropractors and blame ever since I've had, I got rear ended 20 years ago, I've got this chronic neck pain and it's just my plight and becomes their identity. Unfortunately that's because nobody had addressed the emotional component. they'll get adjusted, get their chiropractic or their massage and feel good for a bit. Then when they see another Red Honda or whatever car rear ended them, it brings back that emotion and puts them back into that fight or flight weakness that then causes again, the weakness of say the neck extensors and leaving them back into their headaches or back into their neck problems. We want to have tools to release that. Even if it's thinking about the accident or the first thing you remember here in skid marks or whatever, think about that as a person gets adjusted or as they're getting their massage. Your listeners that are doing bodywork, how often do they see a person break into tears for no quote known reason?
Ashley James (0:29:53.916)
What do you recommend for people that recognize that a major issue is trapped unresolved negative emotion from the past? What tools do you recommend they use to gain resolution and release those trapped emotions?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:30:16.049)
There are a lot of great tools. The tool I use clinically is an approach called neuro emotional technique or NET, super well documented, proven out approach on the ONE foundation, O-N-E ONE foundation.
They've done the research of pain patterns and even tested cholesterol and inflammatory markers and watched them go down by desensitizing people to these chronic effects or the physical manifestation of emotions. That's what we use clinically on my Dr. Scott Vrzal Instagram page I've shown a couple videos of how I kind of apply that so that a person can clear their own emotions by touching over the pulse points on the wrist. They'll basically help a person cover every organ and then doing a gentle flexing of the chin with the hand on the forehead That's a way to clear clear emotions for you the person the consumer that has the emotional triggers in other words if you feel your blood pressure going up when your spouse says something that rubbed you the wrong way you can do this approach by again touching the pulse points, putting the other hand on the forehead and doing each side of the pulse points. That clears in general every organ.
There's also tapping approaches and other approaches that people can use to self-desensitize to these emotional manifestations because unfortunately, the body physically stores emotions. Let's talk about the nutritional component that goes along with that though. In general, my statement is you want to be more rock-like than sponge-like. So to be more rock-like, we want to keep our minerals up. Minerals come from rocks, so minerals make us more emotionally resilient to shed off the back of a duck.
When those emotions come along, having a good mineral reserve will help us shed those emotions and not physically store them. Whereas if we're eating sugar that leeches zinc, that leeches minerals, our system's acidic, we're going to be a lot more prone to physically store those emotions. Then, you're going to be more sponge-like.
If you're eating the sad, standard American diet that has a lot of processed foods and trans fats, then that person's going to be a lot more prone to store every emotion that comes down the pike and they end up with that chronic physical illness. Whereas the person that's eating a lot of organic food eats organic because it has thousands of times the amount of minerals in it, literally thousands of times the amount of minerals in it. Pesticides also are the toxic metals that compromise mineral status. When we eat organic, we don't get pesticides, we get those minerals. That can help us be more rock-like and resilient when the emotional stress happens. Think of the calmness of a person that seems totally chill, even though their dad died, their mom died, that sort of stuff or the work goes bananas then that person that's eating calm and alkaline is going to handle that emotion much better. The other obvious kind of trigger is exercise.
Exercise allows us to raise dopamine levels at runner's high that we get with exercise. Exercise raises dopamine that tells us, hey, everything's okay. This is a good season. We're cool. It also allows us to sort out and collect our emotions, if you will. I'm a crazy avid cyclist. When I'm out on my bike, I'm listening to books, I'm listening to your podcast, things that feed my mind with healthy, beneficial stuff but it also gives me the opportunity to sort through the triggers, the stressors that have happened and kind of categorize them, if you will, and solve them mentally. Exercise and organic vegetables are a great way to prevent the physical storage of emotions.
Ashley James (0:34:15.864)
Oh my gosh. I love everything you said. I have a few things to share as well. I lost my mom back in 2002 and I wanted to grieve healthfully. I was devastated by losing her. She was my best friend and I was 22 and I didn't know how to grieve healthfully. I really woke up to this realization that we are not given tools to process emotions healthfully to have conflict resolution healthfully. I looked back on my years from K through 12. I grew up in Ontario. Actually at the time we had in high school, Grade 13, can you imagine being held back the entire province of Ontario for many years. We graduated when we were 19 from high school because we did, it was called OAC, which was grade 13 but so for my 13 years, this is before I went to college, I was in college when my mom died, but just looking back on the standard 13 years that kids are in or 12 or 13 years, kids are in school and realizing that not one class, it wasn't mandatory. It's not even known. It's so off the radar that we could be teaching children how to process emotions healthfully, how to grieve healthfully, what happens when there's loss in the family, and now they're introducing new things that are teaching children, but they're not teaching them real emotional life skills. They're still not teaching them how to. You're going to eventually lose someone, how to grieve healthfully, how to gain conflict resolution. You're going to have a fight with your friend or your spouse or a family member, eventually, or, a gas attendant, you're going to eventually have a conflict with someone. How do you manage that? How do you do it healthfully? How do you maturely de-escalate, communicate?
These are things that I had to go and find. I had to seek. I went on this excursion and I discovered, well, Landmark Education, which is a company I highly recommend. Now they're all online. They used to be all in person, which is cool because no matter where you are in the world, you can take their live training. They teach amazing life skills for communication. I took all their courses and it helped me improve so much my abilities to communicate and process emotions. I just think it should be taught to everyone. Then I discovered as a result of Landmark Education, I discovered neuro-linguistic programming. I went into that. I became a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, but I was lucky enough to have found the creator of timeline therapy and studied under him.
Timeline therapy, I have not found something that's more effective than timeline therapy at helping people to consciously have an experience of the unconscious mind of going back to the root cause of the event, gaining resolution and releasing the emotion.
I'm excited to look into your NET because I'm always interested and I believe that the more tools, the better. I highly recommend you check out Timeline Therapy because it is phenomenal. Within 15 minutes someone can have, I'm just saying 15 minutes arbitrarily, it could be 5, it could be 45, it depends on the person, but in one sitting, someone can go back and even the most horrific, tragic, what they think they could never resolve, they can walk out of your office having 100% resolution, feeling so good about that memory and no longer having the negative emotion when they think about that memory but actually positively gaining these skills and these positive lessons from the memory, and that's what helps resolve.
When we get a new perspective and we learn the strengths that we gained from that, the body lets go, and we no longer have negative emotions. That's so freeing because holding onto anything negative, especially when you perceive someone's done something to you, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You're hurting yourself. You're not hurting them. You're not hurting the person that hurt you. You're just hurting yourself by holding on. We don't let go until we gain that resolution.
Those three systems helped me to fully heal from losing my mom. In doing so, I was able to help clients because that's why I got to start. I can't believe it. Everyone needs to know this. That's what led me down the path of working with people. Then that's when I found holistic medicine because I was suffering physically and there's got to be more to life than just an MD telling me to get on drugs and that's what led me to the podcast, but I see that, what we need, what everyone needs to know is that there's a direct connection between your emotions and your physical health and that they're not separate. I just love that you're shedding light on that and that sometimes headaches can even manifest because there's unresolved emotional conflict inside.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:40:05.546)
There's so much to talk about in that statement. I mean, for starters, the lung, the emotions associated with the lung are grief, sadness, yearning. A lot of the stuff we go through and I share your emotional thing. I lost my mom in January. She went into the hospital just before the holidays, just before her 79th birthday. It was a very short three week challenge for her and she was done.
I had a lot of stress with that, but I was okay with it in the fact that I knew I was confident that she left no strange relationships and I was able to get to her and be there to say goodbye and that sort of stuff. Again, taking care of myself and having these tools to get through the grieving process, kind of tie that back to your situation as I've kind of listened to your podcast and stuff. It sounds like the loss of your mom was about the time you were transitioning from your younger years. Sounds like you grew up in a pretty healthy environment and then started kind of going wayward if you will and eating more of the processed foods. That situation was then used in your life to redirect and now look at the tens of thousands of people that are benefiting from that change, that shift in trajectory in your life. So that kind of brings us back to one of my favorite statements that really will help us shape the paradigm of when these stressors happen.
I look at everything happens for us and nothing happens to us. If we look at these challenges, you lost your mom. Obviously it hurts. The other statement that goes along with that is pain is intended to elicit change. If we've got the pain of loss of our mom and our mutual experiences there.
I was already a nutcase about changing lives but I told my mom 25 years ago how it was going to go for her based on the diet sodas that she was living on and the lifestyle choices that she was making. They were not conducive to a healthy life and she was following the medical model and getting her methotrexate shots and all the other craziness for her arthritis and brain was starting to go.
She totaled three cars in 18 months with driving the wrong way on an on-ramp and just kind of losing it that way. Fortunately she was super adamant about not being dependent on anybody and she went out quick. Other than the three weeks stay in the hospital, it was quick for her. Having that resolution in my mind that, hey, it kind of went the way she wanted to, but there were predictive factors in there that just strengthened my resolve to be.
People that are making these choices, this is the consequence, this is the outcome. Learn from The Headache Advantage. Learn from where your pain is and learn to listen to that pain because your body's telling you to make a change in your life. Every pain physically in the body is going to relate to an organ system that is trying to get your attention. Every muscle has associated glands or organs, so we can use that physical pain, whether that's back pain that's associated with the quadratus lumborum and bottom muscle that kind of attaches from the ribs to the pelvis, that muscle spasms out, the intestine is not happy. The thumb will get sore when the intestine is not happy. When you have those pains, then is there a grief situation? Am I eating too much corn or wheat or dairy that's compromised the intestine? Then maybe it's a food journal. You realize, okay, every time I eat pizza, my back hurts, or whatever that situation is. Learn from the pain that, again, your body's trying to elicit change with that pain. Learn from what your body's trying to tell you so that we can change the trajectory and flourish and have the quality life that is intended.
Ashley James (0:44:09.941)
I want to say that when you experience pain, even just to view it as a gift, because pain is temporary and it's as horrible and uncomfortable as it is, it is the largest motivator, like you said, for change. It's shining a light on something and if you act fast enough and find the right holistic doctor like Dr. V, get his book, it's coming out soon, The Headache Advantage. Your website also is headacheadvantage.com, by gaining this understanding and then diving into, okay, where's this pain located? What's triggering it? Going through and figuring out what the root cause is, make the correction quickly instead of it going deeper because if it's a nutrient deficiency, it only gets worse. If it's stress, things only get worse. We want to listen to pain when it first comes up and not wait because the longer we prolong it, the harder it is to support the body in recovering. Catch it quickly, listen to the body.
I love that you're exposing that there's a way that we can hear the body. Listen to the symptoms of the body. This is what I was taught by one of my mentors is the body speaks in symptoms. If we listen to those symptoms, we can catch things really early and make small corrections instead of waiting for the really big problems then you have to make really big corrections. I've met so many people who develop cancer and they're always surprised. But then when they started really going down the rabbit hole of healing, there were warning signs that they ignored. I can only speak to what it is to be a woman, but I know women ignore, I think men do too, not everyone, but women ignore because they put everyone else first. They’re like, I don't have enough time for this. I'm taking care of my husband. I'm taking care of my kids. I got to drive them to soccer. I've got to cook dinner. I've got to clean. I just came home from work. I get it. You have taken on the responsibility of other people. You are the executive function of an entire household of people. But if you stop functioning, everything grinds to a halt. You really do need to prioritize you. Listen to those symptoms. If your body is crying out, it's time to put the pause button, ask for some help from friends or family members to take over some of your tasks so that you can carve out the time that's needed to take care of you.
You had mentioned nutrient deficiency, and I think that's really important to bring up the minerals. In fact, I have two interviews, one Kristen Bowen episode all the way back in 294 and an episode with Dr. Joel Wallach, one of my mentors who's absolutely amazing, episode 435. With Kristen Bowen, she sells a magnesium soak where you absorb grams of magnesium from it. It is phenomenal. 76% of people reach full cell saturation within a month of soaking daily in this magnesium soak. She offers listeners a discount. Her website's really cute, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. Use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. She gives us a great discount. Get the magnesium soak, do it every day. Just get a basin, just put your feet in it. When you're watching TV, reading a book, even when you're at your desk, just put your feet in it and soak every day for 30 days. Within the first day, you'll notice a difference.
Most people have amazingly deep sleep and then such great energy. One of the things I learned from her, and I've learned many things, she's come back on the show about four times so you can listen to her, all the episodes I did with Kristen Bowen. But she said that if we're magnesium deficient, pain receptors cannot turn off. That we need magnesium for the pain receptors to even close. I had pain in my foot the other day. I was , I know what I got to do. Did a foot soak, immediately the pain resolved. This is so cool. Magnesium is so cool. it's the most needed of all the minerals. There's 60 minerals the body needs, but it's the most needed.
We always think calcium is the most important. It's not. It's not. Magnesium and zinc are more important than calcium in terms of how many enzymatic processes are used. The body needs magnesium to make over 300 hormones and proteins and 1800 enzymatic processes. It's crazy. People are walking around completely deficient in minerals, especially in magnesium, because the farming practices of over the last hundred years have depleted.
Our food supply of minerals. I love that you're stressing, eating organic, and finding farms. If you can find a local farm that does biodynamic farming, that remineralizes their soil, that also is so helpful. Dr. Joel Wallach has amazing books that'll blow your mind on utilizing minerals to support the body's ability to heal itself. That was episode 435. I love that you brought that up because when we're deficient in one of the 90 essential nutrients, the body just starts to break down. I described this to my clients. It's like the workmen showed up to build the house, but the lumber didn't get delivered. Your body wants to heal itself, but if the lumber doesn't show up, your job is to deliver the lumber, your body or the workmen, they want to rebuild. They want to build healthy cells. If you don't deliver the lumber, they're not rebuilding healthy cells and you begin to break down and then pain.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:50:24.894)
I agree 100%. You just called out the two primary mineral deficiencies.
You talked a lot about- magnesium is so calming. I often have people doing that soak or take a magnesium supplement at bedtime so that'll help colon function and the calmness as you so eloquently described. But then zinc that you mentioned, we also need to talk about that. Our soils are depleted in zinc, sugar leaches zinc, stress leaches zinc. Zinc helps us break down that stress hormone. It helps us make stomach acid. I alluded to that earlier. Helps us make and break down most of the estrogens, most of the hormones and it's prolific in the immune system. With the whole viral challenge that we went through over these last few years zinc got a lot of press. Fortunately people are starting to recognize that zinc deficiency is real. So a physical symptom of zinc deficiency is the white clouds in the fingernails. Those listeners look at your fingernails if you have the white clouds it takes two months to grow out from cuticle to tip.
If you were sick or super stressed or eating too much sugar two months ago, you'll have a white cloud near the cuticle of one or multiple fingernails. That's a sign that you've got really significant zinc deficiency. We want to load up on good quality forms of zinc made from organic vegetables, obviously, so pumpkin seeds are a simple solution. Pumpkin seeds are beneficial for most blood types. There's a whole nother discussion, but pumpkin seeds are great for A blood types and O blood types, which is 84 % of the population. They're great for the prostate gentlemen. I mean, pumpkin seeds is an easy snack to kind of start bringing that zinc level back up. But most people need to supplement because it's so profoundly deficient in current living.
Ashley James (0:52:13.261)
That's if the pumpkins were grown in zinc rich soil. I like to tell people when you think of spinach, we think of Popeye, Popeye the sailor man, and he ate his spinach. What nutrients do you think of? What element do you think of when you think of spinach?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:52:33.533)
Great point. Yes, iron, folic acid, yes.
Ashley James (0:52:39.809)
Folic acid or folate we should say can be there. Folic acid is not in nature but we think of iron. Most spinach is grown hydroponically. So there's actually zero minerals, almost zero. I don't know if you noticed, though, if you're older, if you consider yourself a seasoned person on this planet. I'm not going to put an age out there, but there are people who are old enough to remember what a carrot and a tomato tasted like. They taste like carrots and now they taste like cardboard. You have to go back in your memory when you were a kid. You remember biting into something and being like, I could sit here and eat carrots all day. I go to a local farm and I get them fresh out of the ground and they taste like back in the 80s when carrots taste like carrots. They're candy. I just sit there and I eat them raw like candy. I just can't stop. It's so delicious. It's so good for you. If your produce tastes cardboard, guess what? Probably no minerals in it. I'm just going to say if it's grown in minerally rich soil, you want to become a raw vegan. You just can't get enough. It's so good. It tastes so good. You just want to eat it raw right out of the ground.
I love pumpkin seeds for many reasons. They're also anti-parasitic and they're a really good source of protein and a really good source of healthy fats, but whether there's going to be enough zinc in them, I don't know. It just depends on whether that soil even has zinc in the first place. Because plants can grow. All they need is NPK. Plants can grow without most of the minerals, but you can't as a human, we need 60 minerals. Plants don't need them to grow produce. I have grown a vegetable garden. I remineralized the soil and it's like the garden of Eden. These things grow like I poured steroids into the ground. They grow beautifully. There's different kinds of zinc. There's the picolinate. There's the, I'm going to totally butcher this, the bisglycinate. What do you recommend is the best type of zinc if someone were to buy us a zinc supplement?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:55:03.870)
Yes, I use whole food based supplements that are basically going to be, if you will, organic pumpkin seeds vacuum dried into a zinc supplement. It's more as it would be found in your former garden.
Ashley James (0:55:20.198)
Got it. Digested by the plant. It's plant derived and digested by the plant. But the company that you sell, do they test to make sure that there's actually zinc in the pumpkin seed?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:55:34.134)
Absolutely, I mean, it may not be pumpkin seed. They're using high zinc vegetables that they grow in their own organic farm to produce the supplements that I typically would recommend for zinc.
Ashley James (0:55:47.870)
Got it. You can't say exactly what kind of zinc, because it's the kind that comes out of the ground. It's not picolinate or any of those. Okay.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:56:00.752)
Right. I hate to say, but call it lab grown almost, if you will, so taking zinc that we're going to want to balance it with the copper and the magnesium chromium that all helps it synergistically function. That's part of why I prefer supplements that come from the organic farm, ultimately. Because it's going to digest better, it's going to not create other deficiencies. If we over consume zinc in a synthetic form, it can create deficiencies of other nutrients. Vitamin E is a great example of that. Vitamin E is found in walnuts and organic nuts and that stuff. But if we extract it out and do d-alpha-tocopherol, then it creates a functional E deficiency and then that person is going to have back pain or potentially cardiovascular weakness from creating a functional deficiency by not having the selenium and other synergistic nutrients that go along with E in that case or zinc as we described.
Ashley James (0:57:07.426)
We've touched on some important subjects. Your environment that you live in can play a role, like, mold, for example. There's also EMF exposure. I have several episodes about that. There's environmental, there's emotional, there's whether the food you're eating can play a role, the nutrient deficiency can play a role. There's these different layers.
When someone comes to you and you've talked about this, they come to you and the first thing is, well, where's the headache? We talked about the left side. Let's talk about the right side. If someone comes in and they have headaches always on the right side, what is that an indicator of?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:57:51.579)
The gallbladder is a right-sided organ, similar to the stomach meridian, but the gallbladder starts right behind the eye where the V, on the outside of the eye, goes down the side of the head. It goes down both sides, but again, the gallbladder is a right-sided organ. When the gallbladder doesn't function, when it's congested or, if emotionally we talked about anger, frustration, resentment, if that's been stuffed away, compromisingly the gallbladder functions, then that's going to set the stage for a right-sided headache.
Physically, the muscle that sports the back of the knee, there's a little tiny muscle called the popliteus muscle, that gets weak and tender and creates instability in the knee when the gallbladder simultaneously is compromised. These are other areas that would physically manifest, if you will, when the gallbladder is not functioning properly. Then we want to look at food triggers potentially, glyphosate. I mean, here comes a whole other episode. Glyphosate inhibits bile production so then they end up with bile stasis or congestion, which is a very common trigger to set up right-sided gallbladder headaches.
Glyphosate is the toxin within Roundup that is used to kill wheat, the crops of wheat, corn, soy, oats right before harvest so that they can harvest it all at the same time. It all comes back to the manufacturing processes, but that inhibits bile production. That also obliterates the intestinal lining. That is the most common trigger I see to set up right-sided headaches. Certainly then we've got the balance of omega-3s to omega-6 fatty acids. There's some ratio in there that a typical, sad, standard American diet tends to have more omega-6s as opposed to the omega-3s that the body really needs for anti -inflammatory. Omega-6s are good, nuts and seeds, we need them, but most diets have too much of those, and so that inverse ratio can also congest the gallbladder, which then leads to constipation and other things that go along with poor fat metabolism, even nutrient-wise. B6, pyridoxal 5-phosphates, the active form, functional form of B6, that also helps facilitate methylation again where a lot of the bile is made and facilitates the functioning of the bile. If a person's had chronic gallbladder problems, and they've had their gallbladder removed, typically we want to replace that bile. My canned joke is until the gallbladder goes back.
Ashley James (1:00:20.939)
Yes. So, the rest of their lives. When I have a client and they start telling me about certain issues that sound like a fat deficiency, a healthy fat deficiency, I'm like, do you still have your gallbladder? Almost always they say no. Then I'm like, okay, so let's, we need to back this up. Your gallbladder was so important. God gave you a gallbladder for a reason that it would store all the bile and then when you ate food, the fat in your food was not water soluble fat. You see oil kind of floating on top of water? It's not mixing together. Even though your stomach would produce the enzymes to break down the lipase, to break down the lipids, to break down the fat in your food, whether you're vegan, there's even fat in apples and potatoes. t's in small amounts and it's a different kind of fat, but there's fat in plants. There's fat obviously in animal products, but regardless of what you're eating, there's going to be some amount of fat and that fat is important for the body. There's a good kind, like you said, pumpkin seeds, great. then there's bad kind, anything fried, not good for you. Fried, bad, just giving you an example, there's a big spectrum of fats that are not really helpful and then fats that are extremely unhealthy and very damaging.
Then there's fats that are super healthy for you. But you can't digest them because they're not water soluble. The stomach then empties the small intestine. The bile is supposed to then empty out the blood is supposed to squeeze and let all that bile mix with the contents, those liquid contents now of what you just ate. It emulsifies sort of what a soap does. The digestive enzymes that break down fat allows them to then blend with the fat. If that process doesn't happen, no matter how much fat you eat, you're digesting one hundredth of what, I don't know, because the liver, is just dripping, just drip, drip, drip instead of squeezing a tablespoon or an ounce or whatever it was, however much bile it was squeezing into the contents. It's doing such a small amount of bile now that you're barely able to digest. Here's the kicker. What I've learned from naturopaths is that usually a bile problem was already a healthy fat deficiency to begin with because we need healthy cholesterol to make healthy bile and buildup of gallstones is a lack of healthy cholesterol. What I've seen naturopaths do is actually help the body slowly increase through supporting the digestion and healthfully increase the healthy cholesterol production, which then breaks down the gallstones in the gallbladder, and then that restores function.
If you can catch this early enough, this is again where the pain matters. If you start to have little aches and pains or, I ate a fried egg and then I get a little gallbladder attack, it's small. If it's small, you run to a naturopath. You run or run to an amazing chiropractor with an extensive knowledge such as yourself. We run and we do what we can to support saving the gallbladder because if once you've had it removed, you need to be on and your surgeon will not tell you, which is a crime. Every surgeon who's ever removed a gallbladder that doesn't tell their patient that they need to support their body with basically exogenous someone else's bile or an ox bile or whatever, or sometimes people get, I think there's papaya enzymes or something, but I haven't seen that work as well. I don't know. I'd like to hear your feedback on that. But basically you have to take it exogenously. You have to take it from outside your body instead of your body making it for the rest of your life because that was removed. MD medicine does not tell you that. I think it's, I really do think it's on purpose. I don't think the surgeon is doing it on purpose, but I think the whole system, the education system is designed to not have the surgeon tell them and then they go home and get sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker and get on more drugs and more drugs and more drugs and more drugs and just more hospital stays and they become a cash cow for the mainstream medical system, which I'm on my soapbox again raving about how angry I am that this system is designed to keep you sick and make your loved ones suffer when it's needless and it doesn't have to be that way. When you have a client come in, they've got right-sided headaches and you're beginning to detect gallbladder problems. You're there quickly to help them make some nutritional changes, make some dietary changes to get that back on track. But when someone comes to you and they no longer have their gallbladder, what kind of supplementation have you seen works best?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:05:45.736)
Yes, so replacing the bile salts so they no longer have the storage mechanism of the bile. Typically I have a person taking one to two a night of I use a product called Cola Cal, but something that, or we have several others as well that physically contain bile salts. Unfortunately people have probably known the taste of bile salts when they've drank too much and threw up. That's bile actually that they're tasting. We need to replace those because it's not being stored. Typically bile is recycled from pre-absorbed back up through the intestine into the liver and recycled.
Part of the other part of the mechanism with bile is that it's taking the toxin. The liver takes the toxins that it's taking out of the bloodstream, puts it into the bile to then eject into the colon to get rid of when we eat good fats. That's another mechanism that we need to consider that those toxins are potentially part of the reason that the gallbladder is congested. Another mechanism that takes place is as bile squirts down the bile duct, there's actually a release of eosinophils, an immune modulator that helps kind of antibacterial, if you will.
I kept finding that gallbladder was helping people's immune systems. How's this working? and Dr. Goodheart, the founder of Applied Kinesiology often talked about bio being the most dense antioxidant available. There's that benefit of antioxidants that also facilitate the immune system. We've got all these little interplays that go along, go in the body that is just so profound and exciting as we start learning these mechanisms and how they all interplay.
Ashley James (1:07:27.335)
I geek out. I'm so excited. It's so interesting. I had a guy on my show a few years ago. I've had him on a few times and he's a really interesting fellow. He was an acupuncturist who became a high school teacher. He doesn't have a ton of money, but he has invested about, I think $40,000 of his own money into lab tests that he does on himself before and after 30 day fasts. Every year he does it during the summer, because he’s a teacher so he can take the summer off. He does a 30-day fast and he's really trained in fast. He's been doing it for a long time. I don't recommend someone jump into a 30 day fast if they've never fasted before. Listen to episode 230 to learn more about fasting and how to do it healthfully. Dr. Alan Goldhamer is an amazing guest on episode 230.
This is why it costs so much money. He tests for the things that are not normally tested for. He tests for obesogens and forever chemicals, microplastics, all the things and glyphosate, all the pesticides, everything that is incredibly harmful that we've been wondering how can we get this out of our body? How can we detox this? Because it just is stored in our fat.
He's not an overweight person to begin with. He doesn't have a lot, but even people who are skinny still have fat and their body is trying to store all these chemicals. He would do this every year and he would experiment. One year he just did fasting and then he puts it up on this website just so people can see. Then the next year he incorporated sauna in some supplements. Then he put those results up.
The time that he has had the single handedly, the best result with permanently removing and lowering the needle, permanently removing all across the board, all these very harmful man made chemicals that are get stored up in our body that cause cancer and epigenetically change our gene expressions for really nasty stuff is when he added a binder.
It was explained to him by a camera where some PhD guy goes, bile. The bile we've been talking about. Bile is a wonderful thing that digests our fat like you've said, a wonderful antioxidant, has so many properties. It is also the mechanism in which the liver uses to remove all these chemicals from the body. But bile is so precious, it gets reabsorbed in the intestines, most of it gets reabsorbed. Now our body thinks that we're living in the Garden of Eden. We're eating super clean. There are no such things as chemicals. So if that were the case, if you were never exposed to these chemicals, most of it would get reabsorbed and then through the fiber that you're eating, some of those toxins get out, because we pretty much everyone, unless there are listeners, everyone eats crap.
Everyone eats 15 grams or less of fiber. Everyone's constipated. People are reabsorbing the forever chemicals right back up into their body and also the estrogens, the estrogens are broken down and then reabsorbed because people are constipated and they don't eat enough fiber, they don't eat enough binders. During his 30 day fast, he took binders so that with the bile, which your liver's always, even if you're not eating, the liver is going to still have to get rid of stuff. It's still pumping bile out. He took binders and it lowered significantly across the board, all of these chemicals, which just goes to show bile is very important. Digestion is super important. If you're constipated you are reabsorbing toxins. Fiber is so important because it's helping bind, helping get rid of those toxins from the liver all the way out of your body without being reabsorbed and I thought that was fascinating because we don't think about how we get rid of this? We're eating glyphosate. Even if you go out once a month and you eat some kind of fast food or restaurant food, you're eating tons of manmade chemicals. Even if you eat clean most of the time, and then some of the time you go eat from a restaurant, you are absorbing these chemicals. So it's so important to consider. We've got to help the body get it all the way out of the body. It’s wild.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:12:16.459)
Absolutely. It's such an intricate mechanism and it reminds me of a gal that I actually evaluated up on stage at a seminar I was teaching and then she kind of hit me up a year later that she was about to have her gallbladder removed. Yes, and this is a health practitioner. This is a qualified natural doctor and she tried everything else and was trying to figure out what was going on. I ran a quick evaluation and it turned out her ovary was dysfunctional. So the body was overproducing cholesterol to compensate for the hormonal problems and the hormonal deficiencies. We put her on a supplement to rebuild that ovary and her cholesterol stabilized, her gallbladder corrected. I kind of wondered what happened with this gal because I hadn't had follow up with her again. Then she came up on my Facebook page where she hit me up and did this whole testimony about how we saved her gallbladder, hormones corrected, and so on. It kind of brings it back to the cholesterol we were talking about a minute ago. A couple of things that are often missed as far as triggers for high cholesterol are hormonal deficiencies because that cholesterol is the building blocks for most of those hormones, including the stress hormones and, the girl hormones. So if those are deficient in the body, then the liver's going to overproduce cholesterol as a compensation to correct them.
It’s not so much that it's plaquing up the arteries or those things that most of us have been led to believe it's the deficiency of hormones that the body's trying to compensate for. Hypothyroid, low thyroid is another very common trigger for the body to overproduce cholesterol as a compensatory mechanism to try and find homeostasis when things are out of balance.
Ashley James (1:14:12.749)
Yes, cholesterol is really important. Most people have taken on the mainstream just because, listen, we need to question everything. We've been taught cholesterol is bad, it causes heart disease. I'm not going to because I want to hear from you, the guest, but I could talk for at least an hour on how that is such a sham, such a lie.
Cholesterol is needed because 70% of the white matter of the brain is made of cholesterol. Every cell in your body that has a nucleus makes cholesterol, not just the liver, the liver only makes about 30%. It is such an important nutrient for your body that every cell wall is made of cholesterol. You said, sex and stress hormones are made of cholesterol. The myelin sheath of the nerves that protect the nerves are made of cholesterol.
It's so, so vastly important and also bile is made of cholesterol, to emulsify fats so we can absorb them. Many reasons why we need just any nutrient, too much, not good. Too little, not good. Goldilocks. We need to have that Goldilocks.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:15:26.497)
Perfect bottle of boiler porridge.
Ashley James (1:15:28.633)
Yes, we got to have that Goldilocks for every nutrient in the body. We're kind of running around stressed out. I don't know, just whatever animal you could think of. We're just running around very animalistic, being stressed out and kind of ignoring our body then self-medicating with either over-the-counter pain meds, coffee, alcohol, sugar.
I was just talking to a woman yesterday. She wanted an example of how a very simple change can make a profound difference. I said, I'm going to take water. Everyone ignores the importance of water. If you drink 5% less water than your body needs, you have a 25% reduction in your energy production in ATP. Cellular energy production goes down and then you're tired. What do you do? You probably have headaches. What do you do? You pop some
Tylenol or Advil and then you drink some coffee while you dehydrate yourself further. Then you have another slump. Then you eat some sugar or maybe go for some sugary frappuccino. Then you're completely tired, wired, super stressed out cortisol through the roof. You drink alcohol at night because it's a socially acceptable way to “calm down”. Now you're in a vicious cycle every day of doing tasks that dehydrate you. Sugar, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, caffeine every single day. You're setting yourself up for exhaustion, burnout, poor sleep, tired wired, and then you're stressed out. Then you lose your capacity to handle stress. So you start snapping at people, but you don't realize you're the problem. You think everyone else is a jerk and then you're affecting your hormones and your digestion and your hair starts falling out. Every single aspect of this in the mainstream is acceptable.
Go, go get over the counter meds too, to medicate, self-medicate, go do sugar, alcohol, caffeine to self-medicate. If we just got off that bandwagon and started drinking enough water, all those things would be thrown away and we'd have great skin, great sleep, great energy. Our joints would stop aching. That's a simple one change. I know you teach us hundreds of things. One change, one little change can change your life and that takes calming down, taking some breaths, calming down and starting to listen to the body connect in and ask, what does my body need? What is my body asking for?
Okay. We talked about left-sided headaches, right-sided headaches. What if the headaches are on both sides, right in front of the eyes or behind the eyes, I should say.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:18:10.928)
Great question. I'd like to go back just to finish up the conclusion or conclude the discussion on cholesterol. If people are listening to this and they're truly concerned about cardiovascular risk, a much better thing to look at is going to be high homocysteine. That's an inflammatory marker that can be tested in lab tests. Homocysteine is something that should be recycled and broken down, kind of we're talking about with bile, but it should be broken down. It breaks down into pathways in the liver called methylation and sulfation to keep pathways that are often compromised in people.
Physically, if you're concerned about cardiovascular risk, when homocysteine is high or elevated, physically on the body, it's going to manifest as the little red petechiae, they're called cherry angiomas. If it looks like somebody took a red felt pen and polka dotted here and there, or you see those starting to manifest on the body, they may even be as profound as a mole size or raised red dot. It's not cancer answer risk per se, I mean the dermatologist is not going to say, we need to remove this. But that is a sign that your body's overproducing homocysteine and that is way more directly related to cardiovascular risk. So when homocysteine levels are up above nine, nine, five, the higher that is, the more relevant, the more risk there is for cardiovascular disease and the more likely it is to be a fatal event. If you're truly concerned, you've got the family history of cardiovascular challenges, look at your homocysteine, it's so much more directly related to risk than cholesterol. Is cholesterol 50% or half the people with high cholesterol don't have any cardiovascular problems. You don't have to have low cholesterol, but still have cardiovascular problems.
Homo-assisting is almost a guarantee based on that number of what the risk is. It's very modifiable. The reason we don't see it in the big pharma world, is because it's nutrients like B6 and B12 that help break that homo-assisting down to reduce the potential of plaquing. What that, again, those red dots, the petechia, the cherry angiomas, those are indicators that you're setting down. You're setting the stage for plaque in the arteries and that's way more relevant to what the risk is going to be long term for cardiovascular problems. Just to kind of give the listener a to do, to know something else to look for to have that long term quality of life. Now to take it back to your question, the bitemporal headache, if they've got pain on both sides, that is a hormonal issue that typically most of the time tends to have to do with estrogen metabolism. Again, we go back to some of those liver pathways, methylation, sulfation. There's another pathway called P450. Sorry to use terms like that, but these are key pathways in the liver that break down estrogen when we're done with it.
So if one of those pathways in the liver isn't functioning properly, then the person doesn't break down estrogen, then they're going to be a lot more prone to cancers, and to these other hormonal swings and high cholesterol and temporal headaches. The muscle that physically will get weak and tender when estrogen metabolism is compromised, or in other words, the ovary is not functioning properly, it's called the gluteus medius. It's kind of the top of the butt region. That muscle will get weak when the ovary or in the male, the gonads are not functioning properly and so that'll affect the way they walk in kind of a shuffle if you will, a lateral list during their walk. There's an acupuncture point right on the outside of the elbow that's going to get very tender, think tennis elbow. That is a sign that hormonal regulation is out of balance and so we want to look at mechanisms to break down estrogen more appropriately. Nutritionally, it might be that corn, we mentioned corn earlier in the podcast, that corn is a massive trigger for ovarian cysts and it will literally create damage in the ovary. Sorry, this might rub some people, but from a blood type perspective, O blood type females that are drinking coffee, another massive trigger for ovarian dysregulation and setting the stage for some bigger problems to come. Coffee is fine for other blood types for the most part, but corn and coffee are the most common triggers I see to set the stage for this bitemporal headache showing up on both sides.
Ashley James (1:22:44.942)
Oh my goodness. That just blows my mind. Going back to what you said about homocysteine, just, we got to go a little bit deeper there. What nutrients would be good to make sure that we're getting. I know folate, B12, what's really important to help the body to, is it to break down homocysteine or just lower the production of it? What are we supporting to get it lower? What causes it? What's the most common cause to be high? Just walk us through this since you kind of presented us with this. The most important thing to look at for heart health, it's this little truth bomb. Yes. Let's unpack that truth bomb.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:23:40.679)
You laid the stage talking about, we call it energy drinks, sodas, things like that are going to leach alcohol. A hangover is the functional deficiency of B6. Pyridoxal 5-phosphate is the active form of B6 that drives the methylation and sulfation pathways. Again, homocysteine is something that should be recycled through the body. These two pathways in the liver that don't function properly, when they don't break it down, then it continues to elevate. That's where the plaquing, the big risk comes from if we're doing things again, sodas or sugars that leach the B vitamins. Zinc is another nutrient that helps drive these pathways. Methionine, the best sources of methionine are beef, tuna and eggs. If we're eating beef, tuna and eggs, then we have the methionine amino acid to facilitate that methylation pathway to then break down this homocysteine, to break down the estrogens so that we are less prone to have this significant cardiovascular risk.
Ashley James (1:24:51.482)
Do you happen to know any vegan sources just for those listeners who don't eat those animal products?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:24:58.219)
That is a great question and I run into that often. Unfortunately, it's only found in those foods as far as I know. Often, I mean, my favorite example of this is a third generation hardcore vegan that unfortunately had MS and was in a wheelchair and was unable to walk, she had ulcerations all up on her feet and shins and everything. What we had to do for her was give her a methionine supplement to offset that significant methionine deficiency. She was an O blood type. I mean from a blood type perspective, an A blood type will do much better that way. An O blood type is more dependent on the methionine. Again, because it's beef and that's a big need, in the O blood type for that detoxification process. Often it ends up being taken an amino acid supplement that has that methionine in it if it's a vegan.
Ashley James (1:25:55.791)
Got it. I think it's really important to recognize that food is medicine. We should be using it as medicine. The body goes through seasons. I've had a few interviews where the doctors talk about how they'll use a vegan, very clean vegan diet. Listen, oreos are vegan. I'm not saying all vegans are healthy but to call it a whole food plant based diet where whole food, meaning it's a single ingredient, like there's broccoli. You can recognize everything on your plate. There's no chemicals, there's no weird stuff. You could actually pronounce every single ingredient that's on your plate. It came from a farm, not a manufacturing facility. No lab grown stuff.
Whole food plant-based, very nutrient dense, lots of good fiber. There's a lot of benefits to a whole food plant based on a mix of raw and cooked for those varieties of the enzymes and the different types of fiber. Because when you cook something, it changes the fiber. You're feeding a different gut bacteria. There's lots of fun stuff that you can play with. What I've heard from several doctors is that they use it like a cleanse, like a season. You might do this for a few months, few weeks, few months, few years.
Then there's a time where some people require animal products or you could, like you said, find it from a supplement. But if we're using food as medicine and we're being pragmatic, not dogmatic around diet, but pragmatic, I want to give my body exactly what it needs. A lot of people just run around and shove the food in their mouth that tastes the best.
If you're allowing your taste buds and your dopamine response to guide your diet, you're going to end up a statistic. We have to be more calculated. You wouldn't just put any fluid into your gas tank. Why are you doing that to your body? Sorry to give you a little shame session there, but not calling anyone out in particular, but just do a little internal check and go, because I do this to myself every day. What do I feel for dinner?
Wait a second. It's not about what I feel. What's fun? It's what my body was asking for. Sometimes it's a big smoothie. Sometimes it's a big salad. Sometimes it's something else. But listening to my body and going, what is my body asking me for? What nutrients should I be giving my body? I'm not saying that everyone should be vegan or everyone should eat meat. I'm not dogmatic when it comes to diet but a lot of people haven't explored the healing benefits of a whole food plant-based diet or as Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman will point out, eat mostly plants, just Nutritarian style, eat mostly plants, eat a variety. If anything, treat animal products as a condiment rather than the main event. So many people gain such benefits from that.
But thank you for pointing out that we don't see multiple generation vegans, if they're not being smart about their nutrients, we don't see them have great outcomes. But we also don't see Americans in the South that eat fried food for multiple generations of good outcomes either. It goes both ways. We have to be cautious about how we cook our food, what we cook our food in, whether it's nonstick Teflon or plastic, in the microwave, that matters too.
Again, I'm on my soapbox raving about, it's kind of, once you wake up to this, it's everything's trying to kill me. Everything's dangerous. My friend just literally woke up when she was in a grocery store reading packages and she had that aha moment. She texted me angrily. She's like, how do you do this? Everything's dangerous. Everything's killing us. How do you do it? How do you not get angry every time you go into a grocery store? It's liberating when you learn what's healthy for you and what your body needs. I am super excited for what we're learning from you. I have to have you back on the show because you're a true holistic doctor. I've had a string of interviews where they claim to be holistic and then they talk about, well, you could get this drug. I'm like, are you kidding me? Or they're treating supplements like it's a drug? There's a big difference in the philosophical lens that you view the body. We have a God-given ability to heal. That our body is constantly wanting to heal and let's make sure we're delivering the lumber, then also getting out of our own way. Stop feeding it what hurts it. Stop putting us in an environment that hurts it. Do the responsible thing of cleaning up the emotions, lowering the stress, making those lifestyle changes, and then delivering to the body the nutrients it does need within the Goldilocks zone, and also doing the right labs just to check in. But you know what? You could probably listen to the language of the symptoms, the language of the body speaking. You said, if you start to have those little red dots on you, or those little things that look freckles or look moles, but they're red, hey, that's high homocysteine, that's early warning signs of heart disease. Let's catch it when it's a whisper. Let's catch it when it's that first pain before it's the big nasty.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:31:38.655)
Can I add a little thing to kind of follow what you're saying? One of the symptoms of zinc deficiency is lack of smell or taste. A lot of people had that during the virus we just went through. The person that eats the sugar, for example, and then ends up zinc deficient, they need more sugar to offset, to give flavor to their food.
Whereas a person like us that's eating a plant-based diet and getting proper zinc levels, that food, the organic vegetables are actually going to taste good and taste better to us. The child, for example, the mom's allowing them to eat crackers and sugar and junk for food, they're going to be zinc deficient. So those plants are not going to taste good to them.
One of my solutions, moms, we carry a couple of different forms of liquid zinc. To then start getting that child's zinc levels up, their immune system's going to function better, they're going to handle stress better, and their palate's going to expand, and they're going to start actually appreciating those good, healthy foods that actually you consumed when you were in your youth, that your mom was feeding you. Those are foods that are going to flourish and thrive and build health. Similarly, adults, if we're eating trans fats and a lot of fried type foods, the liver being stressed out will actually crave more of that and it creates that whole conundrum, that vicious cycle of pursuing the things that are making a person more and more unhealthy. That's how that vicious cycle goes where a person just starts going downhill because they get so far disconnected from their body that they start craving the things that are making them worse. That's part of our job, as clinicians is to help break that cycle, get them eating the healthier foods and kind of suck it up if you will initially to eat the healthier foods and start redeveloping that taste for the things that are going to allow us to flourish instead of taking us down that ugly, terrible quality of life road that Ken and Sue.
Ashley James (1:33:43.743)
We just touched the surface. We just discussed a few different headaches. We didn't even go into what if it's the back of the occiput? There's so many different types of headaches. We didn't even really get into migraines. I want to definitely have you back on the show. It would be so cool. Now you've got a book coming out. You got a website for people to check out. Let's talk a bit about how my listeners who want to stop suffering, how do they connect with you?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:34:12.895)
Thank you. Last name is Vrzal, V-R-Z-A-L. I post things on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Periodically little one minute quippy fun triggers about this type of stuff that we've discussed today. Certainly the most beneficial aspect or an area is headacheadvantage.com, headacheadvantage.com on that site. It's neo. It's young but on that site there are links to the seven different patterns of headaches and you can click on that link and it'll list out some of the food triggers or some of the potential supplements that you can take to hand in each of those patterns. I put kind of a little Q&A to help direct to what the best supplement would be to solve those headache problems that's there and then you put your email on there then I can let you know when the book is officially available which is at the timing of this recording about a month away.
Ashley James (1:35:12.381)
Yes, I'm going to be publishing this today. In about a month, your book's going to come out, which is really exciting. It's going to be called Headache Advantage. We're going to be able to see it then. Now you have something called How to Handle Stress Better. Tell us a bit about that. Do we sign up for your email and get it or is that just on your website?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:35:13.291)
That's one of the chapters, the frontal headaches typically have to do with chronic cortisol production. Either the body's not breaking that cortisol down properly, which opened up another Pandora's box, but often things like Lyme disease can compromise the body's ability to break down that stress hormone and set the stage for a frontal headache. What a person would get when they enter their email is a link to that chapter going into how to modulate that stress response a little more healthfully.
Ashley James (1:36:12.833)
Cool. You know what? I personally have some people I'm going to be sending to you the second we get off of this recording. I know my listeners. I bet you guys are thinking of some friends, some family, some coworkers, or like hey, my cousin's mom. Everyone knows someone who has headaches. Now, do you also work with people that have chronic pain in other areas of their body, or do you just specialize in headaches?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:36:43.639)
Chronic pain, the whole body tells a story. The reason I focused the book on headaches is when I started out trying to write a book that covered the whole body, but it was way too all encompassing, ominous.
The book would never be done because I'm learning every day. When I kind of realized I got into healthcare because of my own headaches, unfortunately, about 50% of the population suffers with headaches. When I did the research, unfortunately, no one talked about headaches in this regard. We mentioned migraines. For me, migraine ultimately, as far as everything I've seen in the literature, migraine ultimately just means it's debilitating or it's gnarly.
It all comes down to the location. I mean, my original title for the book was Headaches, Location, Location, Location, because location is everything. Where the position on the head that the pain is, that tells us the story of what the trigger is. But yes, that relates to the head, then there's all these other physical manifestations in the body or on the body in the body that are going to also relate to that same area. That's how we think. L5 does central low back pain goes along with that frontal headache, overzealous stress response we talked about, knee pain, weakness in the inside of the knee or ankle weakness, plantar fasciitis or bunions, those are all signs of chronic cortisol secretion. We can pull all that together. I guess that's the long answer of yes, I deal with chronic illness, the whole body. I got into healthcare because I'm a fitness junkie. That's how I lab test everything on myself. But by default, I mean, chronically ill people are talking to chronically ill people about what's going on. That's our niche. It’s helping those people that need it so desperately.
Ashley James (1:38:38.728)
Can you be my new best friend? You're speaking my language. Yes. Okay. I've got one for you. I recently, a month ago started doing two workouts a day and, I guess maybe I didn't stretch enough, which I'm totally ashamed of, but I developed something super weird. I have a friend who's a podiatrist. I saw him, he's an amazing sports podiatrist. If there's any listeners in the Seattle area that have a foot problem, I got you, I got a guy for you and he's okay. This is not common, but what's happened is the muscle that lifts the toe is getting entrapped on the interior. The inside, not the outside, the inside part of the ankle, I’ll take a few steps and then all of a sudden it's excruciating pain because it feels like my joint is crushing my tendon. He’s like yes, it is. I'm like okay. I've been doing more stretching, which is helping. Obviously seeing my chiropractors, great. I've been doing all kinds of stuff, anti-inflammatory stuff, phototherapy, that's all helping, but it's not gone 100% away. I'm going to seek out physical therapy, but I was wondering, you talked about ankle, high cortisol. What would you say to someone or me? What would you say to me? What did I do? 1:40:10.999
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:40:11.166)
Is the pain in the big toe specifically?
Ashley James (1:40:15.502)
I don't feel any pain just sitting here. I'll just be walking and then the joint will crush the tendon. Also what's developed, because I started walking on the outside of my foot, which shortens that tendon, so it stops happening, but don't ever do that. Don't walk on the outside of your foot, because now I'm getting a shooting nervy pain, around the big toe. Everyone told me not to do that, and then I did it. I'm not doing that anymore.
It's such a bummer because now I can only do the bike for cardio because even the pool messes it up and he's like you can't do the treadmill. You can't walk. You can't go do the pool. I'm just stuck doing the bike, which is a bummer because I like the variety. Also I can't be more active. I have to kind of like not do things until I really heal this.
That is a good lesson to learn. Don't go zero to 60 in any fitness protocol whatsoever. Just slowly ramp up. I thought I was there. I thought I was ready to do two a day and apparently I wasn't. Yes. I'm super motivated. Yes, but my body was nope, a little too motivated.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:41:38.079)
Good on you. I love your motivation. That's all great.
We have good news for you. Liver two is an acupuncture point at the area you were talking about in between the two between the big toe and the second toe.
Typically it's a liver problem that causes that big toe to hurt. What I was referring to was bunions and plantar fasciitis. That's all an adrenal problem or adrenal fatigue, a typical mechanism that sets most of those problems up. But when it's specifically the big toe, it's poor functioning of the liver. I found it to be specifically related to glutathione production. There's a key pathway in that liver that functions to help the detoxification and immune function and it's very antioxidant dependent.
I'm just confident that what I do know of you my new best friend is that I imagine you're getting plenty of those but we'd want to look at things to facilitate that glutathione reduction technically or but glutathione production you do the right thing and that toe pain literally would go away in minutes, that's the good news and the beauty.
I've had that kind of toe off tenderness on my big toe in the past. I have a liquid glutathione product I've used and literally the minute it touches my tongue, the pain is gone in my toe. That's how profound this kind of stuff can be.
Ashley James (1:42:58.831)
Interesting. I have a phototherapy patch. I don't know if you heard about this. I've had a few interviews about it. Is the liver channel up by the chest. Is it?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:43:20.902)
Yes, there's a glutathione point.
Ashley James (1:43:24.407)
It's LV14. I know LV3 and that's by my foot, which I've been stimulating, but I have a patch that stimulates the body to produce more glutathione. I typically put it up by LV14 because that's like this gateway for the liver, but I'll try putting it down in between those two toes, that little tender spot.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:43:54.807)
There's a glutathione reflex over the liver. If you put your left hand over the liver, so your long finger's going to be at the spleen 21.
Your second knuckle is probably going to be probably that LV14 point you were talking about. That is kind of where the body refers pain when glutathione is not functioning properly. I would think putting that patch there should be super, I mean you'll know, you put it there, within minutes your toe's going to tell you whether it's the right place or not.
Ashley James (1:44:27.879)
I'm going to try it. This is so much fun. You see, this is why people want to dive into this and advocate for themselves and learn this because stuff happens. Maybe you sprained an ankle or something, and then all of a sudden so many things that you can do and homeopathy is another fascinating thing.
One of my family members has a symptom in the middle of the night. I get up, turn my flashlight on, because I want to turn the lights on, turn my flashlight on, and run to the bathroom. I have this big cabinet full of homeopathic remedies. I grab one and give it to them and then boom, it's better. It's the coolest. I'm half awake doing it. I'm, yup, that worked. Okay, go to bed. You only needed one dose. My husband once had this trapped gas feeling. He woke up in the middle of the night and this was a few years ago, but he was just like, I can't come out on both ends. It's just trapped gas. He felt so weird. I'm okay. I looked it up, grabbed the homeopathic, gave it to him and immediately it just came out both ends. I feel so much better. You burped and farted. How cool is this?
Homeopathy is amazing and weird and almost instant for so many people. Then that's the least invasive, least toxic thing. If it doesn't work, you got the wrong remedy and that's okay too, because it's not hurtful. The body's going to just come back into balance. This is what I love about holistic medicine. We can go down all kinds of rabbit holes. You could do acupressure. You said, you can push on these points on the body and you can stimulate a specific response.
You can change the little things in your diet specifically and shift the body. We can do things gently to make profound changes.
Dr. V, I want to have you back. This has been a true pleasure. I'd love for you to come back and teach.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:46:30.986)
I love to. Can I throw a quick thing out just to make sure listeners don't miss the fact that sweet wonderful Ashley listeners just confirmed that she can do this in your sleep. Don't miss that aspect, huh?
Ashley James (1:46:41.295)
Well, I was half asleep. I got my little phone out and I know what websites to go to and look up the remedies and I have the remedies here and am half asleep. Well, I don't know about you, but as a mom, I always got one ear listening if my son's going to cough or my husband's going to snore or whatever. We're just wired to be the herbalist, the healer of the whole house? So we're just listening for everyone.
It might be annoying to people, but the second my friends do come to me and they're like, what do you think I should do for this? I give them a whole health lecture. They're like, I can't believe that. How do you remember these things? I'm passionate. I'm so passionate. But I think at the end of the day, this is the gift God gave me. It took me a long time to find it. I think everyone is born with a gift and this is the gift that God gave me as my passion for helping people to help their body to come back into balance. Now my new best friend, it also is the exact same. God gave you the same gift too. How cool is that? Love it. Love it.
Thank you for coming on the show. Definitely going to have you back, especially when you launch the book in about a month. We'll have a big book party. So, headacheadvantage.com listeners, definitely check it out.
Can you work with clients like telemedicine? How does that work if they want to work with you?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:48:13.891)
I do, yes. In fact, the gallbladder gal doctor that I was telling you about, we actually did telemedicine while she was the passenger in a car, of all things, and was able to figure out that it was her gallbladder, and we solved that.
Yes, I do telemedicine. I have several docs in my office as well that are all doing the same work, and most of them came to me as interns and kind of came up through the ranks that way. I say that because at this point, I tend to be booking about two months out, which is good news bad news. But yes, I still very actively treat people all day, every day, and try to do this book stuff on the side.
Ashley James (1:48:55.367)
Nice, nice. Well, good for you for duplicating yourself and for finding true holistic-minded doctors who want to support the body's ability to heal itself. I’m kudos to you. If they go to your website, headacheadvantage.com, is that where they can find information about doing the telemedicine at your clinic or is there a different website?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:49:20.979)
My office website is drvrzal.com. That's the office website.
Ashley James (1:49:28.715)
I'll make sure that the links to everything that Dr. Vrzal does is in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. It's been such a pleasure having you. Is there anything left unsaid that you just really want to make sure you leave us with?
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:49:43.949)
It comes down to listening to your body. Listeners, your body's trying to tell you a story. Pain is intended to elicit change. When you have pain, it's not a deficiency of aspirin or Advil or Tylenol. It's your body yelling at you to go forth and learn.
Listen to what it's trying to tell you so that you can thrive. I mean, it's your early warning that God forbid you've got a cardiovascular incident not pending, looming. Your hormones are not functioning, so you're going to create mutated cells. Learn from what your body's trying to tell you so that you can thrive and enjoy this blessed life we have.
Ashley James (1:50:31.037)
Love it. Awesome. Well, can't wait to have you back on the show. It's been such a pleasure.
Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:50:35.443)
So fun. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity, Ashley.
Outro:
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The Headache Advantage: 7 Pain Patterns as Tools for Total Body
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Dr. Shawn Tassone:
Americas Holistic Gynecologist | Tassonemd.com
Tassone Advanced Gynecology | Drshawntassone.com
Author of The Hormone Balance Bible https://amzn.to/3VF9m7j
Discover the power of holistic health and self-advocacy as we navigate the complexities of hormone replacement therapy with holistic gynecologist Dr. Shawn Tassone. We explore the transformative potential of taking charge of your health, emphasizing the importance of holistic approaches such as dietary changes, lifestyle adjustments, and alternative therapies like acupuncture and chiropractic care. With Dr. Tassone's personal journey as a backdrop, we uncover how personal experiences with loss can ignite a passion for integrative and functional medicine, empowering you to support your body's natural healing processes.
Highlights:
Supporting the Body for Optimal Health
Thermography for Pain Relief and Healing
Patient Symptom Evaluation and Treatment
The Power of Maca in Health
Benefits of Maca on Hormones
Exploring the Mystery of Plants
Fasting Before Chemotherapy for Cancer
Temporary Testosterone Increase for Muscle Loss
GLP-1s and Changing Eating Habits
Empowering Women Through Social Media
Intro:
Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today we have an interesting discussion with a doctor and PhD as we navigate the world of hormone replacement therapy and navigating our own care in this system that is not perfect and really requires us to be diligent when it comes to our own advocacy, which, if you're listening to this podcast for a while, you are well aware that we need to stand up and do our own sleuthing, do our own research, do our own detective work and educate ourselves on how to support the body's innate, god-given ability to heal itself.
Your body wants to heal itself, and that's the first philosophical shift that takes place, that first belief system shift from the standard model of wait to get sick, then go to a doctor and they give you a drug and you go home and yay, you're better, which that's not how it works, as we know from experience. Yay, you're better, which that's not how it works as we know from experience, you're not better. Even the so-called cure has a list of side effects. It causes stress on the body and really was that drug ever the cure? In the first place, it was suppressing something, killing something, shifting something in the body. But is that what the body needs to heal itself? Now, yes, there's times when you break an arm, you get a cast. We definitely wanted that support, and a cast is a wonderful example of supporting the body's ability to heal itself. It takes a lot longer and it's a lot harder for a bone to heal without the support of the cast. So there's times in modern medicine where that support is wonderful and necessary.
Now, if we took that same philosophy and went well, how can I support my body to have more energy, to maintain a healthy weight, to grow healthy muscle, to have healthy digestion and bowel movements, to have healthy hormone levels sex hormones, stress hormones, all the other hormones How can I support my body's ability to maintain and achieve optimal health? We have to look outside modern medicine to gain these answers for a variety of reasons, and we talk a bit about this in today's interview, and one thing that I wanted to let is that it's totally worth going down this one rabbit hole If you are sick of being sick and you are looking to support just like a cast supports the body to heal the bone so that it keeps it stable, allows the body to heal, and then we remove the cast, because a cast left on too long becomes a hindrance, So if you're looking for holistic medicine, meaning how can I support the body as a whole? Because the body is constantly trying to come back into balance, it is constantly trying to achieve homeostasis and something as simple as a small change in your diet can make this huge difference or small change in lifestyle, like an increase of even by 20 ounces of water a day, going to bed an hour earlier, getting 20 minutes of walking just these little, tiny additions. In some cases it's herbs. In some cases it's seeing a holistic practitioner for other therapies, like chiropractic and acupuncture, there's all kinds of different kinds of frequency devices out there, like PEMF. These are all supportive to support the body in doing what it already is trying to do, which is come back into balance.
Now I've had several episodes on why is the body so out of whack in the first place? We've got crazy or over 80,000 man-made chemicals since I was born. In your lifetime there have been 80,000 man-made chemicals added to our air, water, food, added to the soil and it's really scary. Why are we so out of balance? Well, think about how your grandparents ate. They ate whole foods, not from boxes, not from factories. They ate from farms. Now the farms use so many chemicals. So just to give you a few examples, we used to walk more, we used to play more, we used to rest. When we rested, we really rested. When we played, we really played. We used to have large family support and now we're isolated alone, stagnant and filling ourselves with man-made junk and we're constantly in stress mode because of all the things we're taking in, all the media that we're taking in.
So the body's in stress mode and it is depleted of sunlight, fresh air, clean water. Depleted of nutrients. I have some wonderful interviews, like with Dr. Joel Wallach. Highly recommend listening to that. When it comes to the 90 essential nutrients the body needs. The body needs 90 essential nutrients every day for optimal function and that episode, episode 435, is wonderful to listen to. Highly recommend going back and listening to episode 435, if you haven't already.
Now, 18 months ago, almost two years ago, I was introduced to and I'd heard of it before, but my skepticism went up. I'll say on the show, I'm the most open-minded skeptic and I think it's good to be that way. You probably are too. I'm willing to listen to what sounds really woo-woo, sounds really out there, out there. But I'm going to use my critical thinking, but I'm going to make sure that I don't allow my preconceived ideas or my belief system cloud the new information coming in, like allow myself to be open. So my skeptic pops up and I go, wow, I'm rejecting something just based on my skepticism alone. Sometimes things sound too good to be true and we often just negate it. That probably is not real, it's probably fake. It's probably snake oil, and there is a lot of snake oil out there.
But I started to see thousands of people getting results and there's over a hundred studies that show powerful results, and they had a money-back guarantee. So I was like, okay, I'm going to give it a try. It's a technology. It's a wearable technology. It's quite affordable. They could charge a lot more for this, which I was really surprised about. It's very affordable, it's a wearable technology and it stimulates your body, your body wanting to heal itself. It stimulates it and there's no side effects. It's safe for infants. It's safe on pets. It's safe on any, any anyone, any age, any size, and you don't absorb anything. It's not a molecular medicine, it's a frequency medicine. So, with that said, I tried it. I got huge, huge results, which I was really shocked because of how skeptical I was. But there's a money-back guarantee, so I was going to give it a try and I couldn't believe how well it was working, not only for myself, my son, my husband, and my other family members. Then I got my friends to try it and it all worked for them. Then I started introducing it to my clients and now I have over 200 clients using this successfully and getting great results.
They're getting so healthy that their doctors are taking them off of their medications, and that is my goal. My number one goal and I've probably said it 100 times on this podcast over the last eight years that this is my number one goal is to help you get so healthy that your doctor takes you off your meds because you no longer need them. Now, whether you need them in the first place is another thing. That really is person dependent, but I think people are being over prescribed drugs and under prescribed lifestyle changes and dietary changes and the things that we're lacking.
Dr. Joel Wallach, the man I had mentioned, who's one of my mentors. He will often say, like you didn't have a drug deficiency, you had a blank deficiency like a calcium magnesium, B12, whatever the nutrient was. People will have deficiencies in those, but the symptoms show up in a way that the doctors will prescribe drugs or that there needs to be a necessary diet change. I've seen Dr. Wallach get people so healthy using natural medicine. When I say natural medicine, I mean as close to nature as possible. I've seen him get people so healthy their kidney function returned and they no longer needed dialysis. I have seen him help people save limbs, gangrene in the feet about to be amputated. He helps them and now they no longer need their feet to be amputated and now they no longer need their feet to be amputated. I have seen him reverse all forms of disease, all common, the most common diseases you can think of. If you could think of a disease, he's helped people reverse it using natural, as close to nature as possible, holistic medicine.
So when I say holistic medicine, I mean supporting your body's ability to heal itself, because your body is constantly striving for homeostasis and it wants to heal you. It wants you to be as healthy as possible and we are getting in our own way by making silly choices like staying up late and eating sugar and drinking alcohol and the regular stuff that we do that we don't know, because everyone does it, but everyone's sick. Everyone around us is sick. Everyone around us 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription medication. That should tell you something. We should not be this medicated and yet we are.
So I'm on my soapbox letting you know there is a holistic, very effective, very affordable type of technology and you can listen to two interviews about it, episode 496 with Trina Hammack and episode 517 with David Schmidt, who's the creator of this technology. It's been around for 20 years, so I started using it, started using it with my clients and got just such good results. My clients have their doctors take them off. Their doctors like after the labs are showing, oh, you no longer need this thyroid medication. Okay, we're taking you off that. Unbelievable! I have a few clients who their fractures healed in half the amount of time needed and they freaked out. I've had clients text me their x-ray report saying that the doctor couldn't believe how quickly they were healing. So your body wants to heal itself and this is a technology that stimulates and helps your body get over the other side.
Really, really exciting stuff decreasing inflammation in the body, decreasing pain, increasing muscle mass, increasing healthy bones, healthy joints. There's women who've reported after their DEXA scan, after using this technology for about a year, sometimes half a year, as little as half a year that their DEXA scan showed that they're no longer in osteopenia or osteoporosis. So it's really, really exciting stuff. But there's, like I said, about 100 studies and in addition to that, I've spoken with many doctors who are holistic doctors, who are using this technology with their clients and with their patients, and they're seeing these results. The people are feeling better. But it also shows up in the lab. So something that's energy medicine, frequency medicine, is now showing up in the physical realm because labs are changing, and that's really exciting.
So if you want to check it out, listen to those episodes, but then book a free session with me. I love chatting with you guys. You can go to my website, learntruehealth.com. In the menu, click on work with Ashley James, select the very first thing at the top. It's a free, about 20 minute, sometimes a bit more if you have more questions, I'll sit there longer on the phone, if you have more questions. About 20 minute phone call where we discuss this type of technology and I can help you order the kind, because there's different ones the kind you need and I'll show you how to use them so that you place them correctly on the body, on the meridians of the body, for you, for the outcomes that you're looking for. It is phenomenal.
The cool thing is there's a money back guarantee. I haven't had someone yet who didn't feel a shift in themselves, that they didn't feel like it got results. I also don't believe in silver bullets out there, like, oh, this works for everyone, I think we're so unique that I'm not going to say everything's going to work for everyone. So if it doesn't work for you, the cool part is you can get your money back and there's no risk. There's no risk, but I've seen so many people get such great results that I'm singing this from the rooftops that if there was a natural way to support your body's ability to come back into balance without side effects, with no risk and it's affordable, then you would want to know about it. That's why I'm recording this for you, letting you know you could also share it with your friends and family, and even pets! Amazing.
I've seen so many things with animals. I saw one animal who, in 10 days of using two specific patches for this stimulating and healing. Their milky eyes went away. The glaucoma in their eyes went away. They got their vision back. I watched as a dog with hip dysplasia went from being in excruciating pain within minutes, you could touch the dog down by their hips and within two weeks the dog was able to jump back on the bed to help its owner, it was a service dog and this dog wasn't able to jump before because of how much pain it was in. Everyone around this dog is saying it's a new dog, that the dog is just completely out of pain, is jumping around, it's happy, it's running. It wasn't doing that before.
I had a client who had a puppy who was dying. They had no idea why they spent $7,000 on this dog, and had no idea why. I told them what patches to put on the dog and three days later they texted me back and said the dog is completely back to normal. Do not know why. The vet had no clue why this dog was sick in the first place, but they spent so much money on this dog with medications and oxygen tent, everything. The dog was just wasting away. Went from lying there all the time just wasting away. Three days, less than three days, the dog was eating again and just up and at it. I've seen people use this on horses. We have actually a lot of studies done with horses and how quickly it gets them out of pain and decreases inflammation.
Now it's really cool and anyone who wants this, sign up for a talk with me, a little chat with me, a free chat with me. Go to Work with Ashley James at learntruehealth.com and I can share.
They take a special camera that 's called thermography and the camera can measure your heat in your body and inflammation. You could see it visually and there's video thermography of people who put the patches on and you watch as the inflammation leaves the body and you watch as the person, like the entire body, decreases in inflammation and the person's out of pain. It's so cool. This helps with sleep. This helps with hormone balancing at the hypothalamic, pituitary,\ adrenal access. It's really cool. So I mean, I could go on for days about how cool this stuff is, but I wanted to let you know. If you didn't know about it already, you're going to want to try it.
Learntruehealth.com. Sign up for a free chat with me. Work with Ashley James in the menu bar. I'd love to help you with this and go check out those two episodes David Schmidt 517 and Trina Hammack 496. I'd love to be your guide to helping you to purchasing these and how to apply them, because we use this in conjunction with Chinese medicine protocols, so you're going to be able to increase your vital life force energy. It's one of the first things we do after we balance the polarity of your body and we do a protocol for decreasing inflammation, and then we increase your vital life force energy and then we do a protocol that opens up all the different among three systems and balances every system in the body. It's really cool. People notice away better sleep, more energy. They just feel like they can go, go, go. So if you're dragging, you're going to want to try it.
Ashley James (0:17:23.374)
Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 522.
I am so excited for today's guest we have on the show, Dr. Shawn Tassone, who is an MD and they want to become holistic, they want to look at the body as a whole and help the person and the patient as a whole and see them as a whole person instead of just a broken down pieces Like I'm just going to treat your uterus. You're looking at the person as a whole and you're looking at how can we help your body come back into balance instead of well, I got my prescription pad here. What drug can I throw at you today?
So I'm thrilled to dive into this world of holistic gynecology and first I'd like to know a little bit more about what guided you towards going holistic. I'm always interested. Was there an event where you went, hold on, my traditional MD training isn't enough here. Was there a specific event, or was it just like a series of events that led you to want to explore holistic medicine?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:18:43.005)
Well, thanks for having me on. I get asked that question a lot and sometimes you get attacked online for using certain words like holistic or integrative, functional, whatever, and that's because they are slightly overutilized. If I might share that, I think that it is a marketing technique in a way, but also I think it is a moniker that gives you an idea of who the person is and what they believe in. I would say that my journey began when I was a second year resident, I guess. So I was a resident OBGYN living in Oklahoma and basically one day my, my mom had to have surgery because she had this ovarian mass and it ended up being cancer and so so here I was, a second year resident and I knew a lot about cancer, knew a lot about ovarian cancer.
But this was my mom, and what I found was that over the five years that she survived, she eventually succumbed to it when she was 57. I realized she'd call me like the day before chemo, she would be all excited and happy because they load you up with steroids. So you feel good and you got a lot of energy and everything. Then the next day when the chemo kicked in and she had joint pain and all the stuff that goes along with nausea, vomiting I realized really quickly that I couldn't even help my own mom. I couldn't help her live a healthy, productive, happy life, and so I watched her over the years just succumb to this process and just not really have a great quality of life. When she died in 2004, I went on this journey as you do.
I'm an only child, so, as I went through this on my own, and as you find yourself in these spiritual crises, you often go to Sedona, which is where I went and I was living in Tucson at the time, so I was only like three hours away. Anyways, I was in Sedona and I was waiting for my significant other at the time who was getting a massage, and I was reading this book called Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil. At the time, it was 2005, he was talking about all this crazy stuff like fish oil, coq10, vitamin d and oh my god, all this stuff, and I was like whoa, this stuff is mind-blowing. So at the end of the book it said hey, if you're a doctor and you want to learn more about helping people heal and blah, blah, blah, we have this fellowship. It just so happened that the fellowship was in Tucson, which is where I was living, because it was at the University of Arizona. So I just didn't even think about it, I just applied.
I didn't think I'd get in, it was late in the process. Anyways, I got in, did the fellowship for two years. In that fellowship there was an eight-week module on spirituality and health. That was another conk on the head. It just woke me up and then I just decided I needed to go deeper into that aspect. So I did a PhD from 2009 to 2015 and got a PhD in philosophy and in those six years visited indigenous shamans in South America and just looked at different ways to heal. I think I was trying to just figure out what else is out there, what else is there in this world, and this all culminated into the practice that I have today.
Ashley James (0:22:38.109)
My gosh, I so connect with your story. My mom passed away in 2002 of cancer. I'm an only child and that also led me down my road of being motivated to learn how to support the body's ability to heal itself, how to prevent disease, and how to come back into balance. Then my dad died six years later of a broken heart, and so I've watched both my parents die very young. My mom was 55, very, very young. My dad was in his early sixties. They could still be alive now. If there were just a few different choices. If they had just seen a different practitioner.
My mom's cancer was actually caused by and this is relevant to our conversation today was caused by a hormone that her doctor had put her on, and it was a synthetic hormone that was taken off the market in Canada, where we were in Canada at the time. The week she was in the hospital, the week before she died. So I was living in the hospital with her while she was in palliative care, listening to the radio, hearing the news that the very drug that had put her in the hospital that had ended her life was being taken off the market for causing too much cancer in women and the prescribing doctor ended up also getting cancer and she was sort of a very famous doctor in Canada, she's like Dr. Oz of Canada, always on the TV, always on the news. She ended up going on to write a book about it, about her experience. She got cancer but then she caught it quickly and survived and wrote a book about it. Whereas my mom and many of her patients died from that synthetic hormone that she had been put on that this doctor was pushing every single woman my mom knew that was going to the same doctor was being pushed.
I remember the day my mom came home when she was first put on that drug. My mom exercised seven days a week, she took supplements. She ate very healthy, she really watched her health and my mom was a very strong, emotionally strong woman. She came home crying. This MD said to her she put the fear of God in her and said if you don't get on this drug, your hips will break because you don't have enough estrogen. Your hips will break and you'll fall over and you'll die. This MD put so much fear into my mom that she, like fear-forced her into getting on this drug. My mom wasn't on any drugs at the time. She was very natural-minded, and that one decision ended her life prematurely.
So I think there's a lot of people out there that are scared of using hormone replacement therapy in a healthy way, because they don't know, is it healthy. I know that's one of your main things is helping women to bring their bodies back into balance, and sometimes the tool in your tool belt is bioidentical hormones, so much different from synthetic. But I'd love to dive into that concept of like, when, when hormones are out of balance, when is it necessary to bring in hormone replacement, and are there other alternatives that we can do that you see as effective, like herbs?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:26:14.921)
First of all, the concept of hormone imbalance is hotly criticized by many of my OBGYN colleagues that are quote-unquote influencers online. They will say that hormone imbalance isn't a real thing, it doesn't exist. The reality is they're getting caught up more in the semantics of the word imbalance because theoretically, yes, a woman is always cycling, hormones are always in flux, they're up, they're down, they're all around. But that being said, we know where the hormones are supposed to be at certain times in the cycle. So any self-respecting physician that is, quote-unquote, an expert in women's health would have an idea of where the levels should be at certain times in the cycle. So when you draw the blood, then that isn't where it's supposed to be. So I do think that they get caught up more in the semantics and shooting things down than they really seem to care about the actual balance. What's funny, if you look at an issue, say, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is an imbalance, you have high estrogen, high testosterone, low progesterone, insulin resistance, there's all kinds of things. If that isn't a hormone imbalance, then why is the number one go-to treatment for most of my colleagues' birth control pills, which are hormones which override the ovaries, shut the ovaries down and shut down the imbalance. It's contradictory to not see it that way. It's just that they get caught up more in the word.
So let's say, bioidentical. You mentioned the sham organization that I call, The North American Menopause Society doesn't like the word bioidentical and it's because they didn't come up with it so they changed it in their wording. They call these hormones, body identical, which just goes to show you the hubris of the physicians that they need to change a word that has been used for 30 years because it wasn't their word. It's the same thing, it means the exact same thing. It's just that they didn't come up with it.
So when you look at bioidentical, synthetic yes, those two things are different. The thing about bioidentical is there's multiple variations of dosages. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone are all bioidentical. Then you get the confusing piece of bioidentical versus synthetic, FDA approved or not. A lot of physicians will say bioidentical hormones are not approved by the FDA, which is totally wrong. They are. It's just that the pharmacies that compound bioidentical hormones aren't FDA approved, but the actual hormones that are utilized are FDA approved. So there's a lot of misinformation out there. Let's just put it that way. Tons.
Ashley James (0:29:24.293)
So when it comes to a patient who is coming to you and you draw their blood, their labs showed that their hormones are not really like them to be. Is your first tool, bioidentical hormones or do you find that you can get really good results with diet, lifestyle, herbs first?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:29:54.716)
It depends. So when I see a patient that's new, obviously I'm going to get a set of labs and then I'm going to sit with them and go over their issues like what symptoms are they having? A lot of docs will say you don't need to test, I just go on symptoms. I mean whatever. That's fine if that's the way they want to do it. My thing is I would like to use the labs to coordinate with the symptoms. What exactly is going on, because some symptoms overlap. I mean you could have somebody that has fatigue, could be low thyroid, could be low testosterone, could be high thyroid, could be cortisol. There's so many different things that overlap.
To just say that you are psychic and you can just tell what the imbalance is based on. What the patient's telling you isn't necessarily true. Then maybe some of the things that she's telling you in the order that she's putting them in may not be the real order. Maybe she's just saying them as they come up or, maybe she's not telling you something. I think having as much information as possible would be the best. So, getting labs done. Getting a good history is always the first place to start, and then it's based on the numbers. What I always will tell people is hey, these are the things that are low. These are the symptoms that I would see associated with this. Does this resonate with you? Sometimes it's like yes, across the board, and then sometimes it's like this, yes, I do feel fatigued, but I don't really have a decreased libido or whatever, and so they'll tell me how they're feeling and then I'll just base the therapy on them and what they're trying to achieve.
Ashley James (0:31:45.970)
Every doctor I've ever been to my first visit. It's so funny that everyone they're like, aha, I know what your problem is, it's thyroid. I look at them before they do labs, everything could be a naturopath, an MD, but every doctor I've been to in my first visit they think that they're delivering news, like, I am such a smart doctor, I know what your problem is. They always tell me, just based on what I look like and the symptoms or whatever I share, what's going on with me. They always think it's thyroid and I have to break the news.
Every lab I've ever done, my thyroid is perfect. They don't believe me. It's hilarious, it's like that gaslighting, it's hilarious. They don't believe me. They're like well, we're going to run these labs just in case. I just want new labs. Every aspect of my thyroid health comes out perfectly pristine and they're like, well, oh yes, your thyroid is normal.
It's just really funny. Yes, we should listen to the symptoms of the body. Yes, you want your doctor to listen to you, but at the same time they like to jump to conclusions because they're like, oh, this checks off this box. Therefore, it must be this so, yes, you've got to have labs to show what's going on. So yes, you've got to. You got to have labs to show what's going on. Do you trust all labs? Are all labs fairly accurate or are there ever times when you're like well, maybe they didn't calibrate or maybe they messed up somehow, maybe we should go with a different lab? Or do you feel like, across the board, we're getting pretty much the same result, no matter what lab we go to?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:33:26.311)
They can be wrong, sure. If I saw a lab that had a weird thing, if it was something I wasn't expecting, like DHEA or something was way high, like four times normal or something weird like that, then what I usually will do is repeat it. If I get two that are that, then I usually will believe it at that point. But if it's an anomaly, like something that I've never seen, like my God, that's crazy.
Ashley James (0:34:03.205)
I just always wonder if the machines themselves, if they're not calibrated, or if we should go with a completely different company and see if we're going to get the same results?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:34:12.877)
That can always be an issue. I'm saying it now, but I usually never say never, or always there's usually something that can explain it. If not, then that's why we draw labs again or do other tests, with the example I gave, if the DHEA was still elevated, then I would probably get an ultrasound of the adrenal glands to see what was going on. Lab error is easy to figure out because you repeat it and it goes back down to normal. But, yes, there's somebody that has to make sure that the machines are running appropriately. So, yes, if they did it wrong, if they didn't zero it or whatever it is that they do, that could definitely affect things for sure.
Ashley James (0:35:20.561)
So, when a patient comes to you, you get the labs, you've talked to her, you've got what she's expressing, what her symptoms are and you've confirmed looking at the labs. What are your next steps when you see something's low, something's high, she's complaining about certain symptoms, what are your next steps with her?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:35:44.374)
Well, usually when they come in, I've already done their labs. So they have the labs and then they have then we go over their symptoms. So it's a matter of me sitting down with them and finding out what's bothering them the most. I try to get the order of things, like what's really bothering you and then what are some of the minor things. Usually when they come in for that first visit, we're ready to go, like, we have everything in place, where we've got all the stuff that we need, and then I just sit down and it's not like it takes a lot of work, because most women, like I said, by the time they've come in they've seen five other people.
So they're pretty easily they can tell me what they're feeling, because they've rehearsed it and they've said it a hundred times and they're used to talking about it. So it's something that usually over time it just comes out and I'll talk them about the symptoms of each of the imbalances that I see, and usually, there's a lot of head nodding and stuff like that going on where they're like yes, that's me, or I'm not feeling that at all, but usually pretty close. Then it's just a matter of figuring out the dosage that they need, the route of delivery that they need and what's going to work for them.
Ashley James (0:37:12.728)
So your next step, then, is to give them a prescription.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:37:19.334)
Yes, if they need it, I mean usually I'll make recommendations, prescription medications, supplements, whatever it is that they would benefit from, based on their symptoms, for sure.
Ashley James (0:37:35.223)
What lifestyle and dietary changes have you found to be the most effective at helping women balance their hormones?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:37:47.229)
Lifestyle changes. I mean, obviously, sleep is huge, probably number one. Some things you can't really change, like age. Sometimes the hormones are off because of your age and there isn't a whole lot you can do about that, but if you're using supplements and whatnot, I go through those to make sure you're on the right ones.
First of all, a lot of people are on supplements that don't do what they think they're doing and they're spending money on stuff they don't need and they're not using the ones that they do need. So we'll go through all that and base it on that too. We sit down, get a feel. Some people don't like supplements. I had a lady the other day. She can't swallow pills. So I'm not going to give her 17 pills to swallow because it's not going to work for her. So it really varies. Then some women don't want to use a topical cream, they want to use a sublingual tablet. I think the main thing that I like to do is really give people options, options, options. That's what's important.
Ashley James (0:38:55.226)
In terms of diet, have you found that there are any dietary changes that help to bring hormones back into balance?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:39:06.033)
I didn't really get into that. But yes, so like the things that I look at with hormones and some of them may not resonate, some of them do. But I have six areas that I look at. One is spiritual practice whether that's getting outside or journaling or meditation, whatever that is, depends on what the issue at hand is. Obviously hormonal modulation, so actually giving you the hormones.
A third one would be what I call the woo factor, whether that's essential oils or acupuncture, some sort of outside the box treatment that might have a little nugget of research on it or something that you could try. It may not work but it's worth a try and it's not going to hurt you. Nutrition, obviously super important, limiting processed foods and really focusing on good lean proteins, fats and limiting processed carbohydrates. Exercise is always great, depending on the imbalance might be resistance training, might be high intensity interval training, it might be walking. It really just depends on what the imbalance is. Then the last step that I look at is always the potential for using supplements.
Ashley James (0:40:27.239)
You had mentioned the woo factor, which then you said was outside of the box. That might be outside of the box of mainstream medicine, but that's inside the box of this podcast. Outside of the box of mainstream medicine is where I like to look and shine the light on, because we find that has, in many cases, the least amount of side effects and potentially the greatest amount of support, given that we're looking to support the body's own ability to heal itself and come in back into balance and also remove what is hindering the body from coming back into balance.
Inside the box of what you call the woo factor, can you share with us what you've found to have the greatest impact? Or do you have any stories where you've seen herbs, essential oils, acupuncture, chinese medicine, where you've seen that through labs or your experience, you've seen it bring the body back into balance.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:41:38.988)
I would have to say the number one thing that I see all the time is maca, I've been affiliated with maca for probably eight or nine years now. There’s a naturopath out in Oregon named Tori Hudson and I was given a talk at one of her conferences and there was a company there called Symphony and they have this product called Feminescence that I was really just interested in some of the claims they were making. The interesting thing about maca is it's grown in Peru. There's 13 different phenotypes of maca, different colors, different types and you could take yellow maca in part of Peru and grow it and it'll do one thing. You can grow it in another part of Peru to do something completely different. So these women that are using powdered maca, like in their smoothies and stuff in the mornings I hear stories all the time about how it didn't really do much. The problem is, when you have a powdered substance like that in bulk, you don't know what's in it, and what I found was that if you use a really clean maca like Feminescence or something what I noticed was, even women that don't want to go on hormones for whatever reason, they would get some relief, like whether it was better sleep or, the hot flashes would go away and what I've seen and this is just in my practice women tend to if they repurchase a supplement, it's maca across the board. I mean, probably 75% use it and like it and keep using it because they just find that it's so amazing. So if I had to pick a substance that I like the most, I would definitely pick the maca as number one.
I would say things that really also baffle me. I don't pretend to understand them, but acupuncture is amazing. We know acupuncture has so much data on fertility. I mean it's been researched extensively. Women that do this get pregnant faster, that have issues with fertility. I think part of the thing with something like acupuncture is just that it decreases stress. I mean, I do think that anything that's going to help you I mean I know it sounds funny, but it's like if you lay on a table for 45 minutes and just relax that could be part of it. Now I don't pretend to know the meridians and I have friends that do this for a living and they explain it much more eloquently than I do, but it makes sense to me that that would make things better. I don't understand it. I don't understand all the nuances behind it and everything, but it is something that I refer women out all the time for acupuncture and then I think the herbal stuff that's out there, Chinese medicine to me is probably the best thing ever, because these medicines they're medications in China. Here, when I go to this guy here in town and he has like a whole wall of drawers and when you tell him what your things are, he starts pulling on these drawers and he uses the actual herbs, and you get them weighed out and then you're supposed to go make a tea with them, It's pretty astounding and you don't just get it done. I mean, it's like it's a process, but these medicines have such power in them that I think it's one of those things that you just have to look at and go, okay, this guy knows more than I do then you go from there. But I do think, like maca, chinese herbs, chinese medicines for which I would refer out to somebody that specializes in that acupuncture. Then you can get into the essential oils. I think essential oils are tough because there's so much out there about them, there's so many people that are selling them and doing all these things, but it's like, do people really understand the way these things work, and I think those are extremely powerful as well.
Ashley James (0:46:06.622)
I interviewed Dr. Anna Cabeca, Episode 326, and she raves about maca, and it ended up maca was one of the things that really helped her in her health personally, so she ended up creating a drink. So the mighty maca drink. She might even give my listeners a discount. My listeners know to use coupon code LTH. Whenever they try to purchase things that are promoted on my show. I seem to remember she might have offered a discount, but, I drank it once, she sent me a sample. It was delicious. I was surprised because I was expecting healthy things don't taste good, and so it actually tastes really good.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:46:50.601)
I will tell you, maca doesn't taste good, there's something else in there that would make it taste great.
Ashley James (0:46:57.803)
Yes, probably like a buttload of stevia or something, whatever's in there, I was impressed that it didn't taste bad. I think I was expecting maca to taste bad. As far as essential oils go, that's the sticky wicket is that you can overdo it. It's a very concentrated form of herbal medicine and I have experienced that. I've known other people who have experienced overdoing essential oils but when you use them correctly, you're using concentrated plant medicine.
I've got a few interviews. I don't remember the numbers at the top of my head. But Dr. Z, he specifically does not tell us which brand he likes because he wants it to be more about the information and not about the sales. So listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and type in essential oils to find that episode. But there's so many resources out there when it comes to essential oils. Just know that less is more. Start small, start slow. It's very concentrated and just to understand, to use it with precaution so that you don't overdo it.
That concept for acupuncture, if you're just lying down for 45 minutes, you'd be relaxed anyway. I would debunk that because we go to sleep every night, we lie down eight hours or more or less, or give and take eight hours a day and we're still totally stressed out. But you get acupuncture and within 20 minutes and less than 20 minutes for me I am totally zonked out, like you put drugs in me, like an anesthesiologist came by and filled me up with some, something that makes me high as a kite. I can really feel my nervous system go into that parasympathetic rest and digest state and it's wild, it's absolutely wild.
You can do acupressure on yourself if you wanted to, if you want to just try it at home. But there is something to those meridian points, those acupuncture points on the body, and with my clients I've actually been able to help them with just acupressure get out of. I've had several clients get out of a panic attack with acupressure and that was phenomenal and I was on a video call watching them as they just their tension melted and you could just see them, their physiology come out of that panic attack, just really interesting how that we can use it even in our own home to bring down the nervous system back into state of rest and digest.
So the hormones you've been talking about things other than sex hormones. You've been bringing up thyroid and cortisol. But as a gynecologist, are you more concerned about sex hormones or, as a gynecologist, you're looking at all hormones in the body?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:49:59.508)
I think the hormones that I look at are obviously estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, DHEA, vitamin D and cortisol. Those would be the big ones. I will look at insulin too, obviously.
Ashley James (0:50:24.314)
I love that you brought up vitamin D as a hormone, because that's not discussed well enough. What are the levels you want to see your patients like when it comes to their blood work? What levels would you say are ideal for vitamin D?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:50:39.051)
Vitamin D, probably 60 to 80, somewhere in there. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there that overdose themselves on vitamin D and you have to remember that vitamin D is fat soluble, so it will sit in your fat cells so you can’t eat too much of it. So I always want people to remember that. The point being is that 5,000 units a day usually is a good amount. Some people take more than that, but I wouldn't take more than probably 50,000 units a week. But yes, vitamin D, most people are low, but that's why some people I do see are a little bit on the higher side.
Ashley James (0:51:23.792)
What do you do holistically, naturally, to prevent disease? What are your main things that you make sure you wake up and do every single day to keep your body in balance?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:51:40.266)
I'm horrible, I die. I probably don’t do that. I am probably a bit of a hypocrite, but sometimes the doctors are probably the worst patients I do think that sleeping for me and men, don't have a menopause, but as I've aged I've really noticed that sleep is really hard for me and I can tell you that I do feel a lot better when I sleep better. So I would really focus on the sleep hygiene piece for me. Cold room, dark, if that's what you like, sound machine no, sound machine, whatever it is. Then in the mornings, you see people doing these cold plunges all the time, and women don't necessarily need to do those every day. I think if you do them every day, you could potentially give yourself a cortisol spike, which may not be something you want to do but maybe two, three, four times a week.
But if you don't have a cold plunge, when you're in the shower. What I usually say is turn the water as cold as you can, get it for up to a minute, and you can always work your way up to it. What that's going to do is one thing, it's going to just kick start you. It's going to wake you up more than any coffee ever could, but it's also going to give you a little bit of a reset with your adrenals. The other thing and this is a fun one is you can eat one or two squares a day of good cacao chocolate, at least like 67% chocolate.
I did a YouTube video a while back where I ate chocolate from milk chocolate all the way up to 100% cacao. I think I had eight or nine of them. Man, what an adventure that was. You start getting up around 80%, 85%. I know people out there that eat 100% every day. I don't know how they do it. It's like I remember one day when I was a kid. I was like I don't know, I was probably eight and I wanted my mom to make cookies and she wasn't doing it. She wasn't doing it and I was like really wanting this powder. I was like I'm going to just eat the powder and the thing was I thought it was like the stuff you make the chocolate milk out of that has the sugar in it. But this was just powdered baking chocolate. So it was like just eating fire. It just burns and I remember crying, the chocolate was all dripping out of my mouth.
It was a similar experience when I did the chocolate tasting because I was like, oh my god, this is horrible, but cacao is really good for your blood vessels. It's good for a lot of things. So I say, a cold shower in the morning, try to focus on your sleep and if you want to do something, that's a treat you can do, 67% or higher of cacao.
Ashley James (0:54:55.179)
Well, I would challenge you to try to get the 100%, but at least 80%. This is what I like doing. Get a chocolate that has no sugar added okay, so it's that like super dark chocolate, but hear me out, it's going to taste good, then you get dates, I wouldn't do more than like five, six dates a day. Less is more. A small amount is good, a lot might not be great, but get a few dates, take the pits out and then get your dark chocolate and you cut the date in half, or in a quarter, and then you cut your chocolate and you shove the chocolate in the date and then you dip that. This is optional; you could dip it in a seed or nut butter, like almond, or cashew. There's all kinds of different ones. You could do sunflower, or if you don't have any nut butters, you don't need to. As a kid, you liked, peanut M&Ms versus regular M&Ms, and then you pop that in your mouth and you chew, and the sweetness of the date will offset the bitterness of the chocolate and then you get that wonderful high from the really antioxidant-rich dark chocolate without the processed sugar.
So that's my little go-to, and you're not eating a ton of it, you're just maybe eating two or three squares. Also know the timing is really important, because if you do it late at night it can affect your sleep. So it's actually better even though most chocolate cravings happen later at night, it's better done earlier in the day.
I don't know how much caffeine is in chocolate, but I'm one of those people that if I even eat two squares of dark chocolate, I notice it. It affects my sleep, I don't fall asleep. So you have to watch that. Anything I can do to eat something that doesn't have anything processed in it, like processed sugar, as minimal processed as possible.
How about Vitex Berry? Have you explored or worked with your clients who come to you and say, listen, I want to do everything I can to balance my hormones naturally, to support my body, to balance hormones naturally, instead of getting a hormone replacement, even though it is bioidentical. Do you ever have patients come to you and say get me on some herbs first. Have you seen that Vitex Berry can move the needle?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:57:39.968)
Vitex can be good for women that have low progesterone. It's a claim to fame. The research, as with all supplements, is not super strong, but there are a lot of women out there who will resume ovulation or that will start having more progesterone production. The thing about Vitex is it doesn't contain any hormones. The benefits from the Vitex are actually from what it does to the pituitary gland. So it goes a little bit higher than the ovaries, obviously, and works on that pituitary axis and what it does is the production of the hormone, luteinizing hormone.
Luteinizing hormone is a pituitary gland hormone that indirectly increases the progesterone production. So with Vitex you can get an indirect response. Now I used to use a lot of Vitex until I started working with maca and once I started working with maca, I stopped with Vitex because I felt like the maca worked on much different levels. Vitex is going to work more specifically on progesterone, but the maca helps all the hormones rather than focusing on just one.
Ashley James (0:59:13.456)
Wow. Could you explain a bit more as to what maca does to the body? That helps all the hormones. Is it just because it's high in antioxidants, or is there a certain phytochemical reaction in the body?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:59:29.262)
The problem with maca. There's been quite a bit of research, especially by the company Symphony that does Feminescence. There isn't a definitive reason for it, like we don't know exactly, but it's obviously a natural antioxidant. It does help produce more glutathione and something called superoxide dismutase, which is a strong antioxidant, and we think that this may have something to do with it. I think one of the earlier studies that was done around 2006 showed that it can help modulate the hypothalamic pituitary axis. We don't know the exact mechanism of action, like they haven't been able to tell you. They haven't isolated why it does what it does, which is fascinating because you would think we could but that's what I'm telling you.
If you take, let’s say, black maca versus gold maca, one might be good for men, the other one might be good for a woman with PCOS. You might also have one that's good for menopause. So it's really interesting. Let’s say gold maca works for PCOS, but you take the gold maca and you grow it in another part of Peru, it might do something totally different. So you really have to have an understanding of the plant. Like I said, there's 13 different phenotypes of maca and what's fascinating is, if you talk to some of the indigenous healers and the farmers that farm this stuff, they used to use it years and years ago for, like hundreds of years ago, for women that had issues with their periods, like painful periods, heavy periods. They would eat maca or they would make tea out of it and they would get better. So it is just like anything else in this world, these companies that find things based on talking to the indigenous healers who like, yes, we use that bark of that plant. The interesting thing if you look at it and this is a totally different topic but if you look at a plant like ayahuasca, which is a vine, just sitting there in the forest, how did they know that eating that vine, you didn't just eat it, but you got to boil it for eight hours. If you boil it for eight hours, it'll give you this psychoactive thing. However, if you just took ayahuasca, there's a chemical in your stomach called MAO monoamine oxidized that will break down the ayahuasca in about three seconds. So you get absolutely no effect. However, there's this other vine that grows next to the ayahuasca, that if you boil that with the ayahuasca, there's a chemical in that vine that blocks your monoamine oxidase. So you have this psychoactive experience. How did they know to do that? If you ask the shamans because what I did when I lived, I'm like how the hell did they know to do that? How did you figure this out? And they're like the plants, tell us and so I do think there's this, I don't know, this unseen, unknown language of these plants that they're there for a reason, many of them, most of them and we just haven't figured it out yet. We've been living with plants for thousands and thousands and millions of years. They're there for a reason. It's like why do we have cannabinoid receptors in our body? Why do we respond to marijuana? Marijuana is not an essential element in our diets, but yet we have all these receptors in our body. There's something there and it works for pain. I don't know, but the maca thing is fascinating and I really respect the plant. I just think it's amazing.
Ashley James (1:03:47.953)
I have an interview about ayahuasca, episode 379, with Teresa Vigarino. Super interesting. For listeners who don't know a lot about ayahuasca. Really interesting to listen to Teresa's experience. She went down to Peru, had the experience. She's been back several times and now she takes a tour once a year. She found a really good center because she had some sketchy experiences which led her to find a trustworthy one. But she shares her experiences in great detail in that interview, episode 379.
It is so fascinating that when we look at Indigenous medicine, the medicine that's been here for thousands of years, and, of course, if you look at the world through the lens of the modern medical system, the average MD and I'm not bashing medical doctors, but we have to just take look at the stereotypical, let's say, MD. Look through the world through their lens, and plant medicine is poo-pooed, it's looked down upon, it's primitive, and we brush it aside because it's unscientific and it's primitive. Here we are with our modern, proven, double blind placebo, chemically created, pristine, sterile medicine. Then we're going to come swoop in, prescribe you a pill and save the day, kill everything, kill all the bacteria, sterilize the body and that's the key, that's the trick, and we know now very quickly, we've learned that MD medicine isn't the best, it isn't the entire picture of medicine. It's a slice of the pie and it has its place and it has its strengths and it definitely has its weaknesses, which it doesn't want you to know about.
In the last four years, people have gotten canceled, taken off of YouTube for trying to point out the weaknesses, So they do a lot to try to protect. The AMA is not in your best interests. The FDA, all these big organizations not always out in the best interests of our health and healing.
We just have to look at it a little bit cynically, but look at it through the bigger picture lens. How about we look at the world through the lens of like these shamans, for example, or indigenous healers? How about we look through the lens of a 5,000 year old form of healing, like, we go to Asia and India and we see these types of methods or we go to Peru and what we have been doing as humans for thousands of years, and now, through their lens. So they look to the earth, they listen to the plants, they support the body's ability to come back into balance and now stand on their feet for a minute and look at our world.
How crazy are we to think that we're smarter than plant medicine, that we're smarter than God, that we're smarter than how we've been living for thousands of years, to come in and, within the last hundred years, create chemical, petroleum-based medicine and say that every other form of medicine is quote unquote, alternative and outside of the box. So the quote unquote alternative has actually been here a lot longer, been proven, and even in the modern day world, we can't even figure out why, for example, maca even works but we know it works.
So it's worth stepping out of our own perspective and looking at it through the lens of someone else to see where we've been wrong, to see where we could learn and grow. I invite everyone to step into the shoes of someone who's in the politically opposite spectrum of you and actually genuinely try to learn. Look at your own political views through someone else's eyes. Try to learn what we are missing, what's in our blind spot. What's in the blind spot when you step into the feet of a different healer that doesn't necessarily grow up in the MD medical system, and what we see is we can learn so much from the earth and the plants. And what I love about herbal medicine, it just drives me crazy. It's so cool that when there's poison in nature, that within yards of that poison is the cure. If you believe in God, which I do, that has this amazing, world that has been built for us that the cure is close by. If you don't believe in God, but at least you believe in what you see, you believe in the earth. The earth was set up in such a way, in harmony, and we're supposed to be in harmony with it that the cure is close by to the poison. So it's so cool, it's so cool that with ayahuasca, the earth told them, or the plants told them, like, hey, take this vine, take that vine, boil it for eight hours, have a good time. I just love that it's amazing.
When you were traveling and studying with the indigenous people? What did you see that they do to keep their bodies in balance that we could really learn from?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:09:41.598)
You want the dark truth.
Ashley James (1:09:46.534)
Yes.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:09:47.270)
They die. I mean, I know it sounds dark, but really that's the secret, what they do. The Huichol, who are a group in Guatemala, they are the original peyote shamans, and if you go, if they allow you in, harvesting the peyote buttons off of a cactus, it's just the little circles that grow on top of the cactuses and then they dry them and grind them up and you can do peyote. In order to be a part of that harvesting process, which is very spiritual, they walk through the desert and the cactuses only grow in a certain area.
They will tell you that in order to do this, in order for them to let you in, you have to die, you're like okay, I'm already here. So what's this mean? Basically what it means is you go out into the desert and you dig your own grave. It's really fascinating when you do this, because even when you're dying metaphorically, you still have the same character flaws before you even got there. So I'm like okay, I got to do this, I'm going to do this.
But typical Shawn, when I'm doing stuff like that, or building Ikea or whatever, I'm cutting corners. I didn't make the biggest grave ever. Then at night you have to get in. They cover you with a piece of plywood and they cover the plywood up with dirt. They tell you you can bring in whatever you want, anything. So I'm like cool, I'm going to bring in a book, I got a flashlight, I got all this stuff and I get in there and they put me in.
The first thing I did was turn on my flashlight and I realized immediately that I didn't bring my grave big enough. I'm like, holy cow, this is tiny. So I turned off my flashlight because I was like I can't even look at this, it's too confined. But what happened was, over the night they sang. They sing all night while you're there so you can hear them. It was interesting because I realized all the stuff that I brought into the grave didn't matter, didn't matter. I couldn't use any of it. I'm dead.
What mattered was the songs, because it kept me tethered to the place. It kept me tethered to the land, to the people. What I realized was the singing, at least for me, were all the people that were still alive, that were talking about me, like I remember when dad did this, or yes, he was a great doctor or whatever good friend. That's what meant something to me, not all the stuff, it was the people.
Then in the morning you're born again, you come out of the ground and you're Jesus, you're reborn. So it was quite a profound experience and I think that experience in and of itself was profound enough for me to have really just moved on and gotten whatever I needed out of it. I had a great experience with the curandera in Mexico about depression and there's all spiritist hospitals in Brazil and there's all these different things out there that you can experience, for us to think that we have this one way of doing something is a bit ridiculous and narcissistic, I think, on our part. But the medical system, we can’t bash it but it is there. If you have appendicitis, you need your appendix out, so it's got its place.
Ashley James (1:13:56.451)
It absolutely has a place within our society, but it’s like a parasite. It tries to take over and be everything and cut out and all the other things.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:14:08.116)
You're seeing that right now in psychedelic medicine. So what are they doing there? There's ketamine clinics on every corner because of all of the people that are going to Costa Rica and Brazil and all these places to do ayahuasca. They're not stupid. It's business and they see this as a business. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't start seeing ayahuasca coming out like with a capsule or something but what's going to happen is when you reduce this down to business and you take out of it the spiritual aspect, the guided part of it you can't.
Like you said, this lady had a bad trip. Well, because it's shady. If you go to somebody that can actually take care of you and walk you through this process, it can be profound. If you're just some American 25-year-old that's bored and you just want to experience the high, well, that's the wrong reason to do it, unfortunately. That's why a lot of people do it because they're bored. But some people get it. I had a friend that did mushrooms and for four hours she sat in front of a mirror and her reflection told her how horrible she was. So you need to have a guide, you need to have somebody there that can help you get through that, like I did with the people that were singing.So you don't have that negative side effect but yes, modern medicine will co-op stuff. That's just what we do.
Ashley James (1:15:36.834)
Yes, so it really is up to us as individuals to advocate for ourselves, to seek out information. Well, I'm sure everyone listening is on the same page. If you're listening to us, you're actively seeking information because you realize you cannot blindly just wait to get sick. Go to the doctor, they hand you a pill and then you're all better magically. That's not how the life works, although that's how Hollywood has painted it. So when we know that Hollywood and the media, the TV, is funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the mainstream medical industry. We've been fed this one lens, this one perspective. Yes, if I have a broken arm, I am not going to my naturopath, I am not going to my acupuncturist, I am going to the ER. Right, like I'm going to a medical doctor.
But for complex, chronic imbalance, MD drug-based medicine fails us. It fails us over and over and over again, and that is because the body wants to heal itself, wants to come back into balance, and it's missing. So they're missing nutrients, there's certain lifestyle choices that are negatively impacting it. So there's things that we can do to support the body to come back in balance, and that's where I am wanting us to learn more about that, like what can we do to get our body back into balance? Naturally, yes, there is. What is wonderful is that there is available to us and that you can help your patients with. That is bioidentical hormone as needed. But I'd love us to get to a point where we don't need a prescription, where we're supporting us coming back into balance because the body really wants to. It's constantly trying. So what is holding the body back and why are so many women having hormone issues? Do you ever think about that or like to explore that? Why are we so sick?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:17:43.188)
You mean outside of menopause.
Ashley James (1:17:46.864)
Yes, just why are more and more women experiencing hormone related issues?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:17:53.740)
Well, menopause. I think the reason that we still have such a problem with that is because what happened was, if you look back 300-400 years ago, the average lifespan was like 46 or 44. So we didn't really have a big menopause issue because women didn't live that long. We started living longer, extremely longer, like the 80s and 90s, so much faster, like in 100 years. The lifespan has increased so dramatically that evolution hasn't really had a chance to catch up yet. So we have menopause. Now, maybe 300 years from now, menopause will move from 50 to 60 as the body evolves, if we didn't do anything. So that's one thing.
Perimenopause, women that are younger, like I see the number one hormonal issue I see across the board in every age group is low testosterone.
Low testosterone in menopause is understandable because, again, the ovaries make 50% of the testosterone, so it's going to go down. But in a younger population 18 to 35, why is it low? I can tell you why. Number one is because of birth control pills, and I don't mean to rag on birth control pills. I think they're fine for birth control, but what they do is they raise a protein in your blood called sex hormone binding globulin, which then drives down your testosterone. So younger girls, low testosterone and doctors will joke, well, that's just another reason why they work, because the young girls that are on them don't want sex because their testosterone is so low. When you get into that late 20s, mid 30s to 50, the low testosterone is more than likely from probably obesity, neuroendocrine, disrupting chemicals in the food supply and water, stress, not sleeping, just pretty much a conglomeration of living in the times that we live in now and the country that we live in.
Ashley James (1:20:11.661)
That concept that we didn't really live that long. I think that's only one part of our heritage, though have you considered looking besides white northern Europeans when we look at other cultures, like the blue zones, where we see that other cultures actually live much longer, and to this day, there are certain cultures where women have far less hormone imbalance than we do in the West.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:20:39.813)
I would debate the blue zone thing. The blue zone, at least what I've read. It's an interesting concept but it's never actually been proven. If you look at people like, say in Greece, they eat better diets. I mean, they eat more olive oil, they eat more fish, but they also eat quite a bit of meat. They just don't eat the processed garbage that we eat.
There might be more to the dietary aspects than maybe the age, but I think that what's interesting is, we can get caught up in blue zones or whatever, but it doesn't. I don't think it changes the fact that you could go into, say, a blue zone like Santorini or wherever one of those places, and you can eat exactly the way they do it. It doesn't mean you're going to live longer. You might have a different lifestyle. I think it's a combination of where do they live? Are they walking everywhere they go? Are they eating that food? What genetic makeup do they have? I mean, that a lot of these things are multifaceted, not just one thing, and that's part of the problem in this country. I feel like we try to adapt everybody else's stuff because we don't have our own thing. A friend of mine, she puts on quinceañeras, 15 year old women in Mexican culture have quinceañeras. 15 16-year-old Jewish people have bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. White general white people like my kids. There's no ceremony when you're 15 or 16. You can have a sweet 16, I suppose. So we're looking for something. It's like we don't have any culture. I don't know how else to explain it, but we're always looking outside of ourselves, I guess, to find these answers. The reality is, you start with your family, you can change things in your own group and live the way that you want to. Like I said, you can mimic the Mediterranean diet and you can start instituting those changes and walking more.
If you go to New York City, you don't see a ton of obese people because they walk everywhere. They literally walk everywhere. When I was there, I think my steps were like 20,000 steps and I didn't do anything different than I would normally do. But you just don't drive, you walk. I live 14 miles from my office, so I'm not going to walk to the office, but I mean I would if I could. But yes, I just think it's a combination of things, but I really feel like most of this, for our country anyways, is probably dietary and just that we're not as active as we could be.
Ashley James (1:23:34.649)
Yes, walk more, stop eating processed crap.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:23:38.255)
Well, we know people that eat less live longer. I mean that's pretty simple, not like starving yourself, but people that don't eat as much food live longer. I mean we've known that for a long time. Look at the prolonged fasting thing. Giving your gut that rest and having autophagy and the stem cell production is super helpful and I think you can get that by not starving but cutting back on things for sure.
Ashley James (1:24:08.030)
I have a great fasting interview, episode 230, with Dr. Goldhammer. He talks about that, the autophagy, and just a three to five day water fast once every few months is like turning on the dishwasher at night before you go to bed, but for the body and it's pretty phenomenal. He had one person, a woman, who had cancer riddled through her whole body. Her oncologist sent her home to die. She did a 30 day water only fast at his fasting clinic, medically supervised, and when she walked out of there she was cancer-free and he ended up publishing this as a study or whatever you do when you publish these things and just really interesting that the autophagy for some people is powerful enough to the body, wipes out tumors.
Not for everyone, but for some people. Then there's really interesting studies around fasting before chemotherapy. I am not in any way promoting cut, burn and poison medicine for cancer, but for those who choose the chemotherapy route, because I'm also pragmatic and I believe that whatever tool is best for you, you should go for the best tool for you but understand the pros and cons. You got to clean up the mess after chemotherapy. But what's interesting is that there are studies. This is fascinating. They did this in mice before. They did this in humans, but they studied it, they published it. It's out there. It's probably buried though, but you could find it if you looked hard enough. That fasting before, I think it was a two-day fast, it wasn't that long before every round of chemotherapy, significantly reduced all of the side effects to the point where some people didn't lose their hair, didn't get the nausea, like really interesting. Also it targeted the cancer better. Then there's this type of chemotherapy called metronomic chemotherapy, I don't want to say microdose, but it's a far smaller dose. They attach it to a sugar and then they get the cancer to be super hungry and then the cancer gobbles it up. So it's more targeted. So then they use fasting. It is so interesting how we can use fasting in conjunction with certain medicines. But I'd rather go natural. I'd rather prevent cancer in the first place. That's a big thing. Look around you in terms of what the statistics are. I like saying this on my show because it's real. It's a really quick wake up call. One in three people are obese, have diabetes or prediabetes, have heart disease, and get cancer is one third of each population are having this or about to have this problem.
Then look at what the average person is doing. What are they doing? What are they eating, What are they consuming? Do the opposite. Walk, try walking instead of driving everywhere. Eat whole foods instead of eating packaged foods. Go to bed early instead of staying up late and Netflix. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and see if you start feeling better, because it is the accumulation of what we eat and what we do that has led us down this road of disease.
Now you brought up obesity. Can you talk about and shine a light on the GLP-1 pros and cons? There's medications out there, but I also hear that there's certain things we can eat naturally to support GLP-1. What is GLP-1? Why are people in an uproar about it, and I'd love for you to go into teaching us a bit about this.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:27:53.465)
About which aspects in particular?
Ashley James (1:27:58.202)
Well, for example, for people who don't even know what GLP-1 is.But there's GLP-1 medications and then there's some natural things to raise GLP-1. There's people saying it's great. There's people saying it's horrible that we lose muscle mass.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:28:12.809)
Keep in mind the GLP-1s are naturally occurring peptides. They've been around for a long, long time, probably forever. They just were discovered.
The issue in GLP-1 is a glucagon-like peptide that is made usually in the small intestine and the cells of the small intestine usually in the small intestine and the cells of the small intestine, and, whether or not you believe that there's a lot of companies out there that are now capitalizing on it. So if you see a supplement that says GLP-1, like blah, blah, blah, to me that's just marketing and I find it somewhat atrocious because they're trying to sell a product.
The GLP-1s, though they've been used in diabetes for decades and what they noticed was that people that were using these were basically losing weight. The only reason that it recently took off was because of Kim Kardashian. I mean, she started using them, and my guess is that the celebrities have been using these for years, and just didn't talk about it but it caught on because of the attention that it got. What's interesting is, like I said, Semaglutide and Terzepatide, Ozempic and Manjaro, they are naturally occurring compounds. You can find them in nature, you can buy them. You could buy Semaglutide on your own. You don't need a prescription for it because it's a peptide. The problem is, what happened was so when, when you hear all these controversies, like remember a while back, the diabetics can't get it. All these people are using it for their weight loss and the diabetics can't get it. How horrible.
Well, the reason that the companies ran out wasn't because they ran out of semaglutide, they ran out of the pen. So when you patent something, you cannot patent a naturally occurring compound. So you can't patent estradiol , it's not patentable. But you can patent the way that it's delivered. You could use gel or a mist or whatever, but the actual medicine that's in there isn't what's patented. So semaglutide isn't a patentable medicine. What was patented was they come with a pen that has a button. You push the button and it gives you the device. Well, because of COVID, they ran out of the plastic and they ran out of the devices, but the product was still there, and so there's plenty of this product around.
What's the other one? The rates of thyroid and pancreatic cancer. Well one, pancreatic cancer was never an issue. But number two, the thyroid cancer that was shown in the study, was in rats. It's never been reproduced in humans, so that was another fear thing.
Then, lastly, the muscle loss. Anybody that loses 50 pounds, let's say they did Atkins low fat whatever they did, and they lost 40 pounds. On average, about 12 pounds of that would have been muscle wasting, 14 pounds maybe with Ozempic. So it's the same. It's because of weight loss, because most people when they lose weight they're in a caloric deficit. There's no way to really lose that much weight and not have some of it be from muscle density. There's just no way. I mean, you could inject yourself with testosterone and do some heavy lifting and do lots of protein, but in order for you to go into enough of a caloric deficit to lose and we're not talking about people that are losing 10 pounds, we're talking about people that are losing more weight.
The problem is that this got pushed to the forefront. This is again my theory, but you have a lot of people out there that make a lot of money on weight loss programs, coaches, nurses, doctors, whatever and if they weren't on board with prescribing those meds, or they couldn't prescribe those meds, they were losing a lot of business. So to come out and start trashing this medication that I believe has really helped a lot of people, and I think, if used correctly, obesity might be a thing of the past. I think chastising folks saying it's a crutch, the way I look at it is it's a tool, it's another tool. There's lots of tools out there which may work for somebody, may not work for somebody else.
But I don't think we should be judging people, like Oprah, she used Ozempic but she didn't talk about it for like a year and a half. Why, why? I don't understand why. Why is it so bad? The fact that you people should just be happy you lost weight, you're healthier, you're down 40 pounds, it should be a happy thing, not critical saying oh you cheater, why did you do that? That part I don't understand.
Ashley James (1:33:23.028)
Yes, it scares me though, the amount of muscle loss, I guess with any weight loss. You're saying that the muscle loss with other diets is similar to Ozempic?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:33:35.858)
If it was just somebody doing something at home, if you're just like I'm going to do Atkins, you're going to lose muscle mass. It's going to happen, and it's going to be about 30%, or probably 20 to 30%. The thing is, if you hired like a trainer, health coach, somebody that could help you with your food and then with your weight, and you were on testosterone yes, you wouldn't lose maybe half of that, but if it was just like a run-of-the-mill person that just did a diet, you're going to lose muscle density. It happens with all weight loss programs.
Ashley James (1:34:17.339)
With women who are wanting to lose weight and build muscle. Would you ever prescribe testosterone for them during that period even if their testosterone is normal, would you help them by increasing their testosterone temporarily while they're working out, so that they could prevent muscle loss, or would that be too detrimental?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:34:41.270)
It depends on how high. Most women that I test are low. A free testosterone, the range might be 0.2 to 6.4. That's a 32 fold range. So let's say you come back at 0.4 and then you get put on testosterone and you're up to two and a half. You're still in the lower half of normal. I could almost triple your testosterone and it would still be normal.
So there's a lot of play there with testosterone and as long as the levels aren't too high for too long, you won't usually get the negative side effects. If it's too high or too high for too long, you could have voice changes, hair growth, you can actually have the clitoris enlarged. Some of those things are permanent, they don't go away. So it really varies. I wouldn't want to make somebody super physiologic for an extended period of time, but helping them with muscle loss is fine, but most women that I treat don't go and get a DEXA scan before and after to know how much. They're just looking at how their clothes fit.
Ashley James (1:35:57.407)
Right, but the older we get our muscle, the amount of muscle we have really plays a role in our long-term health and in our longevity. I was told this many years ago by a functional MD. She was actually in the Olympics twice. Amazing woman. She's in her 80s now and still regularly runs marathons in the desert. This woman is super healthy and she says you must protect your muscles and she told this to me in my 30s. She goes, build your muscle now, protect it, because when you're in your 80s it could be, for example, just one bout of pneumonia. The amount of muscle you have in your body is the difference between whether you live or die, and your strength is so important when you get into your 80s if you're to prevent a fall. It's a difference between whether you're going to be cycling and walking or whether you're going to be in a walker or worse, bedridden, and so that's just the idea that we would lose so much muscle with a drug but, like you said, it could also be with other extreme diets where there's a great calorie deficit and of course, we want to help people gain balance and lose weight healthfully.
That's interesting though you're saying that in certain circumstances like taking the GLP-1 protocol, getting to a healthier weight and while also doing everything you can to protect your muscle doesn't have long-term negative side effects, because we've seen people have been using it for years.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:37:37.140)
Well, I mean, we have data on diabetics. The problem is, diabetics have other health concerns. So are we going to know because of the millions and millions of people that are now using this stuff? I saw another podcast where this person's a micro dosing now there and people just make stuff up and so I don't know if people are getting the doses or if they're getting legitimate product, because there's generics out there now and there's compounding pharmacies, and so it's one of those things, where it's hard to tell, because, people are using all kinds of stuff now. Should they be on it for years and years? Probably not. My goal is to just get their weight down and then wean them off the medication, but you also have to look at it like what if they were pre-diabetic? Or what if they had high cholesterol, high blood pressure? You now have a system where they've lost 35 pounds and their cholesterol is better, they're off all their blood pressure meds. I mean, yes, they lost a little bit of muscle density, but maybe they're going to live longer because their heart is healthier.
Ashley James (1:39:01.076)
Yes, there's other metrics that you're looking at. Have you seen anything natural? I know, of course, we're going to question everything and be suspicious of natural products in the market that make health claims, but I've seen interesting information around allulose that it increases GLP-1. Have you seen anything natural or something healthy for the gut that increases GLP-1 in the body that you would say is worth looking into?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:39:32.752)
I have not. No, but like I said, this area is so new. Allulose has some activation constructs in the neurons in your brain and those neurons respond to GLP-1s. So what it's thought is that allulose can potentiate the ability of GLP-1 to activate neurons in the brain. But that would be the only thing I could think of there that it wouldn't help you lose weight, but it might help brain function, and that's the other thing too. With more weight comes more inflammation, more inflammation, Alzheimer's, all kinds of stuff. So I think there's a lot of potential issues with GLP-1s. I mean, we may find that certain probiotics can help GLP-1 production. I just think we're so early on in the process. I do feel like what they're finding with these GLP-1s too, is there's people that are quitting gambling, drinking. There's a lot of weirdness around addictive behaviors because that's what I've noticed with GLP-1s, it curbs your appetite a little bit, but it also gives you the ability to think differently about food. You're not feeling the need to like to eat everything in sight. But you also can say okay, I'm standing at the fridge, it's 10 o'clock at night, I want ice cream. Are you hungry? No, I just want it. Okay sorry about that. Can you do two tablespoons, or do you need to eat the whole container? I think I can do two tablespoons. Before I even had that discussion, now it gives me the ability to think it through, and then by the time I've done that, I don't want it anymore, anyway, I kind of talk myself out of it.
I can't tell you how many women that I see, who during COVID and whatnot, would have two, three glasses of wine a night, and basically, that's probably 600 calories. Not to mention the alcohol is not good for you, but they stopped drinking because they just weren't even thinking about it anymore, and so it's one of those things where, I think it's going to make a lot of big differences in different ways if we could just get past the negativity on it.
Ashle James (1:42:27.564)
And if and if we can also create a system that protects the muscle loss as much as possible.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:42:37.216)
There’s going to be other peptides out there and they are not regulated so we can't know for sure if you're getting a good product and then the government comes in and shuts them down. Don't think for a minute, though. There isn't a company that's already looking at that. I guarantee you somebody's going to come out with something that can spare the muscle density, or they'll combine it with testosterone or something like that. If the women that I have on GOPs I usually also have on testosterone.
Ashley James (1:43:14.345)
Like you said, some nutritionist, health coach, guiding them with a healthy diet and going to the gym doing weights, because the only way to build muscle is to stress the muscle. So you got to get the weights in. Even if you start with bands, do it in a way that you're not going to injure yourself. The most common thing is people injure themselves within a month of joining a gym because they're using the weights too much, too long, too hard. Whatever they're doing, they're not doing it correctly. That's why it really is worth it to start slow build up. I just talked to a doctor yesterday about this. He says it takes six months before your tendons and ligaments get strong enough, because every time you go to the gym, you're there, you're strengthening them as well, and it just takes longer for the body, especially the older we get to adapt to our new fitness level. So it's best to get some fitness in every day, even if it's 20 minutes, just some fitness in every day, because we atrophy, and that is the scary thing is, our culture is conducive to atrophy. We just video gaming, netflix, binging, driving, everywhere, we atrophy. If you're not using it, you're losing it. So get in the gym or go for a walk, just do gentle daily and and progressively, slowly build the difficulty up.
I am one of those people that goes in guns blazing, doing the hardest exercise and then injures myself then I'm out for six weeks. I could have just been doing simple little stuff for the six weeks I was out because I was recovering from the injury. So don't go in guns blazing, it's that marathon idea, not the sprint. Every day, get some movement, slowly increase the weights and then, after you're used to it, do the stronger stuff. You're building muscle. Strength is using the muscle. So we got to use it.
You have a book, and this book looks fascinating, The Hormone Balance Bible. Tell us about it.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:45:30.448)
Basically, it's a culmination of all of the things that I was talking about with my mom and all that stuff and the culmination at the time also I was reading a lot of Caroline Mace and Carl Jung and Sally Hogshead and they use a lot of archetypes. So to tell stories.
Basically when you write a book, you have to show the problem and then you have to fix the problem. Well, I found that if I talk to women about low testosterone, they would get it to a certain degree. But then if I started telling stories because I'd sat with 40,000 women and I listen and I love stories, and so what I noticed was similar threads, and so what I did was I came up with these 12 most common hormone imbalances and I put them into archetypes. So low testosterone would be the nun, high estrogen would be the queen, low thyroid is the underdog, and the book talks about these imbalances in a way that makes it easier to understand.
So, like I would notice that a lot of women, when I would tell them these stories, would just start nodding yes, that's me or crying because oh my god, you're the first person that's ever put it into words me and it was funny because it wasn't me, it was just all these other women I had listened to. Then I came up with the shines protocol, which I briefly described earlier, which is a spiritual practice, hormones, infoceuticals, which is the woo factor, nutrition, exercise and supplements. So each of those 12 imbalances has its own shines protocol and put it into a book talked about, obviously, lab testing as well, what each hormone does and why, and it ended up being I don't know 500 pages, but it's a lot of information, it's a reference and, yes, it's a culmination of all these years where I was learning all this new stuff.
Ashley James (1:47:41.964)
That is so cool. I love that you gave each persona life so that we could identify and go wow, like I get it, that makes sense.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:47:53.970)
Well, I think that's how I connected people to it. They just got it. It was like light bulbs.
Ashley James (1:48:00.506)
Where can we go to buy your book, The Hormone Balance Bible?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:48:04.582)
It's on Amazon right now. It came out a couple of years ago with HarperCollins. It's on Amazon. I think it's $15 or $16 right now. You can also find me on Instagram. I post there sometimes twice a day, usually a topic of the day. I also have a great YouTube channel where I do YouTube live every day, talk about different hormones and balances.
What I found fascinating was I had no idea, but the demographic of women. The majority that are on TikTok are over 65. Fascinating for me, for my group, I did a post two months ago about a study that had come out that showed women that are over the age of 65 that were on estradiol had lower rates of lung, colon and breast cancer, they had less dementia and they had less morbidity by 19%. This was a study of 10 million women. I mean it went like I've never had something go viral in my life and that one had like almost 300,000 views and it’s just crazy, and it just showed me the power of the internet. There's so many people out there looking, and women especially, because they're getting gaslighted all the time. Oh, you're too young, oh, you're too old. Testing is stupid. So many things that you're told and all women want is help and an answer. They just want to get back to their lives.
Ashley James (1:49:37.360)
So do you teach through your instagram lives ? Do you teach women how to stop getting gaslit by their gynecologists, by their medical doctors?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:49:50.502)
I'm starting to get a little bit more into that aspect of it, because I have this thing that I hate called lazy medicine, which is where doctors will just say stuff to get you out of their office, oh, I don't do lab testing, hormones fluctuate all the time. Well, that's a fancy way of saying just I don't want to deal with it and get out because they just don't want to look at the labs and whatnot, and that's fine, that's their choice. Usually right now it's just being persistent, and I've had women ask me all the time how do I get a doctor to do this? You don't. You don't get a doctor to do anything.
If they're not going to do it, then you have to find someone else, and that's not your job. Your job is not to change their mind. Your job is to get what you want, and there are people out there like me that order stuff all the time and that do hormones and that are educated. It's just a matter of finding that person, which can be difficult. But the beautiful thing now is, since covid, we can get licensed in multiple states so that we can do telemedicine. So I'm licensed in like 27 states so I can see women across the country.
Ashley James (1:51:07.123)
Interesting. You have two websites. One of them is for people to book appointments and then the other is for just some great, more great information. You want to tell us about your websites.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:51:19.929)
So my website, Dr. Shawn Tassone, D-r-S-h-a-w-n-T-a-s-s-o-n-e is basically if you want to make an appointment, it just gives generalized information. tassonemd.com is my fun website that's got the book, it's got the quiz on there. If you don't want to get your labs tested and it's midnight and you're bored, tassonemd.com/quiz. Obviously I'm going to ask for your email, but you'll get an answer. You'll get one of those 12 archetypes and at least it gives you an idea of where to start. Nothing is obviously as good as labs, but I can't tell you how many times I've had women tell me how accurate they felt the test was. So I'm proud of it. I think it's a great quiz and something that can certainly open your eyes to certain things for sure.
Ashley James (1:52:20.747)
Is there ever a chance they get the, “You're perfect, there's nothing wrong with you” as an answer.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:52:27.755)
Not unless you answered every question, that you didn't have a problem. But I guess then you wouldn't be taking the quiz in the first place.
Ashley James (1:52:34.161)
Right, yes, “You're great! Go home!” You have a podcast, Confessions of a Male Gynecologist. I just love the title. How did you come up with that?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:52:45.909)
I don't know. I guess you always try to think of things that are a little bit off or edgy. I also am acutely aware, because I'm reminded daily of the fact that I'm a man in a woman's world and 75% of OBGYNs now, I think, are females, so we're a dying breed and, you get people all the time no uterus, no choice, no opinion, blah, blah, blah. I get it, I know where it comes from and I understand it. But to negate all the 50,000 women that I've sat with, because I have learned from that and not to mention the training and all that. But I think I was looking for something to be a little cheeky and allude to the fact that I am a guy and maybe I know some things you don't.
Ashley James (1:53:46.091)
To be a good male gynecologist, you have to actually work harder because you don't have a uterus. You don't have a female cycle, you haven't experienced it. So you do have to in some ways to be a good one. You have to work harder as a man to be a good gynecologist. Also, I think you do have an interesting perspective because you haven't lived in it, so that you really have to listen and be present, I mean, to be a good one, which sounds like you're a good one. So I wouldn't throw away all the male gynecologists.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:54:26.709)
No, I'll tell you what. There's a lot of something I don't do that I couldn't do that I've seen women do. I've seen women say stuff like oh, she says she has a bad period. I have a bad period. She thinks she has a bad period. You tell me your period hurts. I'm like, okay, I get it. I can't compare it and I wouldn't because I can't, but I think it can go both ways too. If the female thinks you're a complainer, I don't think that because I don't have anything to compare it to. Also, the flip side of that is that proverbial end of one just because you know your uterus…
Ashley James (1:55:06.731)
it doesn't mean you know other ones.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:55:08.462)
Yes, so it's the same argument. Well, you're not her, so you don't have a choice, and it's an interesting concept, for the most part I don't have to be a woman to understand that perimenopause and menopause sucks and that you're having issues with sleep. Sure, I can do it, but yes, I get it, I understand it.
Ashley James (1:55:29.956)
Well, I'm intrigued and I know my listeners will be as well to check out your podcast Confessions of a Male Gynecologist. It does sound intriguing and you're edgy, so that's fun. You could be like the male gynecologist Joe Rogan, Yes, I think you could do it. You sit there with a cigar.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:55:55.319)
I would actually do that. I would do that.
Ashley James (1:56:01.055)
You should get on this show. You've got the edge.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:03.892)
Well, we're in Austin, but I don't think I'm on Joe's radar.
Ashley James (1:56:07.768)
Not yet. With a podcast like that Confessions of a Male Gynecologist I think you could do it.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:16.710)
We shall see, I'll do it.
Ashley James (1:56:19.516)
Yes, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything you wanted to make sure that you said to wrap up today's interview?
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:29.328)
The main thing is don't give up. I say it all the time. It's frustrating. I get it. Sometimes you got to see four or five doctors.
There was an article that just came out in the UK a couple weeks ago that said women in the UK have to have 10 visits at a physician's office before they get diagnosed with menopause. Totally ridiculous. But it is what it is, if you give up, then you're not helping to pave the way for the women that come behind you. The more that you speak up, the more that you say no, the more that you make demands.
You're doing that not just for you, but that doctor is going to learn eventually, because if they've got five women in there in a day or 10 in a week that are coming in demanding these things, they're going to start looking into it and why? So you can. It's an educational thing on your part too, and think of it also as being there for the women that come behind you.
Ashley James (1:57:30.740)
Be willing to fire your doctor and go find one that will treat you the way you want to be treated and also look into the things you want them to look into. So don't don't try to force the doctor to do something they're not willing to do because they wouldn't even be good at it anyway.
What are they going to do with labs if they're not even willing to run them? They're going to take one, look at them and be like, okay, what are they going to do there? That's not their wheelhouse, go find it. I love saying you don't take your car to the plumber, you don't take your car to the electrician, we do this all the time, we go to the wrong specialist or to the wrong doctor. So it's okay, go to different doctors, get different opinions, get a second opinion, get a third opinion. Find the right team that's willing to listen to you and work with you and, yes, advocate for yourself. If they're not receptive, walk out of that office there. Don't put them on a pedestal. You're employing them, not the other way around. So you're allowed to fire the doctor and go find one that listens to you and you can say that Dr. Shawn Tassone said so.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:58:44.297)
I don't want to be as dramatic as firing them, but just go somewhere else. How's that?
Ashley James (1:58:50.773)
Okay, then they won't learn if you don't fire them, they'll never learn. They need to know that they've been fired by a handful of women until they start waking up.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:59:00.309)
Yes, that's true, it works.
Ashley James (1:59:02.785)
Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such a pleasure and all the links to everything that Dr. Shawn Tassone does, is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Truly a pleasure to dive into this topic with you and if anything groundbreaking comes about, I'd love to have you back on the show to continue teaching us.
Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:59:23.992)
Sure. Sounds great.
Outro:
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