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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.
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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.