In a recent interview with A Major Difference — the team behind the IonCleanse foot bath system — Dr. Miriam Rahav, M.D. sits down for a wide-ranging, unhurried conversation about what it really means to support the body’s ability to heal. She brings her full self to it: the clinician, the philosopher, the person who has sat with patients through the hardest moments of their lives and come away with a very clear sense of what actually matters.

Who Is Dr. Miriam Rahav?

Dr. Rahav is not your average physician.

Triple board-certified in internal medicine, hospice and palliative medicine, and functional medicine, she is the founder of Rahav Wellness | The Center for Collaborative Healing. Her path to medicine didn’t follow the usual script — she started with a degree in education and comparative literature from Brown University, spent time teaching abroad in Japan and Thailand, and then found herself immersed in traditional healing communities in Northern Thailand, where working alongside people living with HIV/AIDS became the catalyst that drew her toward medicine.

A Fulbright scholar, she trained at Columbia University, Ben Gurion University’s Medical School for International Health, Montefiore Medical Center, and NYU. Today, her practice brings together conventional and functional medicine, the Metabolic Approach to Cancer, acupuncture, autonomic response testing (ART), and neural therapy — all in service of what she describes as building collaborative, accessible models of whole-person care.

What the Conversation Is Really About

At its heart, this interview is about one question: What does it mean to care for a whole person?

Dr. Rahav’s answer is expansive and deeply thoughtful. She talks about safety — not just physical safety, but the safety of being truly heard, understood, and seen. She reflects on how much of our health traces back to whether we were cherished as children, whether we learned to express ourselves, whether our nervous systems were ever really allowed to rest. She describes each human being as a complex universe, and her medicine as an attempt to honor that complexity rather than reduce it to symptoms.

The conversation then turns to where the IonCleanse fits into that vision — and her answer is disarmingly simple: everyone. When asked which patients benefit most from the IonCleanse, her response was immediate: “The ones who say yes.” She wasn’t being glib. She genuinely means it. In her view, if you are alive in today’s world, you are dealing with an overstimulated nervous system, a body under toxic load, and a need for quiet — for something that lets you sit still, breathe, and let your body do what it does best when you give it a chance.

As she puts it, we could all use some parasympathetic tone. We could all use some detox. We could all use a little time with our feet in warm water.

Why This Video Is Worth Your Time

This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a window into how a brilliant, experienced, deeply humane physician thinks about healing.

Dr. Rahav speaks with the kind of clarity that only comes from years of holding space for patients at the edges of health and illness — including people facing terminal diagnoses. She has seen what matters. She knows what actually moves the needle. And she is remarkably generous in sharing it.

Whether you are a patient curious about integrative approaches to wellness, a practitioner thinking about expanding what you offer, or simply someone who wants to understand their own body better, this conversation has something real for you.

You’ll come away with a richer understanding of:

• Why detoxification isn’t a wellness trend but a physiological necessity in the modern world
• What “whole-person care” actually looks like in practice — not as a slogan, but as a clinical philosophy
• How the body’s parasympathetic nervous system is connected to your ability to heal
• What makes the IonCleanse a meaningful tool in an integrative practice, in Dr. Rahav’s own words

Watch the Full Interview

Dr. Miriam Rahav, M.D. is the founder of Rahav Wellness | The Center for Collaborative Healing. Her practice integrates conventional medicine, functional medicine, acupuncture, neural therapy, and autonomic response testing (ART) in a collaborative, whole-person model of care.

The post A Conversation Worth Sitting With: Dr. Miriam Rahav on Detox, Whole-Person Care, and the IonCleanse appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:11.160]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

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Shalom. Thank you for joining me right now, because right now is the perfect time. The time you choose is always the perfect time to step onto and walk further on the divine path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention, or as we say in Hebrew, with kavana, and with an awareness of what one is doing. In other words, with consciousness. You were made on purpose. Your life path, I might suggest, and not only myself, is to connect with your purpose, and that purpose is your shalom. Let me explain what I mean. You may know that the Hebrew word Shalom is understood around the world to mean peace. However, Hebrew words go beyond their spoken pronunciation and convey a feeling, intent, and emotion. Shalom is more than just simply peace. It is a complete peace. It is completeness, wholeness, health, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony. Shalom comes from the root verb Shalom, shin lamed, mem, meaning to be complete, perfect, and full. The sages went to great lengths in their praise of peace, to the point of viewing it as a meta value, the summit of all other values. The blessing of the high priest, the cohanim in Jewish tradition, goes like this.

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May Hashem bless you and keep you. May Hashem make their face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May Hashem lift up their face upon you and give you Shalom. Peace was the utmost purpose of the Torah. All that is written in the Torah was written for the sake of peace. Say the sages. It is the essence of the prophetic tidings the prophets have planted in the mouth of all people, not so much as peace and of redemption. God announced to Jerusalem that they will be redeemed only through peace. Shalom is the name of the Holy One, the name of Israel, and the name of the Messiah. And so we bid you peace with the fullness of the meaning in our hearts and the fullness of our intention that this is the master plan for all of us on the pathway. And there is room for everyone on this pathway to find, connect with our purpose, with our own divinity, and with our Shalom, with the full depth and breadth of the meaning of that word. Today, I would like to share with you the journey that I made to San Diego for the conference on Human Consciousness and Evolution.

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It was an incredible meeting of thought leaders who are bringing together science and spirituality. The Science of Spirituality and the Spirituality of Science. We had Bruce Lipton discussing the biology of belief. We have Greg Braden discussing the building blocks of the DNA and how that connects to the message that is imprinted upon on our DNA by our creator. We also had the incredible Anita Morjani, who was dying of end-stage lymphoma, slipped into a coma for 30 hours, and came back to tell us what she learned as she went through what some might call a spontaneous healing or a divine intervention. Here are some words from Greg Braden from his book. Let me find this here. I want to I’m going to read a little bit from Greg Braden’s book, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits. In this book, Greg Braden talks about, The book is less about learning to rewrite the code of reality and more about accepting that we already have the power to do so. Something that has been explored by many mystics in the past, including the ancient Sufi poet Jalal Ad-Dine A-Rumi.

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What strange beings we are, says Rumi, that sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we’re afraid of our own immortality. With these words, the great mystic describes the irony of our mysterious condition in this world. On the one hand, we’re told that we are frail and powerless beings who live in a world where things just quote, happen for no apparent reason. On the other hand, our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions tell us that there is a force that lives within every one of us, a power that nothing in the world can touch. With it comes the promise of surviving the darkest moments of life and the reassurance that difficult times are only a part of a journey that leads to a place where bad things can’t happen any longer. It’s no wonder that we feel confused, helpless, and sometimes even angry as we witness the suffering of our loved ones and share the agony of what sometimes seems like hell in the world around us. So which is it? Are we hopelessly fragile victims of events that are beyond our control? Or are we powerful creatures harboring dormant abilities that we are only beginning to understand?

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The answer may reveal the truth of one of the deepest mysteries of our past. It is also the focus of some of the greatest controversy in scientific discussions today. The reason? Because both questions have the same answer. Yes. Yes, we are occasionally victims of circumstance, and yes, we are sometimes the powerful creators of those same circumstances. Which of these roles we experience is determined by choices that we make in our lives, choices based upon our beliefs. Through the Godlike power of human belief, we are given the equally divine ability to bring what we believe to life in the matrix of energy that bathes and surrounds us. This was such an incredible message that Greg Braden has to share. It was also very much echoed through his own research and experience by Bruce Lipton. Then came the incredible practical, personal, poignant, and heartfelt testimony that Anita Morjani gave. I wanted to share it with you because it’s a way to really connect the science to a human narrative. That is that Anita Morjani tells the story of her life growing up within a certain culture where there were expectations of her that she felt she meet.

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As it so happens, the expectations were around her role in a very traditionally oriented Indian culture, a third culture, meaning an Indian culture held fast in Hong Kong so that she felt even more beholden to maintain a culture within her community. She herself was not good at housework and had of a career and of being able to travel around the world. Because that was a value system outside of her culture, she was made to feel less valuable and less important. That download, that program of her being less than and afraid to express herself. She tells the story, of course, much more poignantly and also available in her book called Dying to be me, which I highly, highly recommend. But the point is that she got sick, she got lymphoma, and she was dying of cancer. She entered a hospital in Hong Kong. She was down to 84 pounds, and she slipped into a coma and essentially went into the beyond, or as it’s called, a near-death experience. Experience. She describes the peace, the shalom, the bliss, the tranquility, the wholeness, the joy of passing into the beyond and experiencing the love and describing that the word love and unconditional love is redundant because the essence of love is unconditional, which I love to hear.

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Her being the actual vector, the vehicle of this experience, just felt so No different than reading about it to just be in her presence. She holds the truth of this within her, within her resonance, and within her voice. What she discovered is that all of those things, all of those beliefs that she was holding in the horizontal plane, the living plane, the Earth plane. Those were all not the truth. The truth was that she was loved and she was valuable. Her voice had meaning and precisely the being who may have contributed to her feeling less than, which in her case was her father. She had a challenging relationship with him on the Earth plane, and he had passed 10 years prior to her near-death experience or NDE. He was there on the other side helping her and actually encouraging her, because it was before her time, that she might go back. She said all of the knowing that she experienced on the other side was a direct knowing. It was spoken directly into what we might call not the physical heart, but the knowingness that she experienced. I do highly recommend that you look at her testimony and read her book or maybe seek out a chance to meet her as she speaks all around the country and the world to bring this wisdom.

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What happened was she was encouraged to go back and to teach about what she learned on the other side, and her father exhorted her to live fearlessly. She arrived back, she made that choice. That choice was also linked to the love of her life, Danny, her husband. There’s a beautiful story there, maybe too long and broad for the scope of this conversation. But she chose so incredibly selflessly and lovingly to return, to speak of the truth, and to live her life fearlessly, and to live a life of fullness and peace and harmony and share the message of love. The moment she came to after 30 hours of being in a coma, her body was still weak. She did not have the strength to lift her head at all. She still weighed, you know, 80 counts or so. However, she knew she was healed. There was no more fear. There was only love. It took her five weeks to be discharged from the hospital, and she was labeled a medical miracle, a spontaneous healing, a divine intervention. Doctors looked over her charts. Within several weeks, all of her tumors melted away that were Her neck and her chest were riddled with them.

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She was able to go out into the world. It took her body time to catch up, but she already knew. The life that she led was one with a complete It was a slightly different belief. She really shared with us that if we are able to anchor her message, and she took us on a deep meditation, that we might not need to go so far to the edge to come back to know what she knows because she knows it for us, and so do other thought leaders. There was Bruce Lipton and Greg Braden teaching us the science of it. She was teaching us her own testimony. It was such a beautiful merging of the science and the experience. I was listening to all of it, and I was thinking about all of you, my brothers and sisters, as you I lead a professional life as a physician, where, of course, I am witnessed to so much, hold so much, hope for so much on behalf of all of you. Anita Mouarjane’s testimony moved me so, because in my heart, I hold this belief that we all can heal and we all can come to our completeness.

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Then I thought of a story. You may have heard of it written by L Frank Baum, is called The Wizard of Oz. In The Wizard of Oz, you have Dorothy. She’s been through traumas, and she also has tremendous love in her heart. Trauma is about potentially being separated from Toto or being told that Toto is a bad dog and needs to be taken away, and about her own truth of love, love for her pet, love for her family, and then a cataclysmic event. Then she is on the other side on a journey, on the yellow brick road, and her desire is to go home, to come home. I believe we are all walking each other home, as one dear member of our community said. She’s given the gift, the gift of those ruby red sparkling slippers that by heading out on this journey, she unwittingly was in part of the cataclysm of her arrival, was meant to hold this power within her. It becomes part of her, these ruby red slippers. Might I suggest they could be a metaphor? Some say that the ruby red, as one teacher told me, is the color of the divine.

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Also, it came to me as Greg Braden was speaking about what is printed, imprinted on our DNA, which he worked on for so many years, over 20 years, putting together the base pairs, the elements, the carbon, the nitro the oxygen and the hydrogen, and correlating those to the periodic table, to the numbers, and that to the numerology and the ancient letters, and put it all together and found that DNA actually read the same message over and over and over and over. God eternal in the body, God eternal in the body, God eternal in the body, God eternal in the body, God eternal in the body, and so doing and so teaching merged science and spirituality in our essence, in our DNA. That was the power. That was the power that Dorothy held, that she didn’t know that she held, that we hold, that we don’t know that we hold, but we can. We can know it. It was the power that Anita Morjani unlocked in her experience, and it’s allowed her to transcend illness and transcend conflict and show up selflessly for humanity. Community. And so Dorothy heads out on the yellow brick road, holding a power that she doesn’t know that she has.

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Along the way, she meets beings like the scarecrow, and the scarecrow has downloaded a program. The program is that he is less than because he doesn’t have a brain. She says she’s on a journey to find the gift, her ability to return home. She’s going to see the great Wizard and he not want to join? He says, Yes, because maybe the Wizard can give me a brain. They walk on the yellow brick road, and of course, then they meet the lion. The lion has downloaded a program that he doesn’t have courage. They’re going to see the great odds, and would he not want to join because he might find the courage the way the scarecrow might find a brain, and Dorothy might find her ability to get home. In so doing, they extend hope to each other and strength to each other and encouragement to each other. They walk on, and of course, they encounter the tin man. By the way, there are threats along the way. The witch shows up, flying monkeys, and the tin man, they discover, has downloaded a program that he is less than because he doesn’t have a heart. He, too, is invited through their friendship, through their selfless service, through their willingness to help others, to join them on the journey because maybe the Wizard will give him his heart.

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And so they, all feeling incomplete, join in the joining and in the selfless giving, they, without realizing it, accomplish what they thought they could not. It only takes when they finally arrive through the gates of Oz and to what was the illusion of a power outside of themselves. They learn through the great Oz who is just like them, that they have the power within, that they can that they already demonstrated courage and smarts and wisdom and love, and that Dorothy within herself had the power to get home. It’s a parable in so many ways, and we can go on about it, about the biology of belief. By realizing that they had the power within them all along, Dorothy is also able to take that quantum leap through connecting her body and her divine wisdom, her proving that the power indwelled her. She was able to actuate her going home. Metaphorical for where we’re all going, right? I wanted to share this conference with you. It’s not a specific health topic. It’s all health topics. It is this key that we may unlock about why we can both simultaneously be victims of circumstance and also powerful creators of those same circumstances.

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By understanding our role within those circumstances, our consciousness, our purpose, we can also find the lesson, find the gift, find our own power. I really invite you to dive deeper into the work of these incredible speakers, thought leaders, luminaries, and beings, as I hope it brings you as much inspiration and soul healing as it did to me. I wish you all my heartfelt prayers for your Shalom. Until next time.

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Thanks for listening to the healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 14: Lipton, Braden, Moorjani and The Yellow Brick Road appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:11.150]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation.

[00:00:57.070]
Enjoy the show.  Thank you so much for joining me today, where we embark or continue on a trajectory of healing on purpose in relationship with our body. Recently, in my own meditation, I’ve been thinking about how honest of an instrument the body is. It will tell you the truth. There are so many ways that we can anchor the truth, but being embodied is one of them. And understanding that our body is made by a divine creator. Its complexity is such that nothing but a divine force, in my own humble opinion, could be responsible for the infinitude of the creation of who we are. With that understanding, every day, we embark on a potential journey to come into relationship with ourselves, and therefore with the divine, and learn the truth, because the body is always telling us the truth. Now, one of the traps I’ve found in the medical training that I received is that it was telling the truth. Sometimes, however, perhaps too narrow of a scope, we can learn so much from a blood count and a comprehensive metabolic panel, and perhaps a lipid A blood study and blood sugar and a thyroid screen.

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In the functional medicine space, however, we learn that there is a lot more biological data that we can gather if If, for example, the honesty that your body is reporting to you with is not exactly reflected in what is our routine bloodwork. The point is the body speaks the truth, and If a particular study or a particular expert is not able to enter into the alignment to validate what it is that your body is reporting to you, there is perhaps an expansiveness needed, either in expertise in laboratory testing or something else, but the body is something that we can grow a trusting relationship with on our pathway to healing on purpose. Today, the subject of our conversation is bone health. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, mainly because there has been so little information available to us beyond the script that I heard over and over again in my medical training, which was calcium, vitamin D, weight-bearing exercise, and some medication. Admittedly, since I was in my training, there has been an evolution in medications. I am turning to a bone expert that I admire very much. I was introduced to Dr. Keith McCormick, at least his body of work, when I was in my first job in the functional medicine space.

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I had looked in the literature for more information on bone health because I saw in hospital medicine how devastating it was for someone to get a hip fracture. Through Dr. Mccormick’s work, who I will tell you a little bit more about shortly, I learned about About half of all women in this country will have osteoporosis in about 20% of men. That’s an overwhelming number. Certainly in medical training, you could be on the medicine floors taking care for someone who had a hip fracture and perhaps was not yet ready for surgery that needed to be medically stabilized, because my background was not orthopedics, it was actually internal medicine. We would meet with people who needed other in order to make themselves safely able to have perhaps a repair surgery. What I also learned from Dr. Mccormick, even though hip fractures are very dramatic, that by and far more common in osteoporosis are stress fractures of the vertebra. Those are the bones that actually make up the spine, and that those are frequently missed, even by radiologist. I actually just learned that while I was preparing to give this talk. It’s really incredible what Dr. Mccormick has done.

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He was responsible for the book that I used as my resource and everything related to bone health and bone physiology. It was called the Whole Body Approach to Osteoporosis. With all the innovation and the greater research available, his book has over 1,200 citations, books, 1,200 references to different scientific articles and papers. This is a magnum opus. Dr. Keith McCormick himself is a triathlete, an Olympian athlete who, at the age of 45, was diagnosed with osteoporosis and found himself in the endocrineologist’s office with an older woman and had questions about how he had there. The truth is that the answers weren’t forthcoming. He became the change he wanted to see, devoting himself to this issue. He came out with his first book, which is how I learned everything I really know about bone physiology. Yet in the functional medicine space, the bone physiology is so holographically identical with so many concepts and how the body is constantly in a balancing act, and that bones are a linchpin for physiology in terms of metabolic health, inflammatory health, immune health, hormonal health, as well as the more obvious, structural health. In and of themselves can be a hologram for everything else happening in the body.

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Therefore, if you do have lower bone mass osteopenia or a more severe version of that, osteoporosis, in fact, we do need to look at hormones. We do need to look at the immune system. We do need to look actually at the gut. Probably more important than anything else, which is the point that Dr. Mccormick really drives home so well in his first book, The Whole Body Approach to Osteoporosis, and his new magnum opus called Great Bones: Taking Control of your Osteoporosis. He has written here a manual for each and every one of you to take charge of your bone health and your overall health. It’s the tome. It’s a large, thick book. I’ve been waiting to record this talk for you, and it’s taken a little bit just because I felt there was so much I needed to get updated on. In general, it will still probably make sense to speak in broader strokes because the book will be actually the most wonderful companion on your bone health journey. I really do suggest, and it really was written for For each of us as individuals taking charge of our health. Once upon a time in functional medicine training, I remember I was told that there would be potentially a lag between what we already knew in medicine in bench research and what would be actually put into action at the point of care, there could be well over a one to two to even three decade lag.

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Except if we have a health issue now, we cannot afford to wait those one to 30 years because the time is always now. That’s why we’re here on the journey to healing on purpose. Pick up your copy of Great Bones. Also, as I was preparing for this recording, I found that there were some other resources available online. I actually learned this through Dr. Mccormick’s website. I’m now sharing my screen to share with everyone that there is actually a bone health, an osteoporosis and bone health summit. Even as medicine may move slowly, individuals who are devoted to taking charge of their health, taking responsibility the way Dr. Mccormick did for himself and has extended it to the rest of the world, so too I see there is a summit. When I learned about this summit, it’s going to cost you $79. You’re going to get a lot of talks from a lot of experts. You can get videos and audios and transcripts. I learned about this from actually Dr. Mccormick’s website. This is my next stage of homework for myself, but I just wanted to let everyone know that this is available, morebonehealth. Bihealthmeans. Com. Healthmeans.

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Com. Morebone health. By healthmeans, one word. It’s three words and one, actually. Com. I’m really, really excited by this, by these opportunities for you to really learn about how everything connects, which is intuitive. Remember, the body is so honest. Dr. Mccormick talks about this. If your gut health is off and you’re If you’re not going to absorb properly your nutrients, then that’s going to affect your bone health. If your hormonal health is off and you’re stressed and your hormones are low because hormones have a direct effect on gut health, especially estrogens and testosterone. That’s going to translate. If you’re a menopausal, you’re going to have greater risk factors. Dr. Mccormick also speaks very interestingly in his book about fat. If you have a higher on your cholesterol testing, a higher LDL, which stands for low density lipoprotein, that has a bit of an inflammatory flavor to it. He speaks about higher fat, especially LDL, being an indicator for higher inflammation Here is the heart of Dr. Mccormick’s teaching, inflammation is the most important driver of bone health. That might be very surprising to us since we… As As I tell you about Dr. Mccormick, I’m going to show you his website, which is osteonaturalsoneword.

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Com. He has different posts here, and he also has a shop where he has his wonderful book, Great Bones, that I’m talking about today, as well as some very interesting and important products. Dr. Mccormick teaches that there are two main cell types of bone. There are actually four. But I’m going to speak about two. Again, I’m speaking in broad strokes. There is no way for me to capture the depth and the breadth of Dr. Mccormick’s excellent book, which is such a resource and guide to you. But I will speak about some, again, basic ideas. There are two bone cell types that we need to know about, one that makes bone, and that is called an osteoplast, and one that breaks takes down and remodels bone, and that’s called an osteoclast. The truth of our bone health is in the balance, as so many things are. Also important to know that bone is structural, It is also a reservoir for minerals, an important reservoir for minerals. In times of plenty, the bones can get mineralized. For most of us, we reach our peak bone density in our 30s. Then from there, bone density starts to decline.

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Back to osteoblasts and osteoclasts in the balance. What upsets that balance? Inflammation. Inflammation, inflammation, inflammation. There are specific mechanisms. Dr. Mccormick will speak to that in his book. He speaks about an important signal with the acronym wrinkle. He speaks about another important inflammatory pathway called NFkB, such that if you are inflamed, it skews the body in the direction of losing more bone mass. Furthermore, since the bones are a storehouse for minerals, the bones are very important in potentially balancing our blood chemistry because minerals are alkaline. Minerals are alkaline. Therefore, if your blood stream is more acidic, one of the things that the body will do is it will sacrifice long-term structural stability, that is our bone density and flexibility, for short-term metabolic necessity, because the body has to live, the blood has to live roughly at a PH of seven. Those minerals, the calcium and the phosphates that are alkaline, will be used in order to what what we call buffer or balance, the acid-based balance of blood. If we understand this, Dr. Mccormick on his website offers pH paper. What is pH paper? Ph paper PHA paper is a way that you can take, for example, and this is what Dr. Mccormick suggests, your most acidic urine, which is your first urine of the day.

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Collect a little sample of it or close thereafter, best effort, and see if you dip a tiny little piece of pH paper, the tip of it in some urine, where on the pH scale you land, where in the yellow zone, I just have this quick snippet here from Dr. Mccormick’s website of how you would interpret You would match the color of the paper that was dipped in urine to this little scale on the back of his pH paper that he’s selling here. You would see that if it’s more yellow, you’re more acidic. If you’re more acidic, friends, even if you are taking the osteoporosis medication that your doctor may have prescribed, your metabolic state, be it inflamed, be it acidic, will not be able to partner with that medication. It’s not that all medications are bad, but medications as an endpoint, yes, they have risk factors, by the way. Many of you may have heard that the family of medication called bisphosphonate, with Aldendronate being the generic name of the one that was most commonly prescribed when I was in training. Now the newer one, which is a injectable monoclonal antibody medication called Prolia, is the brand, or denosumab, that can also lead to excessive bone loss multiple spontaneous vertebral fractures if it’s discontinued.

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We hear about these things, and we get very nervous about what to do about our bone health. These are the kinds of questions that Dr. Mccormick gets. These are the kinds of questions that I get. I am trying to support people in understanding that bone health is part of a much bigger conversation, certainly within an integrative functional medicine practice about overall health, overall metabolic health, overall hormonal health, overall immune health, and overall inflammation. When you are inflamed, it turns out that you have that imbalance skewed towards the bone being resorbed and that medications can slow that cell type, the osteoclaste. However, the osteoclaste is not bad. The osteoclaste is, again, an important cell in our body that is in charge of not just remodeling, but also maintaining a certain flexibility so that you can have increased bone density after four years, let’s say, of osteoporosis medications so that you look better on the DEXA scan. Here’s an important point Dr. Mccormick, made in his book that I am going to implement starting on my Monday, my next work day, that he said, If we start losing bone density as early as our 40s, that he is choosing to have people get bone densitometry, Duxia scans.

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And by the way, he also teaches the history that these started becoming available in 1987. So a lot of doctors practice changes slowly, and we need to stay on top of these innovations. But this is a really important point, and I have not been doing this enough, insisting that my men and women start having a screening for their bone health in their 40s, and certainly by their 50s. Dr. Mccormick says that an appallingly low number of people even have any idea of what’s happening with their bone health. Now, in our practice, we look very closely at inflammation, very closely at hormones, very closely at gut health, and very closely at stress, and very closely at everything. But really adding that extra layer of a bone densitometry imaging sooner rather than later is a great idea that we are all welcome to ask our doctors for. Just because our doctors don’t suggest it, doesn’t mean that your doctor might not be suggestible if you make that suggestion and become proactive about your bone health and learn more about it. Dr. Mccormick takes laboratory tests, and he teaches you, the individual user, how to interpret them so that you can make your own risk assessment as to how much your bone health might be at risk.

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I just love that. He also teaches that a regular CBC has something that you can look at and that is really valuable to understand your your overall metabolic health. That is when you take the white count, which is your Department of Defense. Your white cells are a Department of Defense that have different subcategories. You can have a Department of Defense, you might have Ground Forces, and Air Force, and Marines, and Special Forces, and so on. So, too, your Department of Defense, or white blood cells have subcategories. One subcategory is neutrophil, and another subcategory is lymphocyte. What Dr. Mccormick teaches us to do is to look at the ratio between those. You want that ratio between one and two. You take the number of neutrophils and you divide it by the number of lymphocytes, and whatever that ratio is going to tell you about your metabolic health. That’s from our routine CBC, which stands for a complete blood count, then most of us get on an annual physical, and that, I guarantee you, I was not taught to look at in my training as an internist as a GP. You can become more knowledgeable about bone health and metabolic health markers in reading Dr. Mccormick’s book, then sadly, many of your doctors may be, or maybe you want to purchase a copy for your doctor, invite them to enhance their own expertise for their sake.

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What else do I want to tell you about this book? I told you about inflammation, acid-based mineral balance. I also want to talk to you about blood sugar. Blood sugar and imbalance in blood sugar are an incredibly pervasive issue in our country. It is estimated that over 60% of us are prediabetic or diabetic. What this means on a cellular level is vitally important because it turns out that the problem here is that when we have a body is exposed to a lot of glucose over and over, over again, we need it. But our average body needs just about, over the course of a day, a teaspoon of glucose. There are some estimates that the average consumption of glucose in this country is about 31 teaspoon a day or 31 times what we need, and that’s just an on average. What happens is when a cell has repeated exposure to glucose, it says, too much of this is not good, and it starts blocking that glucose signal. We call that insulin resistance because the mediator of how much glucose gets pushed into cells is a hormone called insulin. If we develop resistance to insulin as a means of protecting the from too much glucose getting inside, the problem is that that same insulin is also a key for many other key nutrients getting inside the cell, including all of our B vitamins, including our minerals, folks, minerals, minerals, minerals, including our amino acids.

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Bone is a type 1 collagen, which is actually made up of proteins. There are very specific amino acids that support our bone health, including Arjanine and Ornithine and glycine. The transport of key amino acids into our cells is also blocked with insulin resistance. Also our essential fatty acids, EPA and DHA, main source that we know of is fish oil. Insulin resistance, prediabetes and diabetes is a state of profound deficiency for all tissue, including our structural tissue. This is just another reason that metabolic health is so tied to overall health. Here’s another nuance/caveat, if you will. That nuance is that there is an important hormone that is involved in our cellular repair. It’s named is growth hormone. When we are small, growth hormone is very important in helping us grow in stature. When we are older, growth hormone is what is involved in repair. If we have injury, if we have inflammation, if we have something called oxidative stress, our ability to recover from that has everything to do with our nutrition, and our nutrition and our gut health work hand in hand, and our nutrition and our hormones work hand in hand, and our nutrition and our hormones and our gut health and our ability to repair.

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Therefore, how we age all go hand in hand. There are tons of mediators and details to this. But understand in broad strokes that if you are just taking a calcium supplement and vitamin D and taking an endoporosis indicated drug, that that’s not going to be enough, not to heal from the inside out. I’m just touching upon some major broad breast strokes to get us excited and motivated and proactive about this subject, and that now, as opposed to when I was in training, there are more and more resources. I also wanted to say that I’ve been using Dr. Mccormick’s supplements, and as far as I know, because I’ve asked him And by the way, he’s just the nicest, most wonderful, most generous human being. I’ve written to him, and he’s just written back with answers. He’s so special, and you can consult with him directly. I really love his line of supplements, and I’m just going to hover over his osteostem because he explains here that the osteostem is the heart and soul of his supplement line. It’s a formulation with antioxidants vitamins, and medicinal herbs really designed to aid in the reduction of the chronic inflammation and encourage normal bone metabolism.

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If you’re looking for a place to start in supplements while you gather information, while you grow your I would say that osteostem is a good place to start and maybe pH paper. You and your own home can develop your own little laboratory so you can really get the upper hand on understanding, Well, where am I? Am I too acidic? Is in the morning? And what do I need to do in order to get myself more alkaline? The answer is, of course, some changes in diet. Also, you’ll learn in Dr. Mccormick’s book that how we breathe affects our our acid-based balance. And so deeper breath. And deeper breath, well, what supports that? Movement and exercise. There’s so many beautiful tie-ins. It is really a way of studying the entire body through the bone. It’s fascinating, and it’s valuable, and it’s brilliant. It is not spoken about, taught enough, along with so many things that we are invited through understanding our body as an honest reporter, how everything connects. That really is our divine design, and the one we’re invited to really inhabit in our consciousness more and more as we deepen our journey to healing on purpose.

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Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this conversation was valuable to you and is setting you on a more and more empowered path through your bone health to your overall health. With all my love and gratitude, Shalom.

[00:28:41.300]
Thanks for listening to the healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 13: The Functional Medicine Approach to Bone Health appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:11.140]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, https://rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:58.900]
She Hello. Thank you for joining me right now, because right now, at this very moment, is the perfect time. The time you choose is always the perfect time to step onto and walk further on the divine path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention and with an awareness of what one is doing. In other words, with consciousness. You You were made on purpose, and that purpose is your entirety, your Shalom. Today, I would like to speak with you about the topic Resiliency on your Journey. I’d like to share with you some words from the introduction of esteemed scientist and author and speaker and researcher Greg Braden and his book Resilience from the Heart: The Power to Thrive in Life’s Extremes. Here is his introduction, or a section of his introduction. From the breakdown of national economies and the global shift of energy dominance to the realities of climate change and the failure of war to solve our differences, a convergence of extreme conditions unlike anything known in the history of the world is upon us. It’s because now is different that the thinking of the past no longer works to solve our problems.

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Life gets better, and resilience is the key. It’s important to remember that the only things breaking down in our lives right now are ways of living and thinking that are no longer sustainable. Personal resilience makes room for big shifts in our lives and is our greatest ally in our time of extremes. Thank you, Greg Braden, for these powerful, resonant, and truthful words. Resilience makes room for big shifts in our lives and is our greatest ally in our time of extremes. I wanted to speak about resilience in the physical body, and specifically, resilience as a key for healing at the level of the mitochondria. To bridge from my hypothesis about resilience as part of healing at the level of the mitochondria, I’d like to just remind us of the definition of the word resilience. I have looked at a few definitions, and mostly this is what I come up with. A physical resilience is the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed. Then, of course, there is another connotation, which is the ability to be happy, successful, again after something difficult or bad has happened. Isn’t that so interesting that in the definitions themselves, there is both a physical definition of returning to an original shape after being bent or stretched or pressed, and also our ability to anchor happiness and success after something difficult or bad has happened.

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How are both relevant? Well, let’s imagine that our health has been changed. Perhaps we’ve been suffering from symptoms such as fatigue, such as pain. Perhaps we’ve actually gotten a diagnosis such as cancer, and our faculties are stretched to their limits as to how we might cope in a time of adversity. And finding the ability, perhaps at the level of the mitochondria, to cultivate a resiliency might be the key to more than one process. Let me explain. We are multicellular organisms, and our ability to even be multicellular organisms is believed to be hinged on the ability of each cell in our cooperative organism to manufacture its own energy. That energy is manufactured at the level of a subcellular organelle known as the mitochondria, also described as the powerhouse of the cell. It is mostly what we eat that we know gives us energy, and what we consume and what is processed through assimilation, physical assimilation of our nourishment that is converted through many steps down to what we call our macronutrients, which are either carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. These are all able to enter a cell and then enter the mitochondria, which is inside the cell, and be converted converted through a multi-step process into the currency of energy that is produced in our mitochondria called ATP.

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Now, why is this important because energy is the essence of life. Having energy is also the foundation of our resiliency. If we cultivate energy, then we will have the strength, literally, physically, metaphorically, figuratively, to face our challenges and to find perhaps ways to adapt, but it starts with our ability to be physically adapted to change. For example, we have co-evolved over a millennia to be able to thrive in times of plenty, be able to make energy from things like carbohydrates, be it potatoes, be it rice, be it grains of various elk that have been the staple foods of so many cultures since we have appeared on this planet. We also have the ability to make energy from protein. There are certain cultures or certain times where protein is more available and therefore protein is a source of energy. Sometimes there is fat, either from our diet or from a very interesting metabolic switch that takes place when we don’t have food coming in from the outside, and that is our own storage. Fat is a very calorically dense, energy-dense storage form of energy. When we don’t have food coming to us from outside source, that is a signal via a very important signaling molecule known as insulin, to switch from assimilating energy to being able to use our own stored energy, which exists in the form of fat.

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Fat breakdown products, known as ketones, are extremely efficient sources of energy, also able to be used by our mitochondria. Our ability to make energy from different molecules, be they carbohydrates, proteins, or fats, is the fundamental source of our metabolic resiliency on a molecular level. Interestingly, our mitochondria are believed to come from ancient organisms. I wanted to share my screen with you and show you a really neat video depiction of this that I have found recently on my search on the interwebs. Here we go. Here we have an image of a mitochondrial membrane and a protein complex. I mean, the stuff that they’re able to do right now to give realistic depictions of what’s happening inside our cells will hopefully help you not maybe understand, but marvel at the infinite complexity that we We are all invited to appreciate and understand that is happening in our body. Here there’s an explanation, mitochondria, the Cells Powerhouse. By the way, I’m on a website called NatureDocumentories.Org. They’ve created this animation of the mitochondria. They’re talking about mitochondria being once freely living organisms that have somehow become symbiotically, which is cooperatively incorporated into us so that each cell can be responsible for its own energy manufacturer, and so that our bodies become this massively complex cooperative organism where each takes responsibility for energy generation, and yet we work cooperatively together, all for the purpose of creating health, for creating, this is my hypothesis purpose, finding, discovering, and actually living in our potential as transcendent beings created by love, created to love, of, created as potential generators of infinite life and light, that we have only yet begin to scratch the surface of our understanding.

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Anyway, I digress. That theory of how mitochondria were separate organisms that symbiotically became incorporated into cells so that we could become multicellular organisms is known as the endosymbiont hypothesis. We also know that mitochondria has its own genetic information, its own DNA, and that the inheritance pattern of mitochondrial DNA is through the egg. The egg, the maternal lineage, carries the mitochondrial DNA from mother to daughters and sons, and from their mothers to their daughters and sons. Interestingly, it is this, the feminine mitochondrial DNA RNA, that is the energy passed through maternal lineages since the beginning of our existence as a multi-cellular cooperative organisms. I I thought it might be really just beautiful. I don’t have the sound on here, but just the visual. And of course, you are welcome to have a look at this website, https://naturedocumentaries.org/18697/mitochondria-cells-powerhouse-harvardx-biovisions/. And look at this depiction of the mitochondrial membrane with this energy complex in it and this fluidity of this membrane, which we are learning is at the heart also of our health and a subject that we speak upon much in clinical practice, in my clinical practice at Rahav Wellness. We do a lot to support the health of this membrane, the mitochondrial membrane.

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Here we literally have the engines that make our energy. Look at it. It defies description. It looks like something fantastical Yet this is the incredible development that we have of beginning to be able to visualize some of the infinite complexity. By the way, this is one intermembrane space of one mitochondria making this molecule called ATP, which is the currency of energy in our body. And incredibly, we have anywhere between 200 and 2,000 mitochondria in each cell of our body with a preponderance of mitochondria in our nerve cells. I’m going to stop sharing here for a minute and return to me. I see my video signal turned off for a minute there. Anyway, I just wanted to share that That incredible and magical image of the mitochondria that hopefully you were all able to see and appreciate. Now, what happens if we have certain pressures on our cells and on our organism? For example, if we are exposed to mitochondrial toxins, what are some examples of mitochondrial toxins? Well, sadly, there are many within our environment, including ones that we screen for on a daily basis in my clinical practice at Rahav Wellness, for example, lead and, for example, mercury, for example, arsenic, for example, cadmium.

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These are all mitotoxic. These are metals that disrupt mitochondrial function. Then we lose that mitochondrial ability to function. What is another very, very important driver of mitochondrial function? The answer is oxygen. Oxygen. When we have problems with our circulatory system. When we have problems of sluggish blood flow, we develop potentially mitochondrial injury. This is incredibly important, and you are all welcome to listen to my episode, which was featured very early in the launch of this podcast on COVID-19, and how spike protein can interrupt blood flow and lead to mitochondrial injury. As such, we lose resiliency of our mitochondria on a cellular level. This is incredibly important because this is at the heart, this loss of mitochondrial resiliency, mitochondrial function, mitochondrial ability to toggle between different types of fuel. We lose this resiliency through multiple mechanisms of action. It is time to start thinking about the body on a cellular and subcellular level and from the perspective of the mitochondria as a funnel to teach us about where and how and why we may have lost resiliency, be it through problems with circulation, be it through environmental injury, be it through problems with our hormone signals, especially that important signal that I mentioned to you called insulin.

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Insulin signals to us if we should toggle between certain kinds of fuels, such as carbohydrates and proteins, to other kinds of fuel, such as fats. If there is a problem with that signal, then we also may stand to lose mitochondrial resiliency. That phenomena can also be known as insulin resistance, which is the dominant problem problem in diabetes, where we lose the insulin signal, either because of insulin resistance or because of autoimmune destruction of the cells that make insulin, that would be a type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune response, or a type 2 diabetes. These are incredibly important to understand not only because of problems of blood sugar imbalance, but because of our understanding of mitochondria as a funnel for our subcellular resiliency, ability to make energy, and therefore, ability to have the energy to deal with the changes that we see, both in our environment that affects us us inside our body and on a macro scale in terms of societal and world-level problems. However, on the pathway to healing on purpose, it is my contention that the change starts from within, from self-consciousness and an intention to understand yourself, your mitochondria, your fulcrum for resiliency on a subcellular level that can absolutely translate into your resiliency on a macroscale and your ability to therefore potentially take place as a being with energy, able to take responsibility for your own well-being and your place, your purpose, your ability to fulfill your potential as someone who is vibrant, as someone who is joyful, as someone who has an inner strength, literally and figuratively, to be a source of strength and evolution so that you can stand in your appointed role as a person, as a member of a family, as a friend, as a coworker, as a

[00:22:58.380]
diviny appointed living being, to live your life out with energy, to meet life’s challenges and develop responses that are evolutionary. I realized today might be a little bit of an abstract conversation, and yet so many things are tied in to the mitochondria, this idea of resiliency, and this idea of us experiencing extremes in our times and the invitation that is being made that we can take up the mantle, take up the invitation every day to develop consciousness around our health, around our mitochondria, and the tie into resiliency so that we can observe with hope, with even excitement, how certain systems are falling away, including our healthcare system, which is not so much focused on this common funnel for health at the level of the mitochondria and awake within yourselves, the common denominator, the awareness of the common denominator of the mitochondria, so that all of these different ideas Our circulation, our nutrition, our environmental exposures, and more, of course, there are more. How all of those different elements can come into play and inform your health in the most profound possible way. How do we work? Therefore, once we find out where our mitochondria are, and by the way, if you have insulin resistance, you you have mitochondrial injury.

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If you have poor circulation, you have mitochondrial injury. If you have If you have problems with lymph drainage, which is another important system that helps move toxins out of circulation and allows your body to regulate itself, you’re going to have problems with mitochondrial function. It is an incredible funnel. It is an incredibly important common denominator to understand. If you have problems with blood flow, hypertension, it doesn’t mean you have a beta blocker deficiency. It means that there’s something disrupting your circulation, and it’s going to affect you on a mitochondrial level. Your body an absolutely honest reporter. The things you feel have meaning, have purpose. Your body has a creator. The complexity that I showed you in that video, it is nothing that we could have imagined ourselves, but evidence of something much bigger than us that is our creator and that we are invited to begin to understand. Perhaps it is that health challenge. Perhaps it is that fatigue. Perhaps it is that brain fog. Perhaps it is the migraines that you struggle with. Perhaps it is the loss of stamina. Perhaps it is the joint pain, perhaps it is the abdominal pain, perhaps it is the bloating, perhaps it is the uncomfortable menstrual cycles, the loss of menstrual cycles, the heavy bleeding, perhaps it is whatever it is, you are invited to listen.

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You are invited to understand that this is important and this is your body honestly reporting to you that something deserves attention. The attention that you give it, the study that you do of your body, of your mitochondria, and the cultivation of your resiliency is your connection through maternal lineages, eternally all the way back to source. The source of that infinite love, that truth that created us at some point in time, that we are invited to learn through the clues of the body and only begin to begin to begin to answer the questions of, who are we really? My brothers and sisters, we are only beginning to understand having the faintest inklings of who we are. It is a time to learn who we are, to invite the crisis, to be the opportunity to learn more about the truth in our body, the truth that is embedded there since we were created. It is the the truth of our creation, and that is the study of the body, and that is the pathway to healing on purpose. I thank you so much for listening to this episode. I really look forward to your feedback, as there are so many themes that need to be developed out of this idea of resiliency and resiliency at the level of the mitochondria.

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This is the beginning of a conversation. This is the beginning of a journey that we are all, in fact, on Some of us may know it more than others. Those of us who choose to meet health challenges head-on and learn, use it as a fulcrum to learn as much as we can about ourselves. Congratulations. You’ve arrived. You’ve arrived at the onset of the pathway to healing on purpose. This is the path that those of us who have landed here in the realization that if we are to live the lives that we dream, hope, are possible to live, that we are invited to take responsibility and understand, perhaps, what was not readily understandable before, but that now more and more there are scholars, there are physicians, there are practitioners out there, there are humans who have discovered this for themselves and have found a path that is opening up to them to healing with mitochondria as a funnel for our understanding of our physiological and also our a physiological resiliency. So my friends, here we go. Embarking on a journey together. Thank you for joining me for this Musing on Healing on Purpose, and I look forward to being with you again very, very soon.

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Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast on Facebook continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 12: Resilience and The Mitochondria appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:11.160]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, https://rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

[00:01:00.130]
Hello, and thank you for joining me today on the path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention and with an awareness of what one is doing, in other words, with consciousness. Thank you for consciously choosing healing. Thank you for taking this time for yourself. You deserve it. Today, the topic of our discussion is going to be medically unexplained infertility. What do I mean by that? Well, as I would like to explain to you, the causes of medically unexplained infertility are things that may be overlooked in what is now considered the standard of care. We have wonderful doctors that study hormones and reproductive hormones, and they will look for specific things. They will look for, let’s say, a history of sexually transmitted diseases that can affect the structure of our reproductive organs. They can look for anatomical differences or anomalies. That is a whole world and a whole expertise. That is not not my expertise. I’m a general practitioner and a functional medicine practitioner. Sometimes when people have already gone to seeing those specialty doctors, also known as reproductive endocrinologists, who cannot find anything wrong, and yet, fertility is not happening. It is not forthcoming.

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People are on the cusp of choosing vitro fertilization or taking certain medications to support their fertility. Before you make such a decision, you might want to avail yourself of some other resources or ask yourself some other questions. That’s really the topic of today’s conversation. What else can we do? What else can we ask? What else can we understand on the pathway to healing on purpose, where fertility is really a reflection of our overall health, our ability to reproduce. I’m going to share my screen, as is my habit. Here we go. To I’ll report a little bit of this discussion further. What I want to look at, let’s see, is some tabs that I have cued up. First of all, I mentioned that when you start on your journey to your fertility journey, there are a few foundational pieces to the physiology of pregnancy that are important to understand. One of them is that we Very, very quickly after we become pregnant, we start increasing our blood flow. This is an article that I took out of a professional database space called Up to Date. This is something we use commonly in hospital medicine and that we use in our clinic, and that it’s written by and constantly curated and updated by experts in each field.

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This particular article is about blood flow in pregnancy, specifically, maternal adaptations to pregnancy, cardiovascular and hemodynamic changes. This is important because very quickly after It explains it here very, very carefully and specifically that we start growing our blood volume and increase our red blood cell mass as early as the fourth week of pregnancy. That means literally as your pregnancy test becomes positive, you’re already experiencing blood changes, increased blood flow. This is important because whatever your baseline balance might be rapidly as you become pregnant, you might experience very quickly physiological changes. This is just one little talking point that I want you to tuck away into your thinking cat. The other one is that you’ve already seen the doctor. They’ve already checked your hormone levels. I’m speaking specifically to female fertility here. They have taken a picture of your your ovaries and your uterus. I’m going to see if I can be tech savvy here and show you what an image of that might look like. Let’s see. Nope, here it is. Here it is, yes. You’ve gotten a hysterosalpingogram, which is a fancy-schmancy way of saying you had a picture of your uterus taken and there was a dye inserted via the vaginal canal and the cervix into the uterus.

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Then that dye was then able to move out of the uterus through the fallopian tubes and all the way to the ovary. That is what’s called a patent fallopian tube, meaning we’re ruling out variations in anatomy or some of the complications that can happen from sexually transmitted diseases that affect the structural patency of the art tubing. We’re not talking about that. Thank goodness, I have wonderful and brilliant colleagues who can do all this work with you. I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about what my colleagues were not able to explain, even though labs look normal, and we have spoken about what normal might vary from optimal labs in previous conversations, for example, on the thyroid. We know that reference ranges can be very broad and reflect what people are showing up with. We’re looking at a mean and two standard deviations from the mean, meaning what are the numbers of most people who we studied and declared as healthy? That gives us a sense of a reference range. But what is in the reference range when so many beings in our world are struggling with health, what is considered normal might be very far from optimal.

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That’s also a very key takeaway point that we’ve touched upon in various ways in different conversations here in our podcast on healing on purpose. But presumably, you’ve checked hormone levels, and those are okay. Here’s another key piece of the physiology of pregnancy. Very soon after a fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall, we start producing a hormone called human chorionic nototropin or HCG. In fact, that’s the hormone that’s being tested in the little home pregnancy kits when you pee on a stick. Interestingly, that hormone supports weight loss. I believe the adaptation of this comes from the need to support the developing fetus above and beyond all else in many cases, such that even if we are, as mothers, somewhat calorically restricted, the body’s alacrity to burn fat and deliver energy to the developing fetus is very great, and that the messenger of that nutrient delivery is HCG, such that maybe that was an adaptation, adaptation to nausea when you were pregnant or situations we know historically when women were calorically restricted, let’s say, in a time of war, and yet babies were still born at normal birth weight. I believe there was an interesting study like that conducted during World War II that I was trying to look up for the purposes of this podcast.

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I wasn’t able to find that particular data set, I was able to find this one about the history of HCG and weight loss with an endocrineologist from the 1950s named ATW Simeons, who discovered that giving HCG to young boys with low testosterone levels allowed them to start losing abnormal belly fat, which is a little bit of a progression, but still supports this idea that HCG, when it’s high in pregnancy, can support fat burning. The increased blood flow, which you already put in your thinking cap, remember, and the preponderance or ability towards fat burning, I want you to put that in your thinking cap as well. Now I want to add another missing piece to this puzzle, potentially That is one of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Yes, indeed. Here is this really cool resource I found called the Endocrine Society. I’m just scrolling for those of you who are visual learners. I apologize for this fast scroll, but I thought it was really cool to discover this resource. The Endocrine Society is a global community of physicians and scientists dedicated to accelerating scientific breakthroughs and proving patient health and well-being. Well, God bless them. I’m so glad I found them in preparing for this conversation because they have been at the forefront of hormone science and public health, and they are finding ways to inform and educate the community.

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So holy convergence of mission statements right there. Here we are having this conversation. What I want to add into this conversation, in addition to the thought about HCG and fat burning and increased blood flow, is an idea related to endocrine disrupting chemicals. I’m scrolling to the top of this page, Endocrine disrupting chemicals, also affectionately known as EDCs. The Endocrine Society shares with us the following. They share the background information that the The endocrine system is a network of glands and organs that produce, store, and secrete hormones. When functioning normally, the endocrine system works with other systems to regulate the body’s healthy development and function throughout life. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are substances in the environment. This is the key piece here. That means our air, our soil, our water supply, our food sources, our personal care products, and manufactured products that interfere with the normal function of your body’s endocrine system. Since these endocrine disrupting chemicals come from many different sources, people are exposed in several ways, including, parentheses in here, I know this information can be often disheartening and overwhelming, but remember, we are on purpose, we are conscious. Without speaking to these things consciously, we have no opportunity ever to rectify them.

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The point of healing on purpose is healing, rectification, coming back into harmonious coherence. Here we go. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, and endocrine disrupting chemicals can also enter the body through the skin. These chemicals can interfere with the body’s hormones and the way that they work, and they can mimic and trick our bodies into thinking that they are hormones, create all kinds of badness and havoc. Also, endocrine disrupting chemicals can increase or decrease the levels of hormones in our body by affecting how they’re made or broken down or stored. Now, what are some of the potential side effects of being exposed to endocrine disrupting chemicals? Well, here they say, endocrine disrupting chemicals can disrupt many different hormones, which is why they have been linked to numerous adverse human health outcomes, including alterations in sperm quality and fertility. Well, the subject of today’s conversation is medically unexplained infertility, abnormalities in sex hormones or sex organs, rather, endometriosis, early puberty, altered nervous system function, immune function, certain cancers, and on and on in them. This is the crux of the thing that we begin to look at in the integrative functional health space.

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Let’s say you have exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals. Those are not checked for in our routine bloodwork. Those are not checked for in the setting of fertility clinics, mostly. I would love to be corrected if I have misspoken. The folks who come to me have not had these substances checked. These substances are checked for in specialty laboratories, and you might want to look out there here, because remember, this conversation is for education purposes only and is not meant to diagnose and treat. It is just meant to raise the bar on your consciousness and perhaps point you to some resources like this website for the Endocrine Society. I will point you to another resource momentarily. But there are direct to consumer laboratories where you might be able to avail yourself of some testing for these precise substances. You might want to associate yourself with, perhaps, an integrative or functional medicine practitioner who can avail you of this testing. One of the things that we routinely do in our clinic, for example, is we test for heavy metals. What’s been really interesting is that we have tracked women pre-pregnancy and during pregnancy, first semester, second trimester, third trimester.

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We have had the opportunity to track women into their postpartum period. We have learned many interesting things. We have learned that many women who were having trouble with their fertility, in fact, had high levels of heavy metals, which is something we routinely screen for, seek and you shall find. Gone untreated, we saw during pregnancy that those levels rose. Remember how I told you to keep those ideas in your thinking cap about increased blood flow and maybe a predisposition, an ability with HCG in your system to burn fat with more readiness, with more alacrity? Now we have increased blood flow and fat burning. What is the site where many of these endocrine disrupting chemicals may be stored? The answer, my friends, is fat. The answer is fat. Normally, fat is the lesser metabolically active tissue in the body. And yet in pregnancy, it may get activated. Because there’s maybe more fat burning, maybe, not maybe, more blood flow, that That is a fact. We might be circulating more readily some of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and very, very quickly. So much so that fetal exposure to these, remember, I’m not a researcher. I am a clinician. This is a hypothesis.

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I would love for researchers to partner with me and corroborate this. That the development of fetal life is incompatible at a certain threshold of disruption to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Now, how have I proven this clinically? Knowing that I am worried about maternal exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, if someone comes to me and says, I want to plan for a healthy pregnancy, we will go looking. We will go looking, and we will find We will treat, and we will and have been able to support healthy pregnancies in so doing. In 100% of cases, no, this is one category that I wanted to share. What are the other situations that we have confronted in our clinical practice? In our clinical practice, we have also met those women who have had multiple trials to get pregnant. Then we do the work, and we do the detox work, and then they are able to conceive so that we know there must be some correlation with the work we’re doing in detoxifying these substances that we have found and we have proven that they’re there, and then we prove that we are reducing that burden, and then we have successful fertility.

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Well, doesn’t that create a clinical relationship that we can now understand more endocrine disrupting chemicals, less fertility, less endocrine disrupting chemicals, more likely to have a successful pregnancy? That’s a very strong clinical learning. Would love to corroborate it with research. That is an important, important category for medically unexplained infertility that has not yet made its way into mainstream practice. However, you, my friends on the path to healing on purpose, do not need to wait for entire systems to change. The time is now, the information is available. There are integrative functional medicine, direct to consumer laboratories and organizations such as the Endocrine Society that can help you. I want to point you to another really neat resource that I found preparing for this conversation. That is the Environmental Working Group. Here they are on their website, ewg. Org. What do they say? We work for you, and we’re not going anywhere. Because what? Picture putting sunscreen on your skin, knowing it has toxic chemicals in it. Envision biting into a carrot, knowing it’s tainted with pesticides. Imagine drinking a cup of water, knowing it’s contaminated to buy pollutants from local farms and factories. This is the world we live in, but we deserve better.

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Isn’t that beautiful? Yes, we do. Yes, you do. The Environmental Working Group has shown up since 1993 to shine a spotlight on outdated legislation, harmful agricultural practices, and industry loopholes that pose a risk to our health and the health of our environment. God bless the Environmental Working Group. As we peruse their website, we can actually find consumer guides. This is so cool. You can learn about tap water, and you can learn about personal care products that are certified by the Environmental Working Group. They keep a cosmetic database for safe cosmetics, so many guide to sunscreens. They also have, what do they have here on their website to help you take your power and your curiosity and your intention to heal on purpose and put it into practice. Here’s another wonderful resource that I’m so proud to share with you. In addition to the heavy metals that I described, we can look at levels of endocrine disrupting hormones Let me go back to the Endocrine Society because they had this really cool infographic that I was looking at. Here we go. I thought I downloaded this already. Here we go again. They give very specific examples of what hormones and endocrine-descripting chemicals are and some of the common ones.

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Some of the common ones here are in pesticides. For example, all of these difficult words that I can barely pronounce, DDT, we can pronounce, but this other one, chloro-pyrotosatrazine is another one, glyphosate. Glyphosate is easily tested in urine, and it’s not expensive. I believe right now with a wonderful laboratory called Mosaic Laboratories, we can actually test in for the cost of $95, your glyphosate levels. This is such a key compound to know if it’s in your system and how it might be disrupting your hormones. On and on, you can look at children’s products, you can look at heavy metals, phthalates, which are commonly in cosmetics, cadmium, industrial solvents, plastics, and food storage material. This is a big one, my friends. This is a big one. In our office, we avail ourselves of a very cool technology called the Oligoscan. I think I need to have a separate podcast on that subject, just the Oligoscan and the patterns we see there. But some of the metals that we see on a Lego scan are actually contaminants of plastics. It’s a backdoor window into looking at our contamination with with plastics byproduct, specifically, antimony and cadmium. Again, very It’s hardening, but it’s only through getting conscious that we have any chance of addressing this and working towards greater levels of food and environmental safety together that, of course, affect our fertility.

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Interestingly, here’s something really ironic. Textiles and clothing, they use perflourocarbons. Those are flame retardants that are put commonly into children’s PJs as per policy to make PJs safer, but actually in and of themselves are endocrine disrupting. Talk about cutting off your nose despite your face, all kinds of examples like this. But look at this wonderful resource to get yourself educated. That is a really big category that I just wanted to open up. It’s definitely a whole Pandora’s box on endocrine disrupting chemicals. I also wanted to put in just another feather in your thinking cap. This has been a scenario that we’ve seen in our clinic multiple, multiple times. It’s actually in women who have had successful pregnancies and have delivered beautiful babies into the world, and those babies were delivered by C-section. That’s a really, really interesting one because it turns out that when you make that cut for the C-section to deliver that baby safely into the world, which is up to the clinician at the time, the most important thing is the safety and health of mom and baby. Then mom and baby arrive into the world, or baby arrives into the world, mom safely delivers baby into the world, rather, There is a scar that remains.

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This is more of a Chinese medicine conversation and an energetic conversation because it turns out that that scar cuts across some very key meridians. Also that scars in general represent to place that in energy medicine, we can call an interference field. We have all kinds of nerves, especially, that cross through scar tissue. When it’s cut, it can affect that communication system so that energy flow, which is, again, more of a Chinese medicine concept about meridians and energy flow, qi flow, that got disrupted. It turns out that the uterus is very sensitive to energy flow and that the essence of fertility in Chinese medicine has to do with blood flow. That is where it converges with our understanding of increased blood flow. That is part and parcel to that article that I showed you briefly and that I can go back to on maternal adaptations to pregnancy, that cardiovascular and hemodynamic changes, big hemodynamic changes. We need to be able to support that. Part of what supports that is a robust autonomic nervous system. But those nerves all of a sudden, at the level of that scar from that C-section may be cut, and we might have reduced blood flow to an area because of autonomic nervous system changes, meridian changes.

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We look at things such as the Qomai meridian, if you speak Chinese medicine with me, and the ren that cross through that C-section scar and greatly inform the robustness of blood flow. What happens is if we work along that scar, doing energy work or acupuncture, we can increase blood flow to that area. That’s another category of medically unexplained infertility that I just wanted to speak to. Sometimes I’ve met women who have had other surgeries, maybe endometriosis surgery for debulking, and the scar tissue, in addition to the hormonal disturbances of endometriosis, It can be leading to infertility. Of course, there might be an explanation, well, you have endometriosis that it can affect fertility, and that’s thought maybe to be a mechanical issue. However, it does tie back into issues of endocrine disrupting chemicals as well, as does the most common condition that causes infertility. Again, this is not medically unexplained, but that’s polycystic ovarian syndrome. Actually, the conversation about endocrine disrupting chemicals is broader than just in medically unexplained infertility. It can really be and must be part and parcel to conversations about hormonal imbalances in lots of other categories that can inform infertility, including medically unexplained female infertility.

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Anyway, that was a mouthful, and those were just some thoughts and perhaps a roadmap to getting yourself more informed so that you can continue, grow, thrive, and prosper on your pathway to healing on purpose. Thanks for joining me today. I’m so glad you were here with me.

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Thanks for listening to the healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 11: Medically Unexplained Infertility appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:11.120]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, doctor Miriam Rahav. The content of the show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode.

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This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with doctor Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

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Namaste. I salute the divine within you because you see the divine is within you. Thank you for joining me right now, because right now is the perfect time. The time you choose is always the perfect time to step onto and walk further along the divine path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention and with an awareness of what 1 is doing.

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In other words, with consciousness, you were made on purpose. You are here with me, and that is no accident. By healing on purpose, you heal so much more than your physical body. You connect to your divine purpose. Healing on purpose is right for you, right for me, and right for all life.

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Thank you for consciously choosing healing. Thank you for taking this time for yourself. You deserve it. The world is better when you are healing on purpose. The subject for today’s conversation is polycystic ovarian syndrome, also known for short as PCOS or PCOS.

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Polycystic ovarian syndrome is not uncommon. As I have developed the habit in preparing for conversations with you, I start looking back at some of the literature and making sure that my understanding is current with what’s available out there. And it turns out that there is a very wide estimate of between 5 20% of women affected by this syndrome. What is this syndrome? So this syndrome has been agreed upon, or at least the the most recent group agreement happened in 2,003, I believe, when a bunch of scientists, clinicians got together in Rotterdam and came up with the Rotterdam criteria.

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And the Rotterdam criteria say that polycystic ovarian syndrome is characterized by 3 main features and that to qualify quote unquote as having polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS or PCOS for short, you need to exhibit 2 of the 3. So what are those criteria? The criteria are that you have high levels of androgens. Androgens are hormones classically associated with men, meaning, of course, women have them. It’s just the balance is different different.

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So the balance is tipped, meaning testosterone and meaning the precursor to testosterone, dihydroandosteradione. We’re don’t even know if I said that correctly because I always just say it as DHEA. And we commonly test for these things in our initial blood work. There are also clinical symptoms that might go along with hyperandranism, which is those high levels of male associated hormones, classically acne, and also increased facial hair, also known as hirsutism. What else?

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Irregular menstrual cycles, longer menstrual cycles, and ovulatory menstrual cycles. That is the second criteria. And the last official criteria is polycystic ovaries. Interestingly, and this is where I might segue for those of you who feel like learning visually with me, I am going to attempt to the best of my ability to share my screen. It’s not necessary, but if you want to, I have some images potentially queued up to share with you to explain actually why polycystic ovaries may be a misnomer.

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So classically a cyst, a simple cyst is a fluid filled sac. And these naturally physiologically occur in the ovaries, especially in young women and self resolve. What we’re looking at in here and by the way, I wanna give credit to this image. Let me see. I’m gonna remember what page I’m on, and then I’m going to go to the cover of this wonderful book that I love and give credit to this wonderful author who has done just such a phenomenal job.

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Let me see if I can do this. What is, what’s the first page? Maybe here. Let me try again. This book is by naturopathic doctor Fiona McCullough.

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I hope I’m saying that name right. McCullough, maybe McCullough? Forgive me. You are brilliant. And this book is a gift.

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8 steps to reverse your polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS. Now I’m going to, after giving credit to this wonderful author and clinician, I’m going to, oh, here’s that Rotterdam criteria. And I wonder if I yep. It was 2,003. Thank you, brain.

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Okay. So we have those and ovulatory cycles that I mentioned, cycles that are longer than 35 days, even they, even if they come on the regular are not normal. We have here a list of some of the symptoms of hype hyperandrogenism. So that’s hirsutism, acne. Oh, also hair loss.

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Yes. And the elevated testosterone, DHEA or androstenedione that we mentioned. And then, the cysts, which we were about to clarify. So this is straight from Fiona McCullough’s book, naturopathic doctor, with an image of a normal ovary. And what we notice here is a cyclical process in the life of the, of our eggs.

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You have these tiny little eggs that grow through a process called folliculogenesis, which just is a fancy schmancy way of seeing the eggs are developing. And then you have here what looks like a mature egg. And then you have an ovulation, so almost like that egg coming out of its shell. And then once that comes out, you have a change in that shell that eventually gets involuted, kind of resorbed. And and, eventually, I guess, it’s an it’s an atrophy.

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It’s actually a magical thing, all of these signals and how the different parts of the body speak to each other in this fine tuned way that that little eggshell, once the egg ovulates, starts taking on a different function. Actually, it gets magically renamed the budial body and starts making progesterone to support potentially a pregnancy and gets a message that if the egg is not fertilized and implanted, it is no longer required to make progesterone. And since progesterone stabilizes the uterine lining, but then is no longer required. The uterine lining is destabilized. And around day 28 of our cycle had we had, this is a key, little caveat, an ovulatory cycle that uterine lining will shed.

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And that is the menstrual period. That is the actual bleed. In contrast, we have here in this very clear schema a, a picture of a polycystic ovary where the it’s not a cyst in the classic sense of the word, but it seems that the effect of that hyperandranism, to remind you, that means those high levels of testosterone, DHEA or androstenedione stimulate multiple eggs such that there is this slow and look here, you have 1 egg cycle, but you’re here, you have multiple eggs developing at the same time. There’s a classic ultrasonographic sign when people do ultrasounds to see this called pearls on a string where you see multiple, follicles. However, none of them are ovulating.

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I think that Doctor. McCullough does yes. Ovarian follicles in a state of partial development, she says. Over time, partially developed follicles pile up in the ovary, creating a look of multiple tiny cysts or what is often referred to in textbooks as a bunch of grapes or strings of pearls. So that’s just a clarification of the Rotterdam criteria.

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However, the plot thickens. And let me see if I can toggle over for our reference to some articles that I kind of built up here. And right. We said 5 to 20 percent of women of reproductive age worldwide, worldwide, and that there is still much that we don’t know and we don’t understand. And yet it is so common.

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It is thought, that there is a and this is an important piece here, that there might be an in utero exposure from mom while mom is pregnant, in other words, to the female fetus that starts causing the expression of polycystic ovarian syndrome as early as in utero. And that those exposures may include androgens. In other words, there can be endocrine disruptors, which in previous conversations we’ve had about female infertility and endometriosis and started speaking about how endocrine disruptors in in so many substances around us are actually contribute contributory to hormone dysfunction. There is also emerging information, and I was just hanging out in PubMed for a bit. And if, if you can see as I’m sharing a screen, it’s really interesting.

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Just some of the titles of, of the articles you can find in PubMed that are basically tying PCOS to, autoimmunity, as 1 possible mechanistic understanding. And, just to see some of the articles in PubMed, just the titles of the articles, you know, for our perusal and, and just to see the emerging literature. So here we have, an article published in 2021 saying genetic susceptibility, the title of the article from Frontiers in Immunology to joint occurrence of polycystic ovarian syndrome and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. How far is our understanding? And what they say is that they are common endocrine disorders.

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That means hormones, right? Which is what really? Those are communication systems, very fine tuned, fine balanced, complex with many, many feedback mechanisms within our body, right, that are sadly commonly disordered. And that there is a higher prevalence of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome. In fact, we think that there could be cross reactivity between antibodies on the thyroid, which by the way, are also driven by what?

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By endocrine disruptors and with the ovaries relative to healthy individuals. And then I saw, oh, well, let, let me just go through a few more titles here. So high prevalence of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in patients with PCOS, does the imbalance between estradiol and progesterone play a role? A correlation between Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, a systematic review and meta analysis, thyroid disorders and polycystic ovary syndrome. And interestingly, I found another article, which I believe I have queued up to look at together.

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Oh, this is just a review of polycystic ovary syndrome and acne. That’s fine. Current concepts. That’s a much older article. Clearly, this has been subject to much conversation, but there was 1 cool image.

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I might not find it right now, but it was actually showing how 1 of the common, clinical manifestations in polycystic ovarian syndrome is actually and this is not in all types, by the way, in some and there’s further discussion. And I think it’s a little bit technical and beyond the scope of what this conversation is meant to be. You know, the different they’re not it’s a, it’s a heterogeneous manifestation. But 1 of the characterizations is a kind of, insulin resistant metabolic syndrome, and that is, you know, folks who have, a hard time losing weight and seem to gain weight, which is also, by the way, something with a hypofunctioning thyroid that, those 2 syndromes might have in common, and insulin resistance. And that downregulation of the regulatory part of our immune system, the otherwise known as the T regulatory part of our immune system, can also increase insulin resistance.

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That insulin resistance and metabolic disruptions are not unique to PCOS, but can be overlapping and create a feed forward cycle between autoimmune processes and PCOS such that PCOS in some circles, in addition to endocrine disruption, is also thought to be a manifestation of autoimmunity. And this is interesting in the functional medicine space because so much of what I found out there in terms of PCOS and how to manage it in the clinical space actually has to do with addressing insulin resistance. I’m gonna maybe toggle us back to doctor McCullough’s excellent, excellent, book because she has here a wonderful summary. And and if you are in fact working on, on managing your polycystic ovarian syndrome, and I believe somewhere in this book, I have to remind myself. But I believe somewhere in this book, she also says something interesting, which is, once PICOS always PICOS because it’s a syndrome.

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It’s not strep throat. It’s, it’s an immune dysregulation. It’s an endocrine dysregulation and it’s something that needs to be managed throughout our lifetime and what we can do. And she also, by the way, takes clinical scenarios and and makes it a lot more understandable. But I’m looking for this really groovy image that I now realize I should have bookmarked because she outlines the 8 steps, the 8 steps that are the integrative naturopathic, way of approaching.

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While I do this and while I scroll, I will mention Oh, here it is. Here it is. This is the beginning of every chapter where she has this beautiful flower image with each petal representing a step. Or as my dear mentor, doctor Nisha Winters likes to say in her metabolic approaches to cancer, that we need another drop in the bucket, a drop in the bucket. How did we get here?

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And then we address we address each drop in the bucket to create a pathway, a conscious pathway to healing on purpose. And doctor McCullough, I really hope I’m saying her name right. Please forgive me if I have not. But, but, each step is a key piece of the puzzle. So we have inflammation.

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Now, 1 of the really powerful ways of addressing inflammation can be with diet. So addressing inflammation per se can also overlap with treating insulin resistance, which also can be dietary. But just doing a fast, for example, and this is another big talking point from my dear mentor and brilliant mentor, Doctor. Nisha Winters, a 3 day fast can completely change around your microbiome, lower inflammation and treat insulin resistance. And so, then we want to balance our adrenals.

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So the role of stress here is incredibly important and might reflect transgenerational stress. 1 of the things that I’ve noticed just looking very closely in a very detailed way at blood work and in folks who come in on their path to healing on purpose, and we do the detailed investigation. Is that 1 of the possible responses to stress, especially when our adrenals can still mount a robust response is actually to increase androgen production. And so let’s say someone is in a stressful pregnancy, a stressful time in their life where they have just inherited stress in their life where transgenerationally themselves, and then they’re pregnant or they have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and they’re pregnant, or they have stressful circumstances in and above themselves transgenerationally and thyroid disruption and endocrine disruption. And who knows what’s happening with diet, environmental exposures.

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That’s the endocrine disruption, a bit redundant, but anyway, this is the multifactorial and we don’t know about genetics, of course, but we’re learning more and more. These are the multifactorial parameters that lead possibly to the development of PCOS. Remember 5 to 20 percent of women in reproductive age world wide. That’s absolutely staggering leading cause for infertility in the United States. Anyway, I digress.

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We said balance your adrenals and we started speaking about stress. Treat excess androgens. In previous conversations, we have had, discussions of how, the liver is very much responsible for breaking down and biotransforming and metabolizing. These are interchangeable terms, are exogenous outside of our body environmental exposures. This is, you know, the under the header that I, that we’re so worried about in our community of endocrine disruptors.

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That means toxins, metals, phthalates, things that we’re exposed to from our cosmetics, from our plastics, from from our water, from our air. This is, an incredibly, overwhelming and disheartening subject. And yet, as I’ve said in past talks, becoming aware of what these things are is necessary. If we don’t know, we cannot get conscious. If we cannot get conscious, then we don’t have a choice point.

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Becoming conscious gives us choice points, allows us to exert our agency and our free will in making changes for us. And why shouldn’t we make those changes? Do we not want to be able to have children? Do we not want our hormones to work for us? I mean, see, see how our body loves us and is speaking to us all the time and telling us that whatever the state is within our body or around our body, that is truly a reflection of the world around us.

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As I like to say, we are all fishes swimming in the same pond and each 1 of us fishes, we might have inter individual variation. However, all of us are touched by the pond and the health of the pond is our own health. These are 1 and the same. And the more we realize that all of us fishies are affected in varying ways to varying degrees, the more we can be motivated together and realize that the change is incumbent upon all of us. And where do we start?

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Here on the pathway to healing on purpose and this wonderful naturopath, Fiona McCulloch has outlined these steps that are separate and yet overlapping just like the petals on this flower. It’s really a perfect, ingenious graphic. Hormonal imbalances, balancing your thyroid, creating a healthy environment, and eating a balanced diet. How beautiful. How beautiful.

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And, I have really, really worked with this and practice. It’s been really fascinating. It’s been really fascinating to balance the thyroid. It’s, been fascinating to, heal the gut, which has so much to do with autoimmunity and with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. And it’s been so interesting to use really straight out of this book.

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Some of the supplement suggestions that have really made a big difference. Let me see. Likely in chapter 5, let me see if I can hop right there. I’m gonna maybe get better about navigating this. Maybe, maybe this page.

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So I wanna go to the 5th chapter on oh, no. It’s actually chapter 6. And and speak to some of the things that we see in labs. So if you’re somewhere out there in space and you want to see if you are having an irregular menstrual cycle and acne and weight loss resistance or weight gain, or you feel like your blood sugar may be imbalanced or your thyroid is off or you have a family history, whatever your score, you’re trying to get pregnant and you’re having trouble. And then you start saying, okay, what’s going on?

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Whatever is the impetus for you stepping on to the conscious pathway of healing on purpose. Here we are. And, you know, really excellent clinical, technical, explanation of how these hormones, should be and where they might be instead and what things you can actually measure so that you can partner with someone who will measure this for you and be willing to look at things like thyroid antibodies. And look of course at these hormones, follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone. Classically, the luteinizing hormone will be higher about twice as high as the follicle stimulating hormone, giving you times, the ideal times to be checking in on these.

[00:29:37.070]
And here is a review of conventional therapies. Commonly just to get a regular menstrual cycle, we are giving oral contraceptives, trying to figure out if we can get someone to bleed if they’re not menstruating regularly. But here are some things that peony and licorice, black cohosh. Vitex is a fascinating 1 and 1 that I really, really love. Again, this talk is for educational purposes and not for diagnosis and treatment.

[00:30:19.110]
However, sending you the resources, creating a shared language and vocabulary, showing you that there’s a plurality of understanding of this as a syndrome. And that since this is something that needs to be tended to thought of and addressed throughout our lifetime, changes the thought process as to, whether just being on an oral contraceptive is going to cut it. Because when we have this is this is my own personal humble opinion. When we have a hormonal dysregulation, that is feedback for us because hormone regulation is feedback and hormone dysregulation is feedback that the feedback isn’t working. That’s very meta, but the feedback about the feedback, the feedback about the fine tuned delicate dance of all the hormones is off.

[00:31:23.350]
This has profound health implications and overriding that fine tune dance is cosmetic, unfortunately. And sometimes I meet women and they say, well, I just had so much pain and I was so uncomfortable or I had acne, whatever was the case that that was what they needed to lean into. And that’s absolutely fine. But whenever it is that that spark is lit and you decide to step onto the path, the healing path on purpose, you start realizing that the plot thickens, that the story is deeper and that out of self love to really get better and be more vibrant and protect fertility and protect life and to protect the future. You might want to know, well, what are the endocrine disruptors that might be in my system?

[00:32:20.490]
And what does that mean about my environment and my exposures? What does this mean about my mom’s environment and exposures way back? What does that mean about my grandmas? It might lead to discovery and self knowledge, not just in your own time, but transgenerationally. It might mean that you heal yourself from insulin resistance or autoimmunity, or even look for autoimmunity in the 1st place because it’s not standard of practice to screen for thyroid antibodies unless the thyroid numbers are out of the reference range.

[00:32:57.970]
So this is really an invitation to look. Anyway, back to Vitex. What I thought was so interesting about Vitex is in the research, the newer research, this book by the way was published in 2016 and at that time was very up to date, determined that much of the way vitex works lies within its action on the brain. I found this so fascinating. Its ability to regulate the cycle involves and I’m just reading right out of chapter 6 in Fiona McCullough’s book.

[00:33:36.020]
Its ability to regulate cycles involves its action on the brain’s dopaminergic and opioid systems. Meaning this has to do so much with our sense of well-being, with our endorphins, with our feel good hormones, with our neuro balance. I mean, holy mind body connection. And, this was 1, I think it was further down here that it appears to act on the brain, regulating hormones from a higher level that it seems to let me go down and try to say this to you clearly beyond estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. It was somewhere further down and it’s explained in beautiful detail, but I’m gonna get to a bottom line here if I find it or not, because I remember.

[00:34:40.510]
So I’ll just say it to you is that it seems to uncouple stress manifesting in the brain from the hypothalamic ovarian communication system, hypothalamus, pituitary in the brain, and the ovaries. Yep. Here, the typical dosing that doctor Fiona recommends, 1500 milligrams in the morning. She typically use, tinctures and extracts, or, I use a standardized, encapsulated form from I don’t know if I’m a from, an encapsulated form. And this in combination with balancing the thyroid, in combination with detox, in combination with intermittent fasting, in combination in combination in combination with with other herbs, and just figuring out what works has worked marvels.

[00:35:58.840]
And what’s interesting also is that sometimes, the excitement of figuring things out over time, I’m saying over years, wears a little thin. And then, in some folks, I’ve tried to see if we can kind of pare back on some of this work, And it’s been tricky. My experience has also been that this is a lifelong journey. And so if you have irregular menses, abnormal hair growth, acne, fertility difficulties, known hypothyroidism, or suspect hypothyroidism, or RN ambulatory and want to someone to look at your thyroid, including antibodies. You might wanna seek out, a naturopath trained in this area, a functional medicine physician trained in this area, or look into direct to consumer labs.

[00:37:01.360]
This is an area that I really need to research more on behalf of the community since I offer labs directly in my office. How can we avail ourselves when there, is not consistent access to integrative medicine to start doing some more of this detective work that is affecting 1 in 5 women, potentially of reproductive age around the world. It’s time. It’s time for all of us to learn this and learn that the pill might be a temporizing measure, but it’s not enough taking spironolactone to block the effects of that hyperandranism on our on our on a cellular level in the form of spironolactone is not enough. Taking metformin, but not looking at our diet, it’s not enough.

[00:37:59.810]
Going into in vitro fertilization because we’re infertile is not enough. Maybe you’ll manage your immediate concern vis a vis being able to conceive or hold a pregnancy. Maybe you’ll handle your regular menstrual cycle because it’s handled cosmetically by oral contraceptives. Maybe you’ll handle your acne with spironolactone. But what about the other health risks that are carried with a story of endocrine disruption, autoimmunity, inflammation, insulin resistance?

[00:38:37.230]
What about downstream risk factors for diabetes? What about downstream risk factors for cancer? We need to do better and you can do better. And that is in fact why you joined me today on purpose to listen to this conversation, to be galvanized, to be inspired, to maybe be pointed to just doing a little bit of research on PubMed and pulling up some of these articles, and maybe bringing it up with your own personal health authority, finding this book, 8 Steps to Reversing PCOS, and, and maybe looking for some direct to consumer laboratory work around the thyroid, around the female hormones. I hope you do pick up the gauntlet, so to speak, and take charge and step into your own power on your conscious pathway.

[00:39:40.220]
I’m so glad you’re here. Let me know what you think about this conversation. And if you want to take a deeper dive into specific subjects, such as insulin resistance, such as, nutritional approaches, such as more information on some of the natural, herbals, and nutraceuticals that we might use, whatever it is, I’m honored, excited, and looking forward to our next conversation on Healing on Purpose.

[00:40:16.690]
Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 10: PCOS Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:10.080]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show. Hello.

[00:01:02.820]
Shalom. Peace. Shalom. Wholeness, completeness. What a beautiful and special greeting encompassed and felt intentionally in the word Shalom. Thank you for joining me right now, because right now is the perfect time The time you choose is always the perfect time to step onto and walk further on the divine path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention and with an awareness of what one is doing. In other words, with consciousness. You were made on purpose. You are here with me, and that is no accident. By healing on purpose, you heal so much more than your physical body. You connect to your divine purpose Healing on purpose is right for you, right for me, and right for all life. Thank you for consciously choosing healing. Thank you for taking this time for yourself. You deserve it. The world is better when you are healing on purpose. The subject of today’s conversation is endometriosis. I have a somewhat clinical definition of endometriosis to share with you. Here it is. Endometriosis. I am actually sharing out of professional literature. In preparation for today’s conversation, I did a little thinking, a little reading, a little refreshing, a little reframing, because I am a physician at the point of practice, and at At the point of practice, we get into symptoms, we get into labs, we get into how this manifestsates both symptoms and functional status in people’s lives.

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In other words, we call that clinical practice. It’s always good. It’s always healthy to go back to the literature. I found this wonderful resource. It’s a book, and it was published relatively recently. It’s good to know what’s out there in the more current literature. The name of the book is Endometriosis, Pathogenesis, Clinical Impact and Management. It’s a volume published from the Frontiers in Gynécological Endocrinology. That is published by the educational branch of an organization called the International School of Gynécological and reproductive endocrinology. The reason I’m mentioning this to you is because you can find my sources and you can do your own reading and reflection and detective work now. I might be speaking in Greek. Sometimes it’s easy for physicians to lapse into very specific physician-type language. It’s a very rich language, medical language. If you have found this conversation, this podcast, then you probably are familiar with the word endometriosis, though we’ll discuss what that means in a bit. Pathogenesis is a word describing how we get out of balance. What is that process? In this case, how do we get endometriosis? By the way, this is a big mystery I wanted to reflect on you.

[00:05:30.370]
Clinical impact means how does this manifest in our lives? I found a really touching testimonial and how endometriosis affected one woman in particular that I wanted to share, and then management. What do we do about it? What I realized as I was preparing for this conversation, and I realized this This, in many cases as I prepare for conversations, that it’s just touching the tip of an iceberg. Each cell, as I have likely mentioned in other conversations, is like a planet It’s so deep, and our body, a universe. It’s that complex. There’s really no dumbing this down. I just want to say that these are conversations that hopefully spark curiosity, grow validation, create hope. I hope to interact with you as a community. I would love to hear what is helpful, what is something you might want to hear more about. But without further ado, I’m just diving in. I do want to mention, as I was just going through this book, I thought it was It’s worth mentioning that this is a collaborative effort. There are doctor researchers contributing here from Pisa, Italy, from Firenze, Italy, from Belgium, and from Salt Lake City, Utah. That just filled my heart realizing that there are beings, so many beings from around the world coming together in order to solve problems, in order to reflect on problems, meditate on problems, ask ourselves, why do we have these problems, and forge together a pathway forward.

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I really believe the best of what medicine has to offer is that community, is that convergence of people devoted to service and to helping make a positive impact on the lives of others. Sometimes when we dive into the literature, we might miss the fact that this is a collaborative conversation. I invite you to reflect with me about the wonderful work of these authors, Andrea. I might not say the names right, but Andrea Gnazzani, Felice or Felice, Patraglia, Michelle Niswell, and Robert Taylor. I just want to give these beings credit. This world is full of so many light beings who are put here to support you, who are put here to serve you. When we meditate on healing on purpose, we can connect to that truth, that frequency that we are here and that we are better together in service. That, too, is the truth of this world. There are lots of other things we might be able to get distracted by, but that truth is ever present. Endometriosis. This is straight from the book, folks. I can take no credit. Endometriosis Glypogliosis is one of the most intriguing diseases for women during the reproductive age.

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The book starts out. It was almost a century ago, so I’m dating myself. This book came out, I think, in 2021, but maybe was being written before that. In 1921, the first paper by John Samson described the chocolate cysts of the ovary. Then in 1927, there was a publication which related endometriosis to a menstrual dissemination. I can relate to that. I remember as late as medical school in the early 2000s discussing endometriosis and the working operative explanation there was that there was some of that tissue from the lining of the uterus, otherwise known as the endometrium, that somehow got out, perhaps through the fallopian tubes, retro flow of blood, endometrium, I forget the exact language, and adhered to the pelvic cavity, various locations led to increased pain, especially during the menstrual cycle. On further reflection, I’m going to go into to the first article. The first article in this book, just the title of it is so key. It’s called Endocrine Disruptors and Endometriosis Risk. It’s written by two people, Marco Palumbo and Federica DiGardo. In their intro, they say endometriosis is defined as the presence of endometrial type mucosa outside the uterine cavity. Several theories have been proposed during the last 20 years to explain the disease pathogenesis.

[00:11:39.040]
If you recall, pathogenesis means the way that we become patho, patho meaning sick, but really it’s an imbalance. Pathogenesis is how, what is the pathway to becoming ill? However, a unique concern Ectasis has not yet been established. What this means is that we don’t exactly cannot fully say why we get endometriosis. This is an important conversation for me in clinical practice because I, in clinical practice, have watched step by step how women work to reverse endometriosis. I may have mentioned this concept, but when something works, a therapy works, it starts becoming diagnostic, meaning it wouldn’t work if we weren’t on the right track in terms of our thinking about this fancy word called pathogenesis or why we got this in the first place. In the clinical space of functional integrative medicine, we actually can get closer and closer to understanding through healing. If we are healing endometriosis, then that makes sense that we are understanding how it came to pass because we are healing on purpose. We’re not healing willy-nilly. In any event, it was in a five-day overview survey course that was run by the Institute of Functional Medicine that I was in 2012, 2013, when I heard a lecture about endometriosis by a wonderful integrative gynecologist, biologist by the name of Bethany Hayes.

[00:13:48.920]
She pointed out something really interesting. She said that the lining, the lining of our pelvic cavity is composed of cells that she called totipotent. Totipotent describes, in my understanding, their potential to become anything, like a stem cell, like the truth of us as we are created when we are just a little ball or a morula of cells. Then we start specializing, dividing, and gaining character, like a little child who, when they develop, we say, Well, they can be anything. They can be anything they dream. Then we start making choices and carving out a path that becomes clarified over time. But these linings, these lining cells, are totipotent. What starts characterizing how they will behave is, in fact, the local micro microenvironment. What I learned from Bethany Hayes is if we have a local microenvironment that is inflammatory, well, what can cause in the abdominal or pelvic microenvironment an inflammatory process? Well, one big, big, big process that I have found in my clinical practice is imbalances in the microbiome. Imbalances in the microbiome. What is the microbiome? It is that inner, complex environment of all the different bacteria. We have the microbiome, the microvyrome, that is really designed to be diverse and lives in its own particular balance.

[00:16:12.830]
Small intestine has its own environment and its own balancing act. The large intestine has another. These are kept in check by particular mechanisms, which I trust we will delve into much more deeply in conversations about bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth. For the purposes of this conversation, I want to state, I have yet met a woman with endometriosis who does not have an inflammatory imbalance in their intestines. These are related because they create the climate, the inflammatory climate, and it’s one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is being spoken to in this article, Endocrine Disruptors and Endometriosis Risk. It doesn’t mean if we have endocrine disruptors, we’re going to get endometriosis. However, there is a relationship. What are endocrine disruptors? Here, it’s being defined. In 2012, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Health Organization prepared a report, and they start naming about 800 chemicals that are suspected of being endocrine disruptors. That means able to mimic our own hormones or alter their regulation. Able to mimic or alter. Then there’s a table, and the table starts listing some of them. They’re listing, for example, a pesticide called DDT and its metabolites.

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Then they say Pathways of Exposure. Pathways of Exposure listed here are milk and derivatives, fatty fish, living environments and workplaces. Holy moly. We’re talking about our food, folks. We’re talking about our oceans. We’re talking about all of our exposure is just in that one line. What does DDT do? It has estrogenic activity. If we have gut inflammation and we have exposure, for example, to DDT, tea that stimulates estrogen. And estrogen, little side note, estrogen is a growth factor, and that’s wonderful. It’s wonderful when we want to grow a uterine lining. However, if we grow a uterine lining, it is really to house a nice, cushy, soft landing pad for a fertilized egg. However, if that egg is not fertilized, that cushy landing pad needs to be broken down. What if we don’t have that fine-tuned balance between growth and then dissolution, the yang of growth and the Yin of going back to our baseline. We can’t do that because we have estrogen that’s made by us, and then more estrogen from our environment. That is a disruptor. Then we have something else called organochlorine insecticides. Where do we get those? Milk and derivatives, fatty fish, living environment, workplaces.

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Will that narrow the down? Then we get, oh, gosh, nonalphenols and octylphenols, detergent byproducts. We get detergent byproducts, we get bisphenol A, detergent byproducts, food chain, seafood, and consumer products. We get phthalates, plastics in contact with food. Folks, have you been able to buy food readily that has not come into contact with plastics? It gets to be overwhelming. The list goes on and on. Now, we sometimes run the danger in speaking about these subjects, meaning it’s in our food, it’s in our air, it’s in the packaging, it’s in the oceans of getting overwhelmed. I do want to mention we must know. We must know. The pathway to healing is the pathway to being on purpose, conscious, aware of what we are doing. If we don’t know, we can’t correct. There are a lot of implications here, and there are a lot of beings out there who want to tell this story and who want to work on it. We need to help each other. I want to mention here, there are so many substances, so many, out there that help our bodies break down estrogen. Where there is a problem, there is also a solution, such as what?

[00:22:08.260]
Such as broccoli Sprouts, one of the most powerful hormone balancers and estrogen detox protectors, in addition to many other benefits, all the cruciferous veggies, green tea extract, alpha-lipoic acid, glutathione, tumeric, and dandelion. The list really does go on and on and on. We can really We can really do so much to help our body break down estrogens by becoming aware of exposure. By the way, the breakdown of estrogens is both environmentally and somewhat genetically and also the interaction between genetics and our own endogenous environment. In fact, there is a chart that I really love. I’m meditating on that speaks to this. But before I get granular, I wanted to share a testimony from a woman who speaks about the impact of endometriosis in her life from such a poignant human point of view. She says that she suffered from pelvic pain for more than two decades. By the way, I am reading this really beautiful human description from a fantastic book that is a collaborative effort between a medical doctor and a doctor of physical therapy. Iris Karen Orbach, Medical Doctor, and Amy Stein, Doctor of Physical Therapy. I know Amy personally. She is such a beautiful gift.

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Clearly, Dr. Orbach, who I do not know personally and would love to, is also a beautiful gift. Again, in the spirit of feeling all of these wonderful beings out there doing this work and wanting to be part of a healing of the world, of Ticun Olam, a repair of our world. They share through their book called Beeding Endo, a wonderful testimonial from Bojana Novakowitch. I hope I’m saying these names right, please. She speaks about having pelvic pain for more than two decades without knowing why. As a teenager, she was told it was normal for girls to have painful periods. When she became sexually active, she was told it was normal for sex to hurt. Then she even had a surgery called a laparoscopy, where we make a few incisions in the in the lower abdomen, oftentimes also around the belly button. We put in instruments that are both putting air into the cavity so that we have that space to look around with light and camera. That is a laparoscopy. It’s a surgical and it’s a gynecological surgical subspecialty. She had one in 2005 that came up negative for endometriosis. In retrospect, Boyana realizes that that surgeon most likely didn’t know some of the hallmarks that she might be looking for.

[00:25:57.250]
Then because endometriosis that thought about and was ruled out, she was told, therefore, that the pain was in her head. I think this is a really, really important subject to discuss, and it’s one that comes up so much as people come to meet me in my practice is that when we don’t understand something, we can sometimes be tempted to as clinicians wanting to help in good faith, but not finding an explanation for a spectrum of symptoms to then say, All right, then if we can’t explain it, it’s in your head. That is a slippery slope in some ways. Sometimes we need to really expand the menu of testing and understand. In such a case, for example, we are able to do a specialty test called a DUTCH. It stands for dried urine hormone. I’m going to mess up on the acronym. I didn’t prepare that, but that is fine because the point of that test is we can actually see how estrogen is being metabolized, and we can see if there are functional hiccups in the way the body is handling estrogen and how much estrogen is there. Is it more or less of we expect?

[00:27:27.250]
The metabolites themselves tell us about how our body processing. What we know is one of the risk factors, if we’re looking at endocrine disruptors, and if the endocrine disruptors are, in fact, estrogenic, that means that they’re acting like estrogen. If we have lots of estrogens, and lots of estrogens, be there native or zeno, meaning from the outside, and that’s a risk for endometriosis, even if we did that laparoscopic surgery, had all the clinical manifestations of endometriosis, which this testimonial will go into, and we don’t find it on the laparoscopy, we can still get a sense of metabolic health and say, Sorry, my index of suspicion for endo is still incredibly high, given these or those results. That’s why I think we have to do better in expanding our understanding of metabolic health, primarily to validate the truth of what the body is speaking because the body keeps the score, the body tells the truth. We, our bodies, what we call my community, they’re telling the truth, and my job is to find, validate, underscore, understand, get conscious, get on purpose so that then we can address. We have to. We have to do this.

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It’s not optional. This is the path to healing on purpose. In any event, this person was told that the truth her body was speaking to her was not the truth her body was speaking to and that creates cognitive dissonance, emotional dissonance, strife. She developed anxiety, worsening anxiety, and more pain, and felt she was doing something wrong. It became a cycle, a vicious cycle, confusion, pain, discomfort that wreaked havoc in her mind, in her body, in her nervous system or central nervous system. This is such an authentic testimonial, and this is a person who doesn’t come from a science background. She can say with complete confidence, she says, without that scientific background, and I want you women to hear this out there, there is nothing normal about knife-stabbing pain during your period, nausea with bowel movements during your period, burning, itching, tingling pain sporadically throughout your cycle. Definitely nothing normal about pain during intercourse even though women go through the painful act of childbirth, and this is all in cap letters, I just thought this was so beautiful and so powerful, Boyana says, Pain is not sinning. Synonymous with being female. Pain is not synonymous with being female.

[00:30:41.130]
Possessing female reproductive organs doesn’t condemn you to eternal pain. She goes on to tell a really exciting story about her pathway out, about how Dr. Amy Stein and Dr. Orbach helped her find her pathway to truth and freedom. For any of you out there who suspect you have endo and maybe even went through preliminary diligence and were told that you didn’t, and it was all in your head, I think this is an important conversation, an important book to put your hands on. The other book that I mentioned might be a little too technical. I know we’re only scratching the tip of the surface here, the tip of the Tip of the iceberg. But what I wanted to say is this is really what I see in clinical practice. I see someone and they have a spectrum of symptoms, painful menses, painful bowel movements, worsening with the menstrual cycle, pelvic pain, and especially One of the clues that I’ve heard from my women is more pain with deep intercourse. We go looking for imbalances in the gastrointestinal system. We have discovered bacterial overgrowth. We have discovered intestinal paracetism. I would put this under an umbrella term of gut imbalance, which will call it broad spectrum dysbiosis, that imbalance in that complex inner world of the microbiome in the GI tract.

[00:32:37.170]
We have found the risk factors for that imbalance, be it chronic stress, be it problems with bile acid metabolism and a bile flow, liver dysfunction. We have found some genetic determinants, some nature determinants, some nurture determinants, some imposed complications like gall bladder removal. We have found energetic components, be it that that lower part, our lower chakras, maybe not always being safe, maybe not always have been being able to determine the use of our energy, of our creative force, of our reproductive organs in one way or another. The reasons, the nuances, the frequencies, the determinants are as profound and individual as the individuals themselves, always requiring individual consideration here. But the patterns, the patterns of gut inflammation, the patterns of environmental exposures to endocrine disruptors, or maybe not lots of exposure, but a slower ability to break down the potential pattern of having maybe trauma to those regions, not necessarily physical trauma, can be emotional or it can just be that our lower chakras are centers of creativity and expression, and that our own expressing of ourselves has been not able to bloom in a way or ways that have affected us energetically in our kundalini Nini.

[00:34:32.100]
So many potential conversations here, but I just wanted to open this up and see what resonates, see what helps. I want you to know that you know. If you know that you know, you will be able to find and anchor those beings, those professional beings who will know that you know and will to validate what you know and create a roadmap forward by reducing both exposure to endocrine disruptors, increasing breakdown of endocrine disruptors, healing gut imbalances, microbiome imbalances, and then hopefully at some point being able to, if needed, and this is definitely something that’s happened in clinical practice, consider perhaps a surgical intervention. What I have seen, this is another side note before we end our conversation for today, that the surgical intervention without that underlying work leads to symptomatic relief for a time. But then what I have seen, and maybe some of you can corroborate this, a need at some point down the line for a repeat surgical intervention. Sometimes because our ability to diagnose endometriosis is delayed because right now, ultimately, the standard of care is still having that laparoscopic surgery, and that’s such an invasive measure Oftentimes, this conversation happens when we are ready to step into our reproductive function.

[00:36:29.400]
That’s when the stakes become really high, and that’s when we may submit to more invasive procedures. But if we work on the underlying pieces and we understand what Anna spoke to so eloquently, that it is not our lot to be condemned to eternal pain, and that that is our body speaking with us and saying, something here is not right, and it behooves us to start unraveling that and looking for practitioners like Dr. Amy Stein, like Dr. Iris Orbach, MD, like someone in the functional medicine space, the integrative gynecology space, someone who runs a Dutch test, you can go to the Dutch website and look up practitioners there and start finding out how your body is metabolizing estrogen. Or empirically, maybe consider going to some of the tools that help the body break down estrogen and see if it makes a difference. That is in the spirit of the therapeutic diagnostic. However, this conversation does not represent medical diagnosis or treatment. It just represents opening up the possibility for this pathway being imminently and readily available for you once you set your sights and your intention to healing on purpose. Until next time, lots of hugs, lots of encouragement, lots of gratitude for you being here with me.

[00:38:32.570]
I’m Dr. Miriam Rahav.

[00:38:36.210]
Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 9: About Endometriosis appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:10.160]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing On Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing On Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

[00:01:00.780]
Namaste. I salute the divine within you, and I’m so glad you’ve joined us on a path to healing on purpose. My name is Dr. Miriam Rahav, Today, I wanted to discuss with you the thyroid. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe you’ve heard of it in the context of feeling tired. Maybe you’ve heard of it in the context of unexplainable weight gain or weight loss resistance or brain fog or depression. You may have heard of it, in other words, in the context of some of the symptoms that may hint at its dysfunction. In other words, that the thyroid might not be working well. What is the thyroid gland? The thyroid gland is a gland that sits right around here, right around the Adam’s apple. It looks a bit like a butterfly with a lobe on one side, a lobe on the other side, and a linking part, a bridge, so to speak, that is also known as an ischemus. It regulates our metabolism. As such, it has a huge impact on our health because it actually works on a cellular level, on a subcellular Every one of our cells and our DNA and how our cells use energy is in fact regulated by the thyroid.

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As one of my teachers in residency said, The thyroid is the thing that when it works, you don’t know that it’s there. When it doesn’t work properly, there’s literally nothing that doesn’t go wrong since it affects every cell in the body. If you’re a gut cell and you’re hypothyroid, your gut cell might not have the energy to assimilate nutrients. If you’re a liver cell, your liver cell might not have the energy to detoxify or create key proteins. It leads to a disharmony in all of our other hormone systems. It’s an incredibly important subject, and it’s a subject that affects so many of us. It’s one that I’ve meditated on quite a bit in practice because it’s so common for our thyroid to be vulnerable. There are some reasons why. Once upon a time, I was sitting in a classroom studying Chinese medicine on my pathway to become certified in acupuncture. Our professor of Chinese medicine described the thyroid as a garbage dump. I was immediately inserted on behalf of the thyroid. How could you say such a thing about our most precious endocrine gland? It’s a plant. And yet, there was an interesting concept that opened up in that statement.

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That has to do with the thyroid being both a source of hormones, but also a factory of It needs to source its supplies. One of its most important supplies, so to speak, is iodine. Iodine is a rare and precious mineral that we most commonly get from what? From sea vegetables. Interestingly, I read that actually dairy is a source of iodine. We wouldn’t really expect that, but it turns out that iodine has antiseptic qualities. Many people would have used it in their home cultures, perhaps. For wound care, it has this dark orange color. In hospital medicine, we actually have iodine packets that we use to clean an area that we need to sterilized for any procedural purposes. We actually sterilize the udders of cows before we milk them. Some of that residual iodine is in our dairy products. Isn’t that interesting? But I digress. Iodine is a precious mineral that is traditionally scarce and more scarce in areas that are landlocked and don’t have access to the sea. Historically mountainous areas, classically people of the Himalaya. In our medical textbooks, we would see these really awesome pictures of Indigenous peoples of the Himalayas with these big glands that became extra active, trying to source iodine in a place of scarcity.

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That condition of an enlarged thyroid that doesn’t have enough iodine to make its hormone is called a goiter. The thyroid, because it regulates metabolism and because it’s sourcing its iodine, it’s going to filter the blood. In fact, I have a neat picture that I tried to queue up to share, showing just how vascular the thyroid is. Let me see if I can figure out how to share I’ll share that with you. Let’s see here. Is this it? Yes. This is a picture of the thyroid gland. As you can see, as my cursor is moving around, it does a good job in this cartoon depiction depicting how vascular the gland is. The gland is going to try and filter into itself iodine for its own hormone production. The The tricky thing is that there are lots of substances that are now in our environment where iodine is precious and is a mineral that can look like minerals, they’re mineral lookalikes, and yet don’t function like minerals. Those are namely heavy metals. You may have heard of this concept. And heavy metals are what we call endocrine disruptors. They disrupt our thyroid function. The thyroid, going back to my professor of Chinese medicine describing the thyroid as a garbage dump, is not willingly or purposely trying to concentrate garbage.

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But if we have a lot of garbage in our environment that looks like iodine, the thyroid will accidentally concentrate those metals, potentially, in place of the iodine that it’s not able to find. Therefore, the thyroid concentrating can wind up concentrating into itself, disruptors of its own function. Thyroid dysfunction in my clinical practice is quite common. Now, let me see if I can show you another picture. Let me see, I’m scrolling here. Here, this Here is the picture. Here is that butterfly-shaped thyroid gland. Above it here is actually a depiction, although somewhat abstract, I realize, of a part of the brain known as the pituitary gland. It lives, I guess here is a picture of the brain, somewhere in here. If you can see that, sorry, that’s small. The pituitary is making a hormone known as TSH, or thyroid-stimulating hormone. Now, thyroid-stimulating hormone is named after precisely its job. It’s supposed to suss out what is happening, what is the state of the thyroid in the body. If there is not enough hormone around, it is like a foreman in the factory. The thyroid is making hormones like in a factory. Let’s say it’s making, I don’t know, for the purposes of our conversation, sandwiches.

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You have the foreman who’s overseeing the production of sandwiches from his window at his desk, and he’s looking out over the production scene and realizes there are not enough sandwiches. The foreman’s job is to get a little louder, maybe shout a little bit at the sandwich makers and say, Make more sandwiches. So too, thyroid-stimulating hormone gets louder if there’s not enough thyroid hormone circulating around. By louder, I mean higher. When I do bloodwork, I see an elevated thyroid-stimulating hormone, I realized that that is in response to hormone levels, thyroid hormone levels, being too low. But there’s a catch. This is the catch that I think the functional integrative medical space is profoundly equipped to capture. That catch is that there is a difference between receptors, meaning how thyroid acts on the level of the brain, on the pituitary, the specialty part of the brain, as opposed to the cell of the body. That is because the brain has a special circulation system, it has a blood-brain barrier. Therefore, there can be a significant lag, sometimes of years before the foreman of the thyroid factory starts getting loud, meaning we could have a scarcity of sandwiches or thyroid hormone for years before the foreman actually notices.

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That can a profound disconnect because we, people, us, we have a sense of where our energy should be, how we should be functioning, and then we go to our doctor and we say, I’m tired. I don’t feel right. I’m sluggish. Maybe I’m constipated. Maybe my skin is dry. Maybe my hair is falling out. Maybe I’m gaining weight or I just don’t lose weight the way I used too. Maybe I feel foggy. I have reduced exercise tolerance. The doctor, of course, appropriately immediately thinks of the thyroid and runs a TSH test. The TSH test comes back normal. Therein lies the rub. Can we have hypothyroidism with a normal TSH? The answer is yes. Yes. There is a specialty test called the TRH Stimulation Test. The TRH Stimulation Test proves what we might otherwise never discover as a subclinical hypothyroidism. We can actually give TRH. Well, first, let me tell you how this works. We check TSH, and then we give TRH immediately thereafter. 20 minutes later, we can check a TSH again. What TRH does is thyrotropin-releasing hormone. It will cause the TSH that’s stored in the pituitary to be released. I worked in a wonderful practice where this old test was commonplace and opened a window onto the pituitary, and I could see that when we stimulated the pituitary, the pituitary said, Well, actually, maybe we were shouting.

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Maybe the foreman was shouting, but I don’t know. I guess we just gave up. We stopped shouting. But you revealed that actually we were shouting for a while, meaning we do a TSH, and 20 minutes later, we repeat a TSH after we gave TRH, which stimulated that TSH. Lo and behold, the TSH was very high. That would be our reason or justification for working on the thyroid. What happened when I was exposed to this TRH test is that I realized that by the time someone’s TSH, a reference range on most laboratories lies between 0.4 nanograms per deciliter to 4.5 nanograms per deciliter. That’s a very, very wide range. What I realized is that by the time the TSH is hovering around the two, that person may, in fact, already be somewhat hypothyroid, meaning that thyroid is not functioning optimally and the plot thickens. TSH is part of that puzzle. Then it turns out that the gland makes two hormones, T4 and T3. Most of our hormone is actually in the form of T4. What works on a cellular level is T3. Now, why is that? By the way, there’s no dumbing this down. I apologize every day in clinical practice for speaking about the truth of thyroid hormone, because the truth of all of us is that we’re incredibly intricate and we’re incredibly complex.

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The more that we can approximate the truth of our inner intricacy and complexity, the more we can speak to it, look for it, understand it. With that understanding and with that clarity, we can actually do the work and get ourselves better. I really, really am so excited that you’re joining me today on the path to healing on purpose, where you acquire the information to really know what is required to look at a thyroid function from a medical perspective comprehensively. That means that we want to look at a TSH. Perhaps you find a practitioner that does a TRH stimulation test. Well, that’s really valuable, wonderful, and interesting. Also, that we want to look at both T4 and T3. What’s the deal here? In the thyroid hormone factory that is this gland shaped like a butterfly, most of hormone is made in T4, and yet what’s working on our cells is T3. Why is that? Well, with great power, the thyroid hormone is a powerful hormone. Comes great responsibility. We make a precursor hormone that then needs to travel and get to cells to be activated and converted into T3. It’s the T3 working on a cellular level on on a DNA level that’s actually regulating metabolism.

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Well, do we routinely check T3? That’s really what’s working on our cells. The answer is that the practice I inherited from my medical training says it’s not really needed because T4 gets converted into T3. There’s the rub. It turns out that there are a lot of obstacles to that T4, T3 conversion. And absolutely correct, T4 does get converted into T3 in normal situations. But when we’re feeling great and feeling like ourselves, we tend not to be running to the doctor. We’re running to the doctor because of various symptoms, and symptoms of hypothyroidism, classically, as I mentioned before, may be fatigue, weight gain, weight loss resistance, depression, constipation, brain fog, feeling sluggish, dry skin, hair loss. In other words, not like ourselves. Here, we might miss that problem with T4 to T3 conversion. Now, what might be the cause of the problem from T4 to T3 conversion? Well, one of the things that can cause a dysfunction in that conversion is stress. Whoa, there’s a big subject, right? The other is environmental toxins. The other is infection. The other is liver dysfunction. So much of that T4 to T3 conversion takes place in the liver and specifically in bile.

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Here in this diagram, I thought it was helpful because it’s naming some of the very common endocrine disrupting compounds that work at the level of the brain, the level of the circulation, at the level of the liver, and prevent normal thyroid physiology. It’s incredibly common and yet looking for T3, T4 to T3 conversion issues, looking for a subclinical hypothyroidism when the TSH starts climbing above the two, looking for the actual endocrine disrupting chemicals is not common practice. This is potentially a great challenge of our times the need to expand our practice, to look at TSH, to look at T4, to look at T3, to look at free T4, to look at free T3, to look at reverse T3, to look at liver function, to look for nutritional backbones of thyroid. Have you heard of one of the main ingredients that drives the thyroid forward? It’s iodine. We mentioned it earlier in our talk. The other is a very important amino acid known as tyrosine, which is also, by the way, a precursor to dopamine. Fascinating. With nutritional deficiencies, with endocrine disruption, with stress, with infection, we can be living with what we would call a subclinical clinical thyroid dysfunction for years.

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And sadly, the standard of practice may miss it until it’s led downstream to lots of other issues in addition. I know that this is only the beginning of a bigger conversation, but for you on your journey to healing on purpose, you have the possibility of understanding that just because your TSH comes out normal in routine bloodwork does not mean that your thyroid is working optimally. In understanding that there is a deeper potential story, you might be able to seek out more information. Ask for a T3. Ask for a free T3. Ask for, perhaps, a screen of your blood for mercury, aluminum, arsenic, lead, cadmium. Ask for an iodine level. Ask for thyroid antibodies, antithyroglobulin, TPO, TSI. Maybe you, too, along with me, can become more empowered through health information to be the change you want to see and live your healthiest, most vibrant, most dynamic life. Thank you for joining me today on our conversation on the thyroid. I’m Dr. Miriam Rahav with Healing on Purpose.

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Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 8: Thyroid Health appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:10.120]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show.

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Hello and Namaste. I salute the divine within you because the divine is within you. That is why you are here, and that is why we are here together. We are joining right now in a conversation because right now is the perfect time. The time you choose is always the perfect time to step on to, and walk further on the divine path to healing on purpose. On purpose means with intention and with an awareness of what one is doing. In other words, with consciousness. You were made on purpose. You are here with me, and that is no accident. By healing on purpose, you heal so much more than your physical body. You connect to your divine purpose. Healing on purpose is right for you, is right for me and is right for all life. Thank you for consciously choosing healing. Thank you for taking this time for yourself. You deserve it. The world is better when you are healing on purpose. The subject of today’s conversation is menopause. What is menopause? As has become my habit and my joy. In anticipating the conversation, I’ve gone back to the literature just for fun. What I looked at was actually a few books, a few books by some wonderful authors, one of them being a Dr. Physician, medical doctor, who is a obstetrician gynecologist by the name of Jenn Gunther.

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She wrote a book called The Menopause Manifesto that was published in 2021, I believe. I learned, thank you, Dr. Gunther, that the word menopause was conceived in 1812 by a Dr. Charles de Gardein, a French physician. He started with a word called ménépausie, méné being month, and pausie meaning a cessation. Then in 1821, he updated this term to mené Menopause, and then the accent Menopause was dropped somewhere. There was a little accent mark over it. But what is it? Well, technically, it’s when our ovaries, where we have eggs that live in little follicles are no longer… No more follicles, therefore no more ovulation because there are no more eggs. The average age of menopause happens somewhere around to 52 years of age in women. Interestingly, in Christianne Northrup’s book, The Wisdom of Menopause, she mentioned that the average life expectancy of women in 1900 was 40. That menopause has become something of a, relatively speaking, modern phenomena, because we wouldn’t live as women long enough to experience the joy of menopause. There is a little diagram in Dr. Gunder’s book. It’s nice sometimes to have a little diagram. I will share my screen if I figure out how to do that.

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There we go. Here we are. Here we can see a reproductive age, starting from the fancy word for getting our menstrual cycle is monarchy. That age has actually, over time, become earlier and earlier, somewhere around the age 11, 12, 13. Then we talked about the final menstrual period. That’s what this FMP in this schema, if you are looking at this video on YouTube, really not necessary. I’m just mentioning a visual cue for you visual learners out there. Premenopause, which we’ll talk about the time from when hormonal changes might be occurring, which we’ll talk about. Then you are officially postmenopausal if you have one year lapse between your final menstrual period and not getting it again. There might be some menstrual irregularities in the period we call perimenopause, but one year after no period, you are officially crossing the threshold into postmenopause, which is just a new age and a new chapter. What I do want to speak out or speak to, are some things that, as I was reviewing literature, both from Christian Northrup and Dr. Gunder, and maybe a little bit later, if we have some time from John gray, who wrote the book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and then wrote another wonderful book, Beyond Mars and Venus.

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If we have time to touch upon that, that might be fun. So let’s see how it goes. But what I really wanted to review with you is… Let me just see. I’m going to stop sharing for a minute and cue up another image here and share again and try to teach to an interesting concept and just give a review. All right, here we go. What I want to share with you is actually an image from what is the adrenal gland. The adrenal gland is a gland that sits on top of the kidneys. It might actually be good for me at this juncture to give you, visual learners, just a sense of what it looks like and where it might be located in our body. Let’s find an image relatively showing where the adrenals live inside our anatomy. Just to give you. You can see that they actually live in the back in what’s called the flank. They’re relatively posterior organ. They’re the kidneys. Then you have this little triangular dome on top. That’s the adrenal gland for you visual learners. What I want to show you is actually the events or the hormonal synthetic pathways.

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What is actually being made in this adrenal gland? I will tie it in a bit into why I’m discussing the adrenals when I’m discussing menopause. The adrenals are making so many hormones. They are just a factory for all of these hormones. Now, some of these hormones you may have heard of. We have somewhere in this diagram for you visual learners. If not, remember, that’s totally fine. But you may have heard of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is made in the adrenal glands, and it is chiefly made responsible for the stress response, tasked with responding to stress. As such, it tends to get activated quite a bit. By what? Well, By anything. The classic example, if you have heard the fight or flight response, is being chased by a potential predator, the proverb bear or tiger. But really in our modern lived experience, it can be anything. It can be exposure to environmental toxicants, poor diet, lack of sleep, stressful traumatic events, fear, infection, financial woes. I mean, you name it, the adrenal. It lands in the adrenal. Now, The first hormone, that is the precursor, also known as the grandmother, of all the other hormones is what I like to joke and say the most famous hormone you’ve never heard of called If you are looking at the diagram here, pregnenolone is the first step.

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Then pregnenolone can go down two main pathways. By the way, the precursor to pregnenolone is actually cholesterol. The backbone of all of our hormones is cholesterol. We always want to have cholesterol within a reasonable value and not push it down too low because it is the backbone for all of our hormones, amongst many other things as as well as an important structural component of all of our cellular membranes. But I digress. Pregnenolone can then go down a pathway to become testosterone via a few precursors and also estradiol. Another branch of this pathway goes to progesterone, from Pregnenolone to progesterone, and from progesterone to cortisol. Yet another branch of this pathway goes to another famous hormone that many of us have never heard of that’s called Aldosterone. Aldosterone has to do with salt and water balance and also plays a role in blood pressure regulation. Now, the body is trained to prioritize survival above all else. And so, cortisol is the chief product in our challenging modern lives of the adrenals. All the other hormones, while very, very important and serving their own vital physiological roles, may become depleted as the body will sacrifice certain other hormone stores, such as estrogen, such as the male hormones, such as progesterone such as pregnenolone.

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In order to make a stress response, this phenomena is called pregnenolone steal or pregnenolone shunt. That is represented in this image, should you choose to take a look, by a double arrow between pregnant alone. Then what’s nice about this image is that they also made this little dotted arrow red for visual convenience. That is pulled or shunted into cortisol. Another intuitive way that I describe this is if you are, just intuitively think, if you’re under really big stress, if you have had a moment like that, hopefully not, but so many of us can relate to this, are you also in the in the throes of a big acute stress response, also able to eat? Oftentimes, we just can’t eat anything inside the acute stress response. This is an important, how our nervous system gears itself towards stress. The other thing about chronic stress is when we’re in big stress, do we also have a big stress… Sorry, sex What we can see here is that a lot of these hormones, estradiol, DHEA, testosterone, progesterone that are associated with sex hormones, are also produced in the adrenal and can be pulled into, shunted, or sacrificed, in a way, for the survival of our organism, such that when we are under chronic stress, acute and chronic or acute on chronic, any permutation thereof, our sex hormone levels can drop.

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Hopefully, so far, so good. The adrenals make sex hormones as well as stress hormones. When the adrenals are tasked with responding to all kinds of stressors over time, sex hormones can take a dip. Now, when we are relatively young and juicy and have nice, juicy ovaries. Ovaries also make sex hormones, especially estrogen, progesterone, but also some testosterone. In fact, the dysregulation of that is the chief concern in the phenomenon known as polycystic ovarian syndrome, which we have discussed elsewhere. For the purposes of our conversation, I liken the ovaries and their dialog between the adrenals when we are before menopause. As that neighbor that we can always go to when we’re baking cookies and have run short of flour or sugars or eggs and say, Hey, can I borrow a cup of sugar? The ovaries say, Sure, sure, sure, sure. Even if we’re living under stress, we have, as women in our ovaries, a adrenal backup system in the form of hormone synthesis in the ovaries. I really hope you get this. This is a really, really key point. I see this all the time in bloodwork because as it so happens, when I want to get to know someone, of course, their story and their physical exam, but also their labs, and guess what I to look at.

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Surprise, surprise, pregnant alone. Dhea, testosterone, progesterone, estradiol, cortisol. I get a sense of where these things are in cross-reference with a physical exam, with a story, with symptoms, of course. Interestingly, some of my women have gone on and become pregnant, which is a state of big hormone production It has always amazed me to watch simultaneously how when women are pregnant, their adrenals seem to do much better. Forgive me, I’m just doing a little Adrenals seem to do much better, and that is because that backup system, that neighbor who always has the extra sugar, is right there showing up and bolstering those adrenals, conversely, postpartum after women give birth and those huge wave of pregnancy hormones dwindles and the sleeplessness of the nights and the nursing and all the other things kick in, I find that the adrenals can really, really get vulnerable in the postpartum period. That’s something that I’ve also observed very, very much in my community of women who are nursing in the postpartum period, they really, really can experience a lot of adrenal vulnerability. One of the markers that I like to look at for this purpose is that grandmother of all hormones pregnant alone.

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Now, why am I speaking about the adrenals so, so much and mentioning some of these examples from my clinical practice as I speak about menopause? The reason is that in menopause, as our follicles go to sleep, so to speak, or the way I like to say is your ovaries say, Talk to the hand, we’re done. We’re done. Then you have a drop in estrogen, a drop in estrogen. Now, if your adrenals are supported and you have both the psychosocial, the spiritual, the physiological, the nutrition, the supports, and the consciousness, and maybe the medical practice standing alongside you and validating you, bolstering these things as needed, which could be in the form of specific nutraceutical supplementation, such as Pregnant alone itself, such as DHEA, or with helping your body adapt to stress. First of all, recognizing the root cause of stress, which is a deep and nuanced conversation as nuanced as you yourself well, and that I hope on your pathway to healing on purpose, you do find a way to take the time for yourself to step onto that pathway and see where you are Oftentimes, we can hear in your story where you are.

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When we are flexible, when we are resilient, when we have adrenal deserve, we tend to be able to handle stress and handle situations and adapt to change. When our adrenals are vulnerable, you may find yourself being more irritable, being less excited about changes or ventures, initiatives, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of clues that I listen for in someone’s story, including a really, really important one is energy. I also want to mention one thing here vis-a-vis of the pregnant alone, the grandmother of all of our other hormones. It turns out that pregnant alone is concentrated in our brain, and as such, it is neuroprotective, which means pregnanolone protects the brain. Conversely, under chronic stress, our brain also becomes more vulnerable. The reason I think I wanted to mention this is because I wanted to segue, if I may, over to a little section that I cued up from Dr. John Gray’s book, Beyond… Actually, I’m not sure if he’s a doctor. Forgive me if I misspoke. But John Gray’s wonderful book, Beyond Mars and Venus. He writes here about estrogen. Estrogen is from Venus, and that women have turned to estrogen replacement to relieve menopausal symptoms.

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And that there is, I guess he says, right? So I’m just reading from his book. And this is not, by the way, necessarily my opinion. I’m just sharing information that’s out there, and then I’ll speak to this and qualify this a little bit more. Researchers claim that estrogen replacement can not only stop menopausal hot flashes, but also support positive moods, increase energy, and reduce anxiety. Hormone replacement for women has become common because of the harm decreased levels of estrogen can cause. Now, this is a very controversial statement in my book. Decreased estrogen has been linked to osteoporosis, low energy, lack of concentration, mood swings, depression, poor memory, infertility, low libido, and anxiety. What I wanted to do and qualify here was that the drop in estrogen more frequently in my clinical practice relates to that adrenal conversation that we just spent our precious moments together going through. I love what he says down here, which is taking hormones is not always the answer. A worldwide debate is raging today regarding the harmful side effects of taking hormones versus their possible benefits. Indeed, John gray, indeed. While some studies say taking hormones increases the women’s risk of breast cancer, others claim that it can reduce the risk.

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Some experts claim bioidentical hormones which are made from plant chemicals are safer while synthetic or animal-derived hormones are not. What I want to say here is that we are circling around a problem. However, I do not believe we’re really looking at root cause. Because root cause goes back to the adrenals, folks. Because we’re talking about a drop in estrogen, and yes, we see that drop in estrogen. But that drop in estrogen is really exposed perimenopausally because what we’re really exposing, folks, is the adrenals. It’s the adrenals. Because the estrogen that is made in the ovaries as well as the progesterone, as well as the testosterone, can mask to our unstudied eyes who have not delved deeper into hormones, can mask adrenal vulnerabilities can mask the effects of chronic or acute on chronic stress. Usually, it’s the chronic smoldering stress that we might be so accustomed to that we just think that’s the way it is. We don’t have validation out there because, folks, in my world, training in internal medicine as a medical doctor, I was told over and over again, Adrenal fatigue is not a thing. I I sometimes think it’s a little funny to say that because adrenal fatigue is not a thing when you never look at adrenal function.

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If you look at adrenal function and you routinely look at pregnenolone and progesterone and cortisol Cortisol. Some of you who are of the initiated in the world of integrative functional medicine are aware of how cortisol, which is our hormone of stress, also changes depending on time of day. A fancy way of seeing that is cortisol is circadian. It has to do with light and sleep cycles. Me looking at cortisol on bloodwork is not diagnostic. It can be a clue, certainly in the context of a story, in the context of symptoms, in the context of physical exam. Absolutely. However, in and of itself is not diagnostic. Agnostic, if we want to look at a snapshot of the adrenals and their ability to make cortisol in time, we can look at a salivary cortisol curve where we actually have a certain amount of cortisol in our saliva. We can do a spit test within 20 minutes of waking, and then 30 minutes after that, and an hour after that, and midday, and in the evening. We can get a sense of our cortisol curve where we We should be able to, and do in normal circadian patterns, amount of cortisol, which is part of normal waking.

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Traditionally, normal waking would happen often with the sun, with light hitting the back of our eyelids raises cortisol. Similarly, when we are in the dark, cortisol will lower, melatonin production starts. Now we have so many disturbances, so much artificial light and bou light, again, for the initiated This is old hat, but for some of this, this might be new information. These are profound effectors, never mind all of the other things, because anything and everything that can cause us stress, obviously, is affecting the adrenals. I hope this much we have gotten so far. When we look at the adrenals routinely, we, in fact, learn that the adrenals can absolutely be depleted. Before they become completely depleted, which is what we might see in critical care medicine in the hospital, where we cannot mount that stress response, what’s needed to deal with infection. What we saw in my hospital training in critical care in the medical ICU is oftentimes we would give, along with someone struggling to overcome, let’s say, a big pneumonia requiring intubation, would be something called stress dose steroids. That’s cortisone, that’s a big steroid, 100 milligrams, oftentimes every eight hours, to try and just boost those adrenals that have all but given up, and see if then that person can overcome the stress of infection.

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One of the signs that your adrenals may be weak is just waking up tired because you’re not mounting that cortisol that you need in the morning. Then maybe you are tired throughout the day, or maybe you’re actually hyper-reved up. Maybe you’re hyper-reved up because there are things that are stressful. In the beginning, our adaptation to stress is just mount that cortisol, mount that cortisol, mount that cortisol, mount that cortisol. Until what? Until over time, our ability to mount it and mount it and mount it and mount it is depleted. Then we lose a good amount of our estrogen production in our ovaries, and down we go. We’re exhausted, we’re depressed. But remember, this is a complex dance. Just giving estrogen back, which, yes, by the way, estrogen is a hormone that is proliferative, folks. It makes the uterus lining grow big and cushy for egg implantation. It is a growth factor. Our exposure to growth factors from estrogens, including outside estrogens from our environment that are absolutely pervasive. The fancy-schmancy The term for that is xenoestrogen, xenobiotics. In other conversations about endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome in future conversations, our exposure to these xenoestrogens is so staggering.

[00:29:43.780]
We are drowning in a swimming pool of xenoestrogens. If we are experiencing fatigue and irritability and depression and hot flashes, we should be looking to to support the adrenals. We should be looking for other things that might be stressing out our adrenals, blood sugar imbalances, toxicants, infection, life choices. We should, this is an invitation, and this is, I think, where Christian Morthrup steps into this space so beautifully and talks about the wisdom of menopause. She speaks to her own personal story, and it’s so It’s so beautiful. She speaks to how menopause offers us that status shift that can expose the truth of our vulnerability, and that It’s an invitation. It’s an invitation to step into growing a validation, an insight, an inquiry, an examination so that we can get what? We can get conscious about what is pulling our body out of balance, and we can get back on and further on our pathway to be on purpose, on a healing trajectory on a trajectory of knowing ourselves better and better and taking stock. That is really the story that Christiane Northrup tells so beautifully, God bless her forever, in her wonderful the Book, The Wisdom of Menopause.

[00:31:31.550]
If that resonates with you, she really, really is the voice for that. I really welcome you to sit down. It’s a delicious deep dive into that intersection between our physiology and our intuitive wisdom and potentially our spirituality, because we are stepping into this place of holding space for ourselves, which comes from love. It comes from growing into the belief that we deserve that attention. Dr. Gunder really speaks to that saying, It’s time for us to pay more attention to menopause because it’s really a reveal. It’s a reveal of what we’ve been doing. When the body says no, it’s a time to take stock and say, All right, well, why is the body saying no? What is the body saying no to? It’s a time to really compile all of those pieces of the puzzle. I really welcome you to step into this possibility to know yourself better. Now, I just want to say one thing here quickly before we end our conversation for today. I am putting out a request that if there are topics within this topic and I’m not getting specific here. I’m just giving an overview as far as what’s some specific test, but I do want to mention one specific test, which is the Dutch, it’s the dried urine hormone test, also known as the Dutch, it’s an acronym.

[00:33:17.150]
It’s capable of offering you both the salivary testing for the cortisol curve, but also urinary metabolites of your hormones. The reason that this is incredibly important is before, if you’re feeling bad and you just want your energy and you just want to function, and I really get that. It’s like we have to do what we need to do, we have to live our lives. But before you potentially invite the risks, the potential risks of hormone replacement therapy. Please, please, please, this is my public service announcement. Get a Dutch test. See how your hormones are being metabolized. You can actually learn from a Dutch test how your estrogens are being handled. Specifically, there is a estrogen metabolite, the 4-O-H estradiol, hydroxy estradiol, 4-O-H hydroxy estradiol that is potentially really, really carcinogenic and concerning. If your body is pushing your estrogens already prior to hormone replacement therapy down that pathway, hormone replacement therapy is not for you. The risks definitely outweigh the benefits. Before you would consider such a thing, I would love for you to find, acquire, obtain a literacy in adrenal health, look into that. I think that’s an excellent subject for a deeper dive.

[00:34:50.870]
Find someone who can provide a Dutch, or at least go and look on their website at https://dutchtest.com/. They have information there. I’ve been getting lots of emails from them with wonderful podcasts, so I think that’s a new initiative theirs. I welcome you to look at some of those podcasts and really get empowered and informed on your pathway to being as healing and healed and empowered and on purpose as you can possibly be. And the resources are really out there. Until next time, I hug you and I thank for being with me on this pathway. I look forward to being with you again soon.

[00:35:40.070]
Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 7: About Menopause appeared first on Rahav Wellness.

[00:00:10.160]
Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation. Enjoy the show. Shalom.

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It is such a beautiful word. It is such an amazing word. If you know what it means, if you have heard it, you may be familiar with the implications of a greeting, the implications of peace, but it also describes being whole. There’s this incredible wisdom and concept held within the word as we greet each other, to be in peace because we are whole. Never before has the need for us to be restored to our wholeness and to our peace more poignant than when it was then when it is rent asunder. We are now in such a time, and therefore, it is a time time to speak again from my heart to yours about the intentional act of healing on purpose in a time where more than ever we yearn to be whole as a response to what has been an act of fission. Fission is an act or process of splitting into parts. You may be familiar with the term nuclear fission. Taking a cell, each of us being a cell of humanity comprising the human race, and where a human cell is rent-asunder split into parts just like nuclear fission. It releases a tremendous amount of energy, a wave of destruction, a wave of shock, a wave of horror that we cannot assimilate.

[00:03:03.400]
It is a force of entropy. It is death. The response necessarily must be a return to wholeness, a return to peace, a return to Shalom.. That is an act of fusion, the merging of the different elements. Be they fragments of our own broken heart, be they fractured elements of society, be they a nation or nations coming together. It is the natural response, the response of fusion, the impulse to unity. It is an act of creation, just as a sperm and egg fuse in together to create the infinite power of life. It is the force of creation. It is the force of love. It is the force of union. It is the unified field of unconditional love. That is the force of creation, that is divine that is what makes the world go round and is the invitation. As a response to fusion, there must be fusion. Fusion is the act of creation. Fusion is infinite. Life is infinite. Fission is finite. Fission is destructive. It cannot last, although we all shatter in its power. Then find the greater power within ourselves because we are encoded by fusion itself. We are each products of fusion.

[00:05:08.100]
It is the ineffable and intuitive and only homies signal that will ever stand the test of time. It is absolute. It is encoded into our very DNA is the fusion, the fusion of code from mother Father, come together into the creative force that is what we call what we call it. You may call it God. You may call it creation. It is fusion. It is you, and you are me, and we are them, and they are us, and we are all together.

[00:05:54.860]
Thanks for listening to the Healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.

The post Healing on Purpose Podcast Ep. 6: Fusion Fission appeared first on Rahav Wellness.