Podcasts about ob gyn

  • 4,907PODCASTS
  • 10,983EPISODES
  • 41mAVG DURATION
  • 2DAILY NEW EPISODES
  • Sep 1, 2026LATEST

POPULARITY

20192020202120222023202420252026

Categories



Best podcasts about ob gyn

Show all podcasts related to ob gyn

Latest podcast episodes about ob gyn

As a Woman
Hypothalamic Amenorrhea: Why Your Period Disappears and How to Get It Back

As a Woman

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2026 27:57


Your period has disappeared, but pregnancy and menopause are not the reason. Could stress, underfueling, or exercise be disrupting your brain-ovary connection, and what does your body need before your cycle can recover? In this episode of the As a Woman podcast, Dr. Natalie Crawford explains hypothalamic amenorrhea and the subtler hypothalamic dysfunction that can begin while your period is still arriving. Learn how chronic stress and low energy availability affect ovulation, which symptoms may signal low estrogen, what testing can help rule out other causes, and why recovery requires more than simply eating more. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Why Did My Period Stop? 01:47 What Is Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 03:30 What Causes Functional Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 04:00 How Does the Brain Control Ovulation? 06:04 Can Stress Stop You From Ovulating? 07:33 Can Low Body Fat Stop Your Period? 08:42 Hypothalamic Amenorrhea vs. Hypothalamic Dysfunction 10:28 Can You Lose Your Period Without an Eating Disorder? 11:53 What Are the Health Risks of Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 13:26 What Are the Symptoms of Low Estrogen? 15:35 How Can You Track Ovulation and Cycle Changes? 16:48 How Is Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Diagnosed? 18:52 What Hormone Tests Are Needed for a Missing Period? 21:44 Do You Need a Bone Density Scan for Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 22:34 How Do You Recover From Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 23:38 What Should You Eat to Get Your Period Back? 24:41 Does Hormone Replacement Therapy Help Hypothalamic Amenorrhea? 25:58 Can Reducing Stress Help You Get Your Period Back? 26:26 How Long Does It Take to Get Your Period Back? AS A WOMAN WITH DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLveZDgg3_HZ9m7Wy3C6Vvyrj_NtEOwj_l  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/as-a-woman/id1449553339  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12IYOLH9liu60gk5D0bRPk  HOST RESOURCES: Order The Fertility Formula: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book  Newsletter: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliecrawfordmd  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NatalieCrawfordMD  Become a patient: https://www.forafertility.com  Earn FREE CE/CME: https://learnatpinnacle.com/education  This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network. ABOUT DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, co-founder of Fora Fertility, and author of The Fertility Formula. She helps women understand their hormones, fertility, and reproductive health so they can make informed decisions about their bodies. Disclaimer: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a doctor, but she is not your doctor. This content is for general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be It Till You See It
727. The Health Truth Every Woman Over 40 Deserves to Know

Be It Till You See It

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2026 40:16 Transcription Available


Ladies, if you have ever been told your labs look normal while your body says otherwise, this one is for you. Dr. Amy Loden is a physician who nearly died from preeclampsia and now builds her practice around what medicine misses in women. She breaks down why pregnancy complications are a warning sign, what perimenopause is really doing to you, and why heart disease deserves your attention more than you think. You will walk away knowing what to ask for and why it matters.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:How pregnancy complications reveal health risks that were already there.Why perimenopause symptoms get dismissed as normal aging.The heart disease signs that look nothing like the classic ones.Why good quality sleep matters more than hours in bed.How to eat and move to protect your metabolic health.Episode References/Links:Vitality Medical and Wellness - https://www.vitalitymwc.orgDr. Amy's TEDx talk on pregnancy - https://beitpod.com/amytedxDr. Amy Tiffany on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dramytiffanyDr. Amy Loden on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lodenThe Postpartum Pivot by Dr. Amy Loden - https://vitalitymwc.org/read-the-bookSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsGuest Bio:Dr. Amy Loden Tiffany is a St. Louis-based physician entrepreneur, author, and TEDx speaker dedicated to women's metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular health. After surviving severe preeclampsia and experiencing burnout in traditional, high-volume medicine, she pivoted her career toward a personalized, root-cause approach to patient care. As the founder of Vitality, she guides women through major life transitions—from postpartum to perimenopause—to help them recognize subtle warning signs and prevent long-term illness. Through her clinical work and her book, The Postpartum Pivot, Dr. Loden empowers high-achieving women to listen to their bodies, optimize performance, and take control of their long-term health.  If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 0:00  If we're going to call pregnancy a stress test, which is becoming an increasingly common term, is pregnancy a stress test of a woman's metabolism and her cardiovascular system? Then we have to ask, what are we stressing it for? And the way I'm looking at this is a little bit different than how I was trained, which again was if you got the problem, the solution is in the pregnancy. So what if we started looking at pregnancy from the perspective of this is an unveiling, an unveiling of what was already there, and that nothing's actually gone wrong. Lesley Logan 0:29  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:11  Oh my God, Be It babe. Get ready. Get your notepad out. Get ready. If you're driving, listen. You're gonna re-listen. You're gonna share this episode with everybody. I am so freaking stoked about the guest that we have. I fell in love with her with every single answer, and we need women like this in the medical world. So Dr. Amy Loden is our guest today. We're going to talk everything from postpartum to perimenopause and heart health, because ladies, you can't be it till you see it if you get sick, cannot. And I know it's confusing. There's so much information out there in the world, and it's like, who do we trust? What do we do? And I'm just so grateful I found her, and you're gonna love it. So make sure you get ready to hit share on this episode for women in your life and the men who need to know about what women are going through. My mind is blown on the episode. Here's Dr. Amy Loden.Lesley Logan 1:54  All right, Be It babe, I'm excited. I'm super stoked. We're gonna talk about all things women, health-related, with an amazing professional person who actually studies this stuff, not what I've read, and then I'm asserting to you because I don't want to be that influencer. I think those people need to take a little step back and let the professionals do it. We have Dr. Amy Loden here on the show, who's going to tell us everything we need to know. But Dr. Amy, we tell everyone who you are and what you rock at, kind of how you got here.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 2:20  Sure, thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here, Dr. Amy Loden. I am in St. Louis, Missouri. I help primarily women over 40, but certainly anyone who's like, "How are my hormones working for my life or not? How is my weight in the mirror matching the weight in my head or not?" And all the things that come with life transitions from postpartum to perimenopause, beyond, my goal is that women who've interacted with our team will have a better care experience because it's the care experience we want each of us to have had ourselves, and because each of us are not only professionals within the medical nursing communities, we're patients too, or daughters and sisters and mothers and neighbors and all the things. We know how much it sucks to be patient, right? And so we've tried to redesign what is the best thing for our ladies. Now, in full transparency, we do have a few dudes, but most of them have had their arms twisted by our rock-star ladies, and they are the ones that are coming because they're forced to. And eventually, they decide they like us, but we're pretty cool too. So that's who we serve, and that's what we do. And happy to go into any detail or rabbit hole you want to chase?Lesley Logan 3:21  Oh my God, Amy! I love that. When people ask about the people who listen to this podcast, we have mostly women and a few good men because there are some men out there, including my husband. They want to be interested. They want to. They want their partners, the women, their lives. They want to get what's going on. They don't want them to feel like an alien or like they're alone in this journey. So I think that's really, really cool. I also just want to highlight. I love that you brought up your patients too, because as someone who I feel very lucky to go through my perimenopause journey in today's time when people actually are talking about it, versus even 10 years ago, generations were not talking about this stuff, and I just feel it's really nice because then there's information I would never have known about HRT unless my girlfriend had told me about it. Oh, that could be going on, and then I could talk to someone. Can we go back though? Yeah, I feel like to be a doctor like yourself, who has empathy and understands, like you must have gone through a journey as well. You don't just want to do this Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 4:13  Because you wanted to do this. That's true. Lesley Logan 4:16  Maybe there are a few. There might be a few, but typically, like there there has there's a story there that got you to be like I want to care about this. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 4:24  Absolutely, yeah. So definitely with the traditional college to medical school road, really didn't understand that there's a and I say this with all the love in my heart, but there is a bit of brainwashing to be a good doctor, right? And what is a good doctor was who you've been told it is. It's not necessarily an external criteria. It's who does academic medical center say, and that was very different. I learned through transferring all of my non-medical student fears into the actual application of those fears, and then being a patient and living those fears. That I realized there's a whole lot we're not talking about. There's a whole lot that we're not being told, both as doctors and as women, as patients, and it's hard to realize you don't know what you don't know if you've been told you're the expert and you know everything, right? And most doctors don't go around saying they know everything, but there's enough patients who feel like that's what's communicated, that that's the language I'm using.Lesley Logan 5:18  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 5:19  And that's really frustrating as a patient, so I didn't realize how frustrating though it was until I was a patient, and I'm a mom of five kids, my third and fourth are twins, and really I am so grateful to live in the United States in a time in history where complicated pregnancies does not mean that mom dies, because I developed severe preeclampsia with heart failure, and my twins came 31 weeks instead of at least 37, and I nearly died the night they were born. They nearly died the night they were born, and I just am grateful that God let me be in this situation that I had the help I needed. Historically, these are not good situations. We see this on TV and in movies frequently. And something like 70,000 women a year across the globe die of the same disease I had, preeclampsia. So it's not nothing, even in our day and age, in certain countries, and even in countries where you have advanced medical care and they do everything right. It can still happen. So, that for me was the pinnacle of this isn't working. What we're telling people to do isn't working because I had done all the things.Lesley Logan 6:30  Right, you were a doctor. You did all the things. I did all the things. You enjoyed all the appointments. You were probably doing, and this is your third and fourth. So you knew what it should feel like. You knew what you should be eating. You knew all the vitamins to take.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 6:41  Correct, and it didn't work, right? It didn't work, and so I think that is the fundamental kind of if you place a pivot on why did I change how I think about healthcare as a doctor, it was because of my experience as a patient for myself. My husband had cancer twice, so being the advocate for him in those types of things, guiding my children and now my parents through healthcare, you start to carry a lot of stories, and you start to see, wow, they're not doing what I think is just the bare minimum. And if they're not doing that for me or for my family, I know they're not doing it for everybody else.Lesley Logan 7:11  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:12  And then at the same time, holding a ton of grace in my heart because that's—they're doing what they were taught.Lesley Logan 7:17  Right?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:17  Right. And they can't do differently if they don't know differently. You can't be better if you don't know to be better.Lesley Logan 7:23  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 7:23  So that is a really tight tension. But I thought I would just keep plodding through and just be a better doctor in that context of me being a patient until a little—I guess it was two years later. My daughter at that time, my oldest, was seven, and I had about 3000 patients. I was working somewhere between 65 and 80 hours a week, and had four kids at that time. And my daughter came up to me one night, and I'm opening the computer. I'm doing work like I do every night, and she says, "You're gonna make my birthday gifts. Like, can I help?" Right, totally innocent seven-year-old looking forward to her birthday knows that her mom shops online, right? And so she's like, "I want to pick my birthday presents," and I kind of stared at her. I was like, "No, no, I'm going to work. We'll do that later," and go watch whatever show. It's probably Paw Patrol for all I know, right? That's in the background. Go watch it. It's gonna be bedtime soon. And she just stands there, and I haven't even looked at her at this point. My eyes are on my computer. I'm just telling her this as I'm going. I'm totally not in the moment, right?Lesley Logan 8:19  Of course, because like you have so many, you have 3000 patients and four kids.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 8:23   I can't keep up. I can't keep up. Right? I'm barely getting enough sleep. I'm not exercising, and I'm just trying to survive. And she doesn't move. And so I remember not totally slow motion, but I remember turning to her and feeling like I was going to be like, "What?" Right? What do you need? And she's just got out of the shower, so her hair's wet. She's got her pink pajamas on, bright big blue eyes, and they're full of tears. And there are just silent tears tracking down her face, and I'm horrified. Oh my gosh, what's wrong? Right now, I'm in fix-it mode.Lesley Logan 8:55  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 8:55  And she still doesn't really budge, and she just says in a very sad voice, "Mommy. Why do you love your job more than me?"Lesley Logan 9:05  Oh.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:07  Yes. So the twins tried to kill me. She did kill me, right? Like, that was a knife in my heart because nothing ever had I wanted to be better than a so-called good doctor than to be a good mom.Lesley Logan 9:17  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:18  And that was for me the moment that I realized I'm not doing either of these well, and I'm not showing up how I want to be personally or professionally. I'm certainly not taking care of my health. I'm not doing the things I'm telling my patients to do. Like, it was a moment where I really felt the failures. I felt all the feelings, and I told my husband that night, "This is not working anymore." And he actually thought I thought was talking about our marriage, and so he was like, "Oh my gosh, what's wrong with our marriage?" Right? No, but I need to, like, redo. We have to redo this. I either have to retire, or I have to do something different.Lesley Logan 9:51  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 9:51  And he was like, "You're not retiring. You will drive me crazy. Go find something different to do, and I will make sure our family is okay." And so I did. And this June will be five years of having Vitality here in St. Louis and serving women and trying to lean into all the pain and the things and the feelings they're dealing with from all the things and the feelings I dealt with having walked that path.Lesley Logan 10:13  Yeah. Oh, Dr. Amy, I love that you shared that whole story because I think there's so many women who are listening here and, like, they don't have, they may have one kid or they have no kids, but, like, I think we can all relate to, like, having just too much on the plate because.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 10:27  Right.Lesley Logan 10:28  Hello, my high-achieving woman. I see you, everyone here listening. We call recovering perfectionists and overachievers. There's nothing wrong with being a high achiever, but what happens is we tend to just keep saying yes to things, and we're like, yeah, we can fit that one more thing in, that one more thing. All of a sudden, it just comes to, like, a volcano breaking point. Yes, and because we don't, we don't see the signs early that we are at the breaking point. We don't, you know, we, it's almost, it's actually proven to be not true. But everyone uses the frog in the boiling water, right? Like, we just kind of, like, you don't realize how hot it's getting until it's until your daughter is crying in front of you. Oh, exactly.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 11:05  Yes, it was awful. I never want to relive that moment.Lesley Logan 11:08  Yeah, but also, like, thank goodness for her because that she felt brave enough to say that. Like, what a badass she is. I mean, she's just going to be, like, she's just going to be a girl who speaks her mind. She does.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 11:18  She's 13 now, and she heard me tell that story once, and now she's like, "Well, you have to credit me for opening your business because I hadn't said what I did." I was like, "Won't you just tone it down a notch, please?"Lesley Logan 11:27  It's called balance, babe. It's called balance. Yes. Okay. So, can we, like, let's get to some of the health stuff that I think our listeners want to—I want to definitely get into perimenopause, but I do want to, because we started with a pregnancy, and I have had family members who, you know, have had preeclampsia in their, and it's scary. So, how are pregnancy complications connected to long-term heart risk? I don't think anyone's thought about that. I just thought, like, if it's because I don't have kids, like it's going to screw up your pelvic floor, and you might have to rebuild your abs and these other things. But I didn't know it can affect your heart long term.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 12:01  I had no idea. I'm so glad you brought that up. So I actually did a TEDx talk on this very topic, where the idea is pregnancy is so much more than just the birth of a kid. That's how we think about pregnancy in our culture. That's even how we think of it medically, right? Like if you have preeclampsia, you have gestational diabetes, you have high blood pressure, whatever in pregnancy, the answer is end the pregnancy, deliver the kid if they're old enough, right? Like, get, move it along and it's gone. But that I strongly believe is not true. We can't test this in a lab, so you have to do a little bit of extrapolation here. But if we're going to call pregnancy a stress test, which is becoming an increasingly common term, is pregnancy a stress test of a woman's metabolism and her cardiovascular system? Then we have to ask, what are we stressing it for? And the way I'm looking at this is a little bit different than how I was trained, which again was, if you got the problem, the solution is in the pregnancy. So, what if we started looking at pregnancy from the perspective of this is an unveiling, an unveiling of what was already there, and that nothing's actually gone wrong. It's scary. It's horrifying. And yes, absolutely, people die. So how can I say nothing's gone wrong? What I mean is nothing has gone wrong in the context of the situation we put your body in. It's exactly responding the way it should for the context it's in. So if I have underlying insulin resistance, and then I put a pregnancy on top of that or perimenopause, and I'm starting to have more insulin resistance. Well, of course I'm going to develop gestational diabetes. If I'm having a lot more fluid retention and I'm putting up a low weight, of course my blood pressure is going to go up, right? If I've got underlying inflammation, of course preeclampsia is going to develop. So I think we need to stop and think about it as it's not done; it is unmasked.Lesley Logan 13:42  Got it. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 13:42  And then once you know it's unmasked, you treat it.Lesley Logan 13:45  I see. I see. Because again, we think of pregnancy as just the baby, so you have the baby, but it's well, but there's a problem, an underlying problem that the pregnancy revealed is what you're saying. And so great if having the baby is the safest thing for both people, we do that. But also, you still have this underlying issue.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 14:01  Yes, it's still there. Correct.Lesley Logan 14:03  Yes, and I don't think anyone does that. I think they're just, "Okay. Now you don't have gestational diabetes anymore." But I have had clients who had it, and then afterwards, so what do we got? Oh, I'm fine. Are you correct? I don't think so. I'm not a doctor, but they're not fine. Don't just be diabetes. Yeah, for a moment. Yes.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 14:19  So I actually experienced this as a patient too. I went in after my first pregnancy with gestational diabetes. At the time, I was living in New York City. I walked everywhere. I was a normal weight. I ate pretty clean, and despite being in residency, I'd got decent sleep. I didn't have any other kids. It's my first kid, so I got decent sleep. Right, but I had the baby after having had gestational diabetes. I go see my OB, and she's, "Oh, just follow up with your primary doctor." I go see my primary doctor, and he's, "Your weight's normal, your labs are normal. We're done," and that is how I was trained too. So again, lots of love in my heart. They're not; they're just not told. But for more than 10 years, we've known that women who have these high-risk pregnancies are at high risk not just for diabetes, but heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, dementia. Listen, I can't treat dementia well in the clinic, right? So why wouldn't I want all hands on deck trying to prevent it?Lesley Logan 15:07  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 15:07  But that's not how our medical professionals are trained—nurses, advanced practice providers, any of them. And so we're asking people and expecting people to fill in a gap they don't know exists, and so all these reproductive-age women are falling into it. And then where it gets really interesting is some of the same things you have immediately postpartum in all your different types of hormone fluctuations are matched intermittently for 10 to 15 years before menopause when you're in the perimenopausal years.Lesley Logan 15:32  What?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 15:33  Correct, but that's why these women are feeling, "I'm going to my doctor, I'm putting on weight, I'm doing all the things, it's not working," and they're being gaslit, partly because their doctors don't know what they don't know, and partly because we're not acknowledging this is the same physiologic status of hormones that are different than baseline. So we're not in a country, and we don't have the testing that would promote or facilitate checking what is your normal hormone level at 18, so that we know what 18 should look like, and then by 45, you know, we're not. So we're trying to patchwork together a whole bunch of tests, and different labs have different testing, and different people say different things about testing. It's very confusing.Lesley Logan 16:10  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 16:11  And you end up with women suffering. And at the end of the day, that's the problem I'm trying to solve: is how do we stop these women from suffering? Because they are called to live big lives, to be ambitious for a purpose, for a calling. They have a lot to do, and their health is one of their biggest assets. It should not be a liability.Lesley Logan 16:27  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 16:27  And that's what's happening, especially for women who are trying to not work just in the home but outside the home. Right? There's a lot they're carrying. Yeah. So that's, I don't remember. Sorry, I'm having a total perimenopause moment. I don't remember where we started with that question here. I'll stop there. Lesley Logan 16:42  Don't worry, babe. I got my focus meds on the ADHD today, so I'm tracking. So we're good. But we were talking about the postpartum, and then we got into those hormones that switch as, and they can repeat into perimenopause. And I think this is fascinating. I love that you brought up. It doesn't matter if you're in the home or out of the home. We have big lives. Correct. We can't have our health be a liability, and I think for a lot of us, it feels like, like my girlfriend's a weight-loss coach for women over 40 who feel like their body gave a middle finger. That's what her coaching is, and it's all about not going to yo-yo diet. That's not going to work. We have to figure out what is the underlying issues, and it can only go so far because you said we don't test our hormones at 18. We don't do that, so we don't know what is normal for us, and I remember I was having a lot of health issues, digestive issues in my 30s, and no doctor could help me. In fact, one doctor sending me to, I was in this weird part where they study HIV and Ebola in the hospital, and she's like, "Do you know why you're here?" I don't know why I'm here. I don't. This scares the hell out of me. This feels like a department I should not be in. I'm not in any pain. I feel like I'm taking someone's spot, and so because he could, he just couldn't figure out what's going on my stomach. So I found someone who did an actual test of everything. He's so range normal. We don't know what normal is for you. We just know what the average person of this population of people that who knows who they were that were tested. So what is normal for you might not be the average. And I was, "Oh well, that's the first time anyone said anything that makes sense. That's the first time." So you can be in range, but for your hormones, but it wasn't in range for you because maybe you were used to higher testosterone, you're used to higher things. And so I love that people like you exist. I'm sorry for the frustration of your own journey, but also without people like you, women like me wouldn't have someone going, "Hey, actually, maybe you should be on testosterone right now," even though the, this is what it is. Mine was actually zero, but people, you know, we can actually get you help because I feel so much better because someone finally was listening to me and thought, "Yes, we're not going to compare you to a random person. We got to compare you to how you're used to feeling."Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:42  Correct. And for most people, that can't happen in the traditional system.Lesley Logan 18:47  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:47  You can't do that in a 10-minute visit.Lesley Logan 18:49  Right.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:50  You can't do it when your doctor has 3000 patients, 10-minute visits, and they really don't actually know who you are.Lesley Logan 18:55  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 18:56  You just can't. So we've got a little bit of unrealistic expectations as a society, and then you know any women's magazine or journal article you read says, "Talk to your doctor about this." So then you go in, I'm all prepared. I have my list. I've done it too, folks. Right? This is not a criticism, but they, they can't. They don't have the ability to process it, and the way they're paid is based on the questions they ask you for insurance. So every incentive is misaligned, and at the end of the day, women, people are being screwed.Lesley Logan 19:22  Yeah, yeah. No, it's so true. So I'm glad we talked about the postpartum. I want to get into now. We're in the perimenopause, and yep, this is hard because you mentioned the hormone shift of people after postpartum is its own crazy world. I keep checking on my sister-in-law every day. How are you feeling? Are you feeling okay? Right. You feel okay? She's, "I'm fine." Are you fine? Let me just, I just want you to know. It's okay if you feel different, right? I think I'm crazy, but I know that that people don't realize how they're feeling, and it's hard to get to the doctor until it's too late. So I'm just, I'm on her. But for people like me, we didn't have children, so we have never experienced a crazy shift. We just start to experience, "I don't feel like my, anymore," and all the symptoms are so different for every single person. I'm not having hot flashes, but I'm, I got to keep my hair still here. But my inflammation was insane. I was putting on weight and working out and eating the same. And I don't understand what's going on. You know, so can we talk a little bit about what, I don't know where you want to start with that. So you tell me where you want to start with my post, my perimenopausal people who are not necessarily attributing these changes to that.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 20:27  So I think the biggest confusion I see in the exam room conversations is that there's just question of, am I in perimenopause or not? And it's more of a less of a yes-no and more of, are you on the spectrum, and where on the spectrum are you? And so if you think of it as a sliding scale, because some months those ovaries are working really great, and you feel all the feels, and you're 18 again, but a lot of months maybe you're more like 20 or 25, right? And then maybe out of the blue, I feel like I got run over by shock. Nothing's working for two or three months, and then we're back to 25, right? And so it's ups and downs. You're like, what is happening? It is a roller coaster, and it runs anywhere from 10 to 15 years before you actually go through menopause. So I think of it as reverse adolescence, and I think it's completely ironic that God lets us have teenage girls when moms are going through perimenopause because that is just double-adolescence whammy, right?Lesley Logan 21:19  And no wonder, no wonder marriages don't survive certain things. Right, you have a daughter going through puberty and a wife with a pair of menopause. Good luck to the husband. Correct, becauseAmy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 21:28  I want to have sex. I don't want to have sex. I have pimples all over my face. I don't want to go to the house. I do. My belly's bloated. It's not like my mood's up. All the things, and it's all in reverse. So it's a it's a period of a woman's life that I think needs to be acknowledged, and then within the healthcare system, there's more noise about it over the last five years. You're seeing more and more people talk about this, but there's not a lot of standardization, and so you're getting chiropractic, functional medicine, traditional medicine. You're getting all sorts of different recommendations. So my hope is that over the next decade, we start to see some standardization, and we start to say this is what is normal for this population. You still have to apply it to the person. You cannot take population data and apply it to individuals and say that you're going to have good luck, bye. We'll see you in a year. That doesn't work. What I do think is that women need to know what's normal for that time, and then they need to decide, do they want to do something about it beyond what their body is experiencing? And here's some really interesting data that I hope your listeners suddenly stop and listen. If they don't hear anything I've said yet, this will be really important for women who have hot flashes and night sweats. Either one, they're actually the same thing. We call them vasomotor symptoms. When you have those at a certain degree, so that they're happening most days of the week, more than 10 times a day would be an easy target to kind of pay attention to. You have that, and you choose not to take hormones. You actually have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke. That does not mean every woman in that category can or should take it. There may be reasons they can't, but the hormones we use today are different than what in the Women's Health Initiative that came out in the early 2000s. So you're getting a lot of confusion because women are reading about data from that, not realizing that it has changed, and that study is not going to be redone. It was a huge study. We're not going to see data like that, so we have to make really informed decisions. But cardiovascular disease, hear me, ladies. Cardiovascular disease, which includes stroke and heart failure, kills more women every year than all your cancers combined. Yeah, I get the women and they come in religiously for their mammograms or their Pap tests, right? But they don't know that the bigger risk is that they're going to die of heart disease, cardiovascular stroke, and we know that one in eight women, roughly, have breast cancer risk, and those women get it. One in two women are getting heart disease. So there's one inLesley Logan 23:50  Two.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 23:51  One in two. So that means there's two of us on this call, right? We already know I'm going to get it because I had preeclampsia. So I'm the one. Lesley Logan 23:56  I was going to say. I hope it's not maybe. I hope it's not you. But, like, thank God you know that because I think it's one and two, especially if you don't know. Because if you know that you're at risk, you do. Then you can you do something. I am. I'm double the risk for breast cancer, so I have to do an MRI and a mammogram every six months, and I have some decisions I might have to make in my life. But because I know.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 24:18  Right, I can take.Lesley Logan 24:20  I can take action. Yeah, correct.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 24:22  And you know, using that same kind of history, if someone comes in my office and says that I don't want to take hormones because I was a breast cancer, I'm like, that's fine. But let's look at all the facts. Let's lay it out like your financial advisor does, and then you can make an informed decision. Because just acting out of fear or reacting is not wise either.Lesley Logan 24:38  I actually really appreciate you mentioning that because it's true. If I'm, I'm very lucky in that I still get to do the HRT that I'm on, even with my risk. But also they're checking me every six months, and I'm checking me. So if anything's going to happen, we're going to catch it so much more quicker. Whereas the hard stuff, there's only so much you can do with that. And so if you're, especially if you're not aware. Say there's all conversations, but I liked the way you laid it out with the wealth manager. I just met with mine. He laid out here's where we're being aggressive. Here's where we're doing this. Here's what's going on here. We're going to move this over here because we're going to risk-manage these risks. And I think that's that's a better way to look at it because we're not going to, every single one of us is unfortunately going to experience something because it's a body. We're not a machine. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:21  It wears out.Lesley Logan 25:22  I did not know it was one in two, girl.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:26  Yeah, and what's even more disturbing, you may have heard a lot of women have by now that women's heart disease presents differently than men.Lesley Logan 25:32  Yeah, can you tell us just in case my people haven't heard because I didn't know it was one in two? So let's go over the signs.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 25:38  A lot of times people think of what's the so-called traditional? It's the jaw pain, the radiation of pain from your chest up to your jaw, to your back, down your left arm. Very classic symptoms. Classic because it was studied in men, and then we have these so-called atypical for women because they're not typical compared to men, but they're classic for women. And so, got a little bit of lingo here that it doesn't make total sense. But for women, sometimes it's they just feel a lot more anxious than they've been for unclear reasons. They have this sense that something bad is on the horizon. They can't really place why their sleep is different. Maybe they're having some shortness of breath they didn't used to have. Maybe they go up the stairs in their house, with a laundry basket, and they're huffing and puffing when six months ago they weren't. So it can be very subtle differences. It could be a new fatigue. Check labs are normal, but the fatigue's still there. That worries me when I hear women say this. Unfortunately, the number one sign that you have heart disease is sudden death.Lesley Logan 26:33  Oh.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:34  So let that sink in for a second. So we can't always wait on what the signs are.Lesley Logan 26:39  Yeah, we can't fix that. Right. Correct. Okay, so that's hard because our signs are also. I feel like high-achieving women would so easily brush away that anxiety.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:51  All the stuff. Correct. Because I have a lot of tabs open.Lesley Logan 26:54  Yeah, I got this going on, or I haven't been working out, so of course I'm out of breath going up the stairs. They would just so easily.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 26:58  It's May, it's graduation season. It's wedding season, right? This is just aging, and that's not the story at all. The problem is 10-minute visit with your doctor who has 3000 patients. They don't know who you are. They're not going to notice that this is different for you.Lesley Logan 27:13  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:13  Decreased exercise tolerance is a big one. And so, if you could walk three miles every day in your neighborhood, now you're like, "Wow, I'm really struggling to get through one." I'm worried about that. I want to know what's going on and why.Lesley Logan 27:25  Yeah. So I guess since one getting a 10-minute visit is hard. I, where I live in, I live in Las Vegas. Last I heard, we are short general practitioners by 1400. I don't have one. I go to a women's clinic, and I'm really grateful. It's a, it's also a student-teacher thing. So I actually, they've caught things because the students are asking the questions because they'reAmy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:44  Yes, yes.Lesley Logan 27:46  I love them. I'm so grateful for them, but are there things that women can do to check their heart, or is it just being, is it just noticing the one mile versus a three mile? What can we, what are the signs we need to be checking on?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 27:57  Certainly be aware of what your body is telling you. Again, if you have to remember nothing else, this is another one: is that your body is smart; it will talk to you, but you have to listen.Lesley Logan 28:05  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 28:06  So that's really essential. If something's different, say something. You're right. There's a big collapse, if you will, of how much support we have in healthcare, whether it's nurse practitioners or chiropractor or whatever. And the issue is not all of them are trained the same way. So when I worked in the OB/GYN clinic, it became apparent to both of us, on both sides of it, that OBs know stuff about women's health. I don't know, but I know stuff about metabolic and heart health that the OBs aren't taught, and most women use their OBs as their primary care, at least to a certain age.Lesley Logan 28:32  Right.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 28:33  And again, you don't know what you don't know, so you don't realize what you're not looking for that you should be. And our system's not set up for good collaboration. So if I could tell women, here's a checklist of things I want to make sure you get, your doctor is going to give you some resistance, most likely because they don't realize that lipoprotein with a little a, it's like in parentheses at the end of it, not the big A. Lipoprotein little a. If you have that mutation, and 10 to 20% of our population does, you have a different rate of plaque development, at least risk for that than the average risk will miss. If you have high insulin levels, you have a higher risk that you're going to be on a pathway toward diabetes. Those are not things that are standard checks. So knowing that there's other tests you can ask for, and even if your insurance doesn't cover it, they're not expensive tests. Just get it once, right? Have an idea of what's going on in your body once gives you a ton of information. I offer a lot of our patients to wear different glucose monitors, even if they're not on diabetes. And all my physicians who are listening to this are probably like, "You do what?" But the reason is, if you can figure out that your glucose and insulin are high before you develop diabetes or pre-diabetes, if you figured out that insulin-resistant stage, that's a lot easier to fix, and our doctors aren't even taught about what is insulin resistance, what is the criteria for it, and how do we reverse it?Lesley Logan 29:47  Right, because there's some prevention we can do if we have information.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 29:50  There's a ton, and it's things women can do in their homes or their businesses. It's not stuff I'm doing in the exam room.Lesley Logan 29:56  Yeah, and that's also, you know, you're listening to this podcast, you're kind of a go. Anyway, so you're gonna, you'll take the action. Our health insurance is very bizarre. I thought it was crap because, but it has a lot of preventative stuff that goes on with it. Hey, we want to put this thing in your house and check your heart and some other levels every, I don't know, two or three times a week. They keep calling them. I have two adults. We have two ADHD adults in this household. The box is here. One of us will open it when it becomes the pressure. I just have to hang tight. We'll get there. But I'm really impressed by that because we don't have access to a regular doctor. So what information can we gather so we could be watching it and monitoring it? So we can advocate for ourselves if something comes up. So having that prevention is really amazing. Okay, so we talked a little bit about the perimenopause and the different things. What are some simple shifts that women can make now to protect their future? I mean, obviously we have a wide range of women, so the now is different. But what are some things that they could be doing? Because I do think that they are getting information from the magazines and the Instagrams, and we should get it from the person who's experienced it and has seen it. You know, so you.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 31:00  Some easy things, and I say easy relative because they're easy to do, which means they're easy not to do. So acknowledging that, right? It's real. Number one, understanding that just because you get eight hours of sleep, if they're not high-quality hours, you've got a metabolic risk from your sleep not being normal. That's important to understand because you spend a third of your life asleep, right?Lesley Logan 31:19  What's a metabolic risk? Just in case my people. So.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 31:22  If you don't get good-quality sleep, your cortisol goes up. It's one of your stress hormones, and when cortisol goes up, glucose goes up. When glucose goes up, insulin goes up. Insulin's your fat-storing hormone. So even without your sex hormones being involved, or the ghrelin and leptin you're hearing about with weight and GLPs and all that, just those, you're not getting good sleep. It's going to be a problem. Insulin resistance is going to go up. Insulin resistance means your cells are not listening to the insulin your body is giving it, so your body works harder to get more insulin, and the cells work harder to ignore it, and it just keeps going in a vicious cycle. So if we consider that that's the root cause of a lot of these problems we've been talking about, we fix that. Number one is get good sleep, get good-quality sleep, and it's not, not just enough time in bed.Lesley Logan 32:02  Yeah, so.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 32:03  That's important. Number two is most people don't realize that they're doing it backwards. They're, if they're, if they're even able to get exercise in their life right now, right? So we're going to make the assumption that you figured out some exercise regimen you like. We're, we're at that level, but they're doing it at the wrong time, and they're doing it in a way that they're sabotaging their end result. So rather than going to the gym and then going and eating dinner, or going to the gym first thing in the morning and skipping breakfast and all these things, you need to eat protein and fat, and then you need to move your thighs. I don't care if that's jumping jacks, going for a walk, running up the stairs, something where your thighs are moving regularly for 10 minutes. So make it whatever you like doing. This can be the mom at home who's doing all sorts of fun class activity with her kid, right? Like moving the baby around or the teenager can be equally fun to move around for what it's worth. And then it could be the CEO who's getting ready for a meeting and has 10 minutes after eating whatever lunch she had in the five-minute break she did, right? So looking at what makes sense in your life, but 10 minutes of physical activity, ideally after every meal, that's not realistic, but that's ideal. And then you start with the one meal a day you can do, and you do it most days of the week to start with, because most of us have to figure out how to make it a habit.Lesley Logan 33:15  Yeah.Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 33:15  But movement for 10 minutes after eating, it's, it's crucial. I cannot stress that enough.Lesley Logan 33:20  I didn't realize it was. It makes total sense moving your body after eating because I like to go for a walk after I have lunch. Otherwise, I'm tired. Correct. I can't go back to work now. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 33:30  The reason you're tired though is because your glucose goes up and your insulin went up to match it. When you walk right after you eat, glucose still goes up, but it's less, and so you have less insulin spike. Insulin is the bright driver here, and so you've got to do the movement after. And if it helps to understand why, think back to what our ancestors did 1000 years ago. Right? We weren't checking hormones. We weren't checking insulin. We weren't talking about hacks. We were trying to survive most of the time. Yeah. But the things they did is they, if they, what, after they ate, they moved around. Right? Like they were building their shelters. They were taking care of the kids. They were moving in the community, helping build, create, relocate, whatever. They were always moving, and they did not get the whole three square meals a day. That's bogus. You don't need three meals a day, okay? And most of my ladies don't realize that they're eating their nutrients potentially in the wrong order for their body. That they're eating them in the wrong time for the cycle of the month they're in, they're not getting enough protein, not getting enough fat for their hormones and their brain, and it doesn't happen quickly, right? It's months, years, maybe even a couple decades before they're, I don't know what happened, but my body in the mirror is not the body in my head. This is not who I am. There's a disconnect, and they finally are at that place where they have to do something, where the body is forcing them to stop because they've pushed it as hot as you know.Lesley Logan 34:44  Oh my God, that's a whole episode. We're having you back. I'm just telling you right now because I want to have a whole episode on the whole. Because what I do know is if you eat certain things, if you work out too late, if you get your cortisol up, sleep that. I have been trying to figure out sleep for over a decade, and I, I get good-quality sleep most of the time. But I'm obsessed with it because I'm like, I don't want Alzheimer's. I do not want heart problems. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing at the gym if I'm not sleeping. None of that matters. Doesn't matter what you're, If you don't get good sleep, all the rest is gonna just fall apart anyways. So it's interesting. It makes sense about the food because I remember when I was having problems with my cycle and I had my one of my doctor friends, she said you should try seed cycling because I just, the worst cramps and, like, the worst everything was just the worst in the world, and so I tried seed cycling and my goodness, you know, I'm not a woo-woo girl, but the seed cycling makes, I got, I had no more zits, my boobs didn't hurt as bad, everything leveled out, and I didn't need any extra hormones for it. I was, whoa, so now there must be more. We need to know about it. So we'll have to have you back for that. I can talk to you forever. So we'll just, this is part one of many. I'm just going to take a brief break and then find out if people can find you, follow you, and work with you. All right, Dr. Amy Loden, where do you hang out? You mentioned St. Louis. Can people work with you if they're not in St. Louis? How does this work?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 36:03  Yes, absolutely. Best way to get into contact with our office is just going to our website, www.vitalitymwc.org. They can sign up for a consultation, and we can go through what their options are. There is also lots of opportunity if you don't want to work with us directly, but you want to continue the conversation and hear what we're seeing. I do all the social media I can so that people can hear what's being said in their exam rooms and have it in their real lives too. So you can do that on follow me at Dr. Amy Tiffany, whether it's on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook. You find it where they're also on LinkedIn at Dr. Amy Loden. So lots of places depends on what their needs are. One special offer I do have for your audience: we talked about pregnancy and perimenopausal bit through this conversation, they can contact my office for a free physical copy of my book, The Postpartum Pivot. And before you stop listening, ladies, and you think, "Well, I'm not postpartum." If you've had a baby, you're postpartum even it's 20 years ago. Your body's different than it was before that baby, and so you can understand what does this look like for perimenopause and other types of areas that we go through as we grow less young, but grow more wise.Lesley Logan 37:03  Oh my God! Every one of my female females, that's where your Christmas present is. Sorry, just gonna get a doctor because they don't. It's, if their doctor doesn't tell them, they don't know, right? And then they are just going through it. And I feel so bad because every woman in my life is such a badass, and then they get their body doesn't keep up with what they're wanting to do in life, and then it just becomes not just like a liability, but like this hangup. So you are amazing. Okay, you've given us some great stuff already. I mean, we're gonna have to rewind, and I'll listen to this. I've got, you know, getting my notepad out, but our bold, executable, intrinsic, or targeted steps people can take to be it till they see it. What do you have for us?Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 37:37  I want each one. When you be it as you see it, I want you to be true to what your body's telling you, and recognize nothing's gone wrong. Listen when things are happening and they seem like it's a crisis. Nothing's gone wrong. Your body's talking to you. Listen, and when you listen, you become more wise. You become a better version of yourself.Lesley Logan 37:55  Okay, I really love that. We talked about that earlier, but it's true. Some of us think our body is against us, and it's doing something to us. But really, it's like, hello. The alarm bells. Amy Loden Tiffany, MD, MBA 38:05  It's doing exactly what it should do for the situation we've put it in. That doesn't mean we like it. You get diabetes. No one's like, oh yeah, my body did exactly what it's supposed to do. But if we understand that, then it becomes a neutral thought. It's not bad or wrong. It's I didn't listen, so now I'm going to stop, and the best place to reverse is as soon as you realize you're going in the direction. Right? It's not to keep going in the wrong direction. So nothing has gone wrong. We just need to listen. We need to turn around, create a better story.Lesley Logan 38:33  Love it. Love it. This is and then so enlightening. This is so fun. Thank you so much for being you and your and and the journey that you've been on is something we can all benefit from. So thank you for that, you guys. We all need to share this episode with all the women in our lives, and I would love for you to make sure that Dr. Amy knows your favorite takeaways. Send them to the Be It Pod as well. And since I'm going to have her back, not that I even like asked her beforehand, but I'm just going to tell her she's doing that. You can send your questions, and we'll make sure we get that. So, beitpod.com/questions. Until next time, my loves, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 39:03  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 39:45  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 39:50  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 39:54  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 40:02  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 40:05  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

SHE MD
The New Perimenopause: A Masterclass with Dr. Mary Claire Haver

SHE MD

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2026 70:43


The frozen shoulder. The 3 a.m. anxiety. The brain fog and the rage that come out of nowhere. For decades, women were told it was "just stress" and sent home with an antidepressant. This week, Dr. A and Mary Alice welcome back the woman changing that — Dr. Mary Claire Haver, the OB-GYN The New York Times calls the "Menopause Queen" — for a full masterclass on perimenopause.It can start in your late 30s, it lasts 7 to 10 years, and almost no one warned us. Dr. Haver explains what's really happening in your body and brain, why so many women are dismissed, and what you can actually do about it — HRT, progesterone, vaginal estrogen, sleep, mood, and the myth that you have to wait until it's "bad enough" to get help. Because suffering isn't the price of admission.Subscribe to SHE MD Podcast for expert tips on PMOS, endometriosis, fertility, hormonal balance, mental health, and more. Share with friends and visit SHE MD website and Ovii for research-backed resources, holistic health strategies, and expert guidance on women's health and well-being.SponsorsTalkiatry: Head to talkiatry.com/shemd to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. Babbel: Right now, Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to Babbel.com/SheMD Egglife: Find Egglife chillin' in the fridge at Aldi, Whole Foods, Kroger, Target, Walmart & more. Visit egglifefoods.com to find a retailer near you. Acely: Visit Acely.com and use code SHE MD for 20% off. Ladder: If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit/SHEMD and take a quick quiz to find your perfect Ladder plan. Use our link and get a free 7-day trial with NO credit card, and $10 off your first month if you join. Skylight Frames: Right now, Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15-inch calendars by going to myskylight.com/shemd. What You'll LearnWhat perimenopause actually is and how it differs from menopauseWhy perimenopause can begin in your late 30s or 40sWhy brain fog, sleep disruption, anxiety and mood changes can be early symptomsWhen hormone therapy may be considered during perimenopauseThe difference between HRT/MHT, birth control and vaginal estrogenWhat we know, and still don't know, about HRT and cardiovascular and bone healthHow GLP-1 medications can affect muscle and bone healthThe role of protein, resistance training, vitamin D, omega-3s, fiber and creatineWhat declining estrogen can mean for vaginal and urinary healthWhat women should know about HRT and breast cancer riskWhy listening to your symptoms and advocating for yourself mattersKey Timestamps00:00 Why Every Vagina Needs Estrogen01:32 Welcome Back Dr. Mary Claire Haver05:44 What Perimenopause Actually Is08:44 The "Zone Of Chaos" And Brain Glitching18:08 How To Evaluate A Perimenopausal Patient20:01 All Vaginas Need Estrogen24:50 Why Perimenopause Is The Best Time To Start HRT32:13 GLP-1s, Muscle Loss, And Bone Health36:41 Patches, Pellets, Creams: What Actually Works40:23 Debunking The HRT-Breast Cancer Myth50:33 Creatine, Vitamin D, And Key Supplements54:56 The Histamine-Hormone Connection58:12 Vulvar Changes Nobody Warns You About1:04:37 Lightning Round: Hormone Myths Busted1:07:19 Three Takeaways For Every WomanKey TakeawaysPerimenopause is a years-long biological transition, not simply the period immediately before menopause.Symptoms can appear before periods become irregular or hot flashes begin.Brain fog, sleep disruption and mental health changes can be among the earliest signs of fluctuating hormones.Hormone therapy does not necessarily have to wait until a woman is fully menopausal; treatment should be individualized based on symptoms, risks and benefits.Bone health, cardiovascular health, muscle mass and metabolic health all deserve attention during the menopause transition.If using GLP-1 medications, Dr. Haver emphasizes adequate protein, resistance training and monitoring body composition rather than focusing solely on the number on the scale.Vaginal and urinary symptoms can be related to declining estrogen and may be treated with local estrogen therapy.The goal of understanding perimenopause is not simply to get through it, but to enter the next stage of life informed, healthy and empowered.Guest Bio: Dr. Mary Claire HaverDr. Mary Claire Haver is a board-certified OB-GYN and a leading voice in menopause and women's health. She has dedicated her career to helping women better understand the biological changes that happen during midlife and has been called the “Menopause Queen” by The New York Times. She is the author of the bestselling The New Menopause and her newest book, The New Perimenopause, which focuses on the years leading up to menopause. She also hosts the podcast Unpaused and shares women's health education across social media.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

BackTable OBGYN
Ep. 132 Gynecologic Cancer Surveillance: Best Practices & Updates with Dr. Ritu Salani

BackTable OBGYN

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2026 48:38


Does catching cancer earlier with surveillance always translate to better outcomes for gynecologic cancer patients? On this episode of BackTable Women's Health, hosts Dr. Mona Guo and Dr. Marcia Ciccone interview Dr. Ritu Salani, Professor of OBGYN at UCLA and lead author of the updated SGO surveillance clinical practice statements. They discuss how post–curative-intent surveillance has evolved amid limited prospective evidence, review the latest guidelines, and highlight the real-world challenges of balancing early detection, patient safety, and cost. --- Get the BackTable apphttps://www.backtable.com/app --- Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction03:05 - Evolving Guidelines and Consensus10:02 - Lead-Time Bias and Cost Considerations12:05 - Maintenance Therapy and Surveillance Nuances14:44 - Ovarian and Endometrial Cancer: Imaging vs Exam20:24 - Key Takeaways from the TOTEM Trial24:04 - Future Tools, Lifestyle Counseling, and Shared Care27:21 - Cytology, HPV Testing, and Post-Radiation Surveillance31:13 - Hormone Therapy Considerations34:37 - ctDNA and MRD Testing37:39 - Emerging Technologies and Limitations43:22 - Rapid Fire Takeaways45:33 - Closing Thoughts --- More about this episode The conversation explores practice variability, the lack of clear survival benefits from routine imaging and tumor markers, and the risks of cascade testing and lead-time bias. Dr. Salani reviews the TOTEM trial data for endometrial cancer, the importance of symptom review and pelvic exams (especially for lower genital tract cancers), and the reduced role of cytology, even in cervical cancer after radiation. They also discuss shared-care models, lifestyle counseling, hormone therapy considerations, and the promise and limitations of emerging technologies like ctDNA and MRD testing during maintenance therapy. --- Resources TOTEM Trialhttps://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jco.22.00471 2010 Ovarian Cancer CA-125 Trialhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20888993/ Society of Gynecologic Oncology Clinical Practice Statement on Surveillancehttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41308226/ --- BackTable Women's Health is the go-to podcast for gynecologists, gynecologic surgeons, and other healthcare professionals focused on women's health. Download the free BackTable app to get early access to new episodes, cases, and courses curated by physicians in your specialty. ► https://www.backtable.com/app

Everyday Wellness
BONUS: Practical Solutions to Manage Perimenopause and Menopause Symptoms with Dr. Mary Claire Haver

Everyday Wellness

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2026 59:11


Today, I am thrilled to reconnect with a previous guest, Dr. Mary Claire Haver.  Dr. Haver is a board-certified OBGYN, a certified menopause provider, and the founder of Mary Claire Wellness, a private medical practice focusing on women in midlife. Her best-selling book, the Galveston Diet, and her latest New York Times best-seller, The New Menopause, are fabulous resources for middle-aged women. In today's discussion, we dive into various aspects of perimenopause and the associated challenges. We discuss factors accelerating ovarian aging, the role of contraception, mental health shifts, and the often delayed diagnosis of premature ovarian insufficiency. We examine the differences between hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives, discussing the importance of advocacy for women's health and the benefits of vaginal estrogen. We explore the disparity in federal funding for women's health research, the impact of the Women's Health Initiative, body composition changes, the estrabolome, the 30 Plant Challenge, and the advantages of HRT. Dr. Haver also talks about her preferred supplements.  I'm sure you will find this conversation a valuable resource that you will likely revisit several times. IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN: Why perimenopause is so fraught with chaos Some of the factors that hasten ovarian aging How perimenopause causes significant changes in neurotransmitters, leading to cognitive changes The differences between HRT and oral contraceptives How estrogen loss during menopause affects vaginal tissue The benefits of vaginal estrogen for symptoms of menopause  How women's health research funding prioritizes reproduction over menopause and perimenopause How HRT can help with fat loss and muscle mass in postmenopausal women The emergence of eating-disordered behaviors in menopausal women Some of the lesser-known symptoms of menopause and ways to overcome them How HRT could impact the longevity and cognitive health of women Bio: Dr Mary Claire Haver Dr. Mary Claire Haver is a board-certified OB-GYN who has devoted her adult life to women's health. When she began experiencing the changes of menopause and midlife weight gain, she created her online program, The Galveston Diet, which currently has over 80,000 students. The Galveston Diet is the first and only nutrition program in the world created by a female OB-GYN, designed for women in menopause. As part of her ongoing research, she became certified in Culinary Medicine in 2019, specializing in medical nutrition. In 2021, Dr. Haver opened Mary Claire Wellness; the clinic grew out of repeated requests from Galveston Diet students and Dr. Haver's social media followers for personal guidance.  Dr. Haver lives with her husband and two daughters in Galveston, Texas. She is the author of The Galveston Diet (Rodale; January 10th, 2023). Connect with Cynthia Thurlow   Follow on X, Instagram & LinkedIn Check out Cynthia's website. Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com  Join other like-minded women in a supportive, nurturing community: The Midlife Pause/Cynthia Thurlow.  Purchase Cynthia's book, The Menopause Gut. Cynthia's Intermittent Fasting Transformation Book The Midlife Pause Supplement Line Connect with Dr. Mary Claire Haver On the⁠ Mary Claire Wellness website⁠ ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠TikTok⁠ ⁠Facebook⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ Books Mentioned Dr. Haver's books, ⁠The Galveston Diet⁠ and ⁠The New Menopause ⁠ ⁠The Menopause Brain⁠ and the⁠ XX Brain⁠ by Lisa Mosconi Previous Episode Mentioned ⁠Ep. 308 Dr. Mary Claire Haver: Weight Gain in Middle Age, Perimenopause and Inflammation

The Food Code
#1011: Dr. Tabatha Barber - Why Isn't My Body Healing? The Variable Nobody Tests

The Food Code

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 31, 2026 47:16 Transcription Available


Why isn't my body healing? Dr. Tabatha Barber — a triple board-certified OBGYN and robotic surgeon who walked away from the operating room — says the variable nobody tests for is the story running in your head. Liz and Becca get into negative self-talk and inflammation, why an emotion only lasts 90 seconds, what happens when a doctor tells a 24-year-old with PCOS she'll never conceive, and why your genes load the gun but don't fire it. If your labs are "normal" and you're still exhausted, start here.***Connect with Dr. Tabatha: Instagram | Web***Lets Connect:Connect with Liz: Instagram | YoutubeConnect with Becca: Instagram | YoutubeJoin our private community: FitMom Society***Have questions? Ask HereLooking for answers? Work with us***Want to win FitMom Mystery Box?Leave us Apple Review | Spotify Review

You Are Not Broken
386. Nuances and Myths of Menopause with Dr. Shepherd

You Are Not Broken

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2026 48:10


The longer we treat menopause as something to survive quietly instead of understanding fully, the more women get left without real answers.Dr. Shepherd is an OB-GYN, and we use menopause as the entry point into a much bigger conversation — the myths still circulating about menopause and sexual health, why clinician expertise and actual hands-on experience matter more than a lot of people realize, and how insurance and the broader healthcare system quietly shape what choices women even know they have. We also get into AI and new technology in medicine — where it genuinely helps, and where it's moving faster than anyone can vet it. And we land on something I keep coming back to on this show: aging well is not a solo project. Community and connection are part of the medicine.Dr. Jessica Shepherd is a board-certified OB-GYN focused on women's health, menopause, and sexual wellness in midlife. Generation M - Dr. Jessica Shepherd's bookWhat We CoverMenopause as a gateway. Why menopause is so often the first time women start really engaging with their own health, and what that says about the gaps earlier in the system.The myths that won't die. Common misconceptions about menopause and sexual health that Dr. Shepherd still has to correct in the exam room, every week.Expertise actually matters. Why the clinician you choose, and how much hands-on experience they have, changes the quality of care you get, especially in a field this nuanced.The system shapes the choice. How insurance coverage and healthcare structures quietly limit what options get presented to women in the first place.AI in medicine — promise and risk. Where artificial intelligence and new technology are genuinely useful in healthcare, and where the pace of change is outrunning oversight.Community as medicine. Why connection and support are not a "nice to have" in aging well, they're part of the actual strategy.Thanks to our sponsor: Addyi, the little pink pill. To find out if Addyi is right for you, go to addyi.com/notbroken and use code NOTBROKEN for a $10 telemedicine appointment.And great news: with commercial insurance coverage Addyi is as little as $20 a month! Visit Addyi.com/notbroken. Eligible patients only. Restrictions apply. See Full Prescribing Information including Boxed Warning at addyi.com/piThanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Midi Women's Health⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Designed by midlife experts, delivered by experienced clinicians, covered by insurance.Midi is the first virtual care clinic made exclusively for women 40+. Evidence-based treatments. Personalized midlife care. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.joinmidi.com⁠See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Tranquility Tribe Podcast
Ep. 479: Let's Talk About Low Amniotic Fluid: The Nuance Nobody Talks About with Dr. Lawren Honken

The Tranquility Tribe Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 26, 2026 64:14 Transcription Available


Labor Live is your chance to practice navigating labor before you're actually in it. This interactive birth simulation delivers real-life labor scenarios straight to your phone, letting you make decisions, explore your options, and learn what questions to ask your provider along the way. Labor Live starts September 1. Head to https://joinlaborlive.com/ to save your spot! Low amniotic fluid can be one of those pregnancy diagnoses that sends you straight into a Google rabbit hole. So in this episode, HeHe sits down with board-certified OBGYN Dr. Lawren Honken to break down oligohydramnios, what it actually means, how it's diagnosed, and when low fluid may or may not mean it's time to induce. Dr. Lawren explains how providers measure amniotic fluid, including the difference between the single deepest pocket and AFI, and why one measurement may give us a more useful picture than the other. They also dig into what can contribute to low fluid, from dehydration and placental function to hypertension, preeclampsia, fetal growth restriction, ruptured membranes, and other pregnancy complications. And then we get into the big question: Does low amniotic fluid automatically mean you need an induction? Spoiler: it's more nuanced than that. HeHe and Dr. Lawren talk through hydration and repeat ultrasounds, fetal monitoring, the risks associated with truly low fluid, ACOG guidance for isolated oligohydramnios, and what happens when you're trying to decide whether to continue the pregnancy or move toward delivery. They also have a really important conversation about informed consent, trauma-informed care, provider communication, and why a diagnosis shouldn't automatically mean you're rushed into a decision without understanding your options. Because sometimes the most empowering thing your provider can give you isn't another intervention. It's information, context, and the space to make an informed decision about your own body and baby. If you've been told you have low amniotic fluid, you're being monitored for oligohydramnios, or you're trying to understand when an induction is actually medically indicated, this is one you want in your back pocket. Chapters 00:00 Induction Shockwave 01:12 Pregnancy Diagnosis Minefield 03:42 Meet Dr. Lawren Honken 07:52 What Is Low Amniotic Fluid? 10:55 Hydration, Placenta & Clues 14:34 What Causes Low Fluid? 19:20 Amnioinfusion Explained 22:25 When Does Induction Make Sense? 29:08 Individualized & Trauma-Informed Care 33:31 HeHe Shares a Personal Birth Story 36:41 When Your Water Breaks Without Contractions 39:13 How Accurate Is an Ultrasound? 41:00 The Risks of Low Amniotic Fluid 46:49 Advocating for Your Options 51:27 The Triage Reassurance Algorithm 54:20 Provider Compassion & Burnout 01:00:26 Questions to Ask Your Provider 01:02:03 Where to Follow Dr. Lawren 01:03:17 Final Wrap & Subscribe Guest Bio: Dr. Lawren Honken is a board-certified OB/GYN, Certified Menopause Practitioner, surgeon, mother of four, and creator of Your Friend the OB/GYN. She is passionate about helping women understand their options through evidence-based education so they can make informed decisions that align with their values, goals, and unique circumstances. Her approach emphasizes patient autonomy, shared decision-making, and compassionate, individualized care. Connect with Dr. Honken here: YourFriendTheOBGYN.com SOCIAL MEDIA: Connect with HeHe on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tranquilitybyhehe/  Connect with Dr. Honken on IG: https://www.instagram.com/yourfriendtheobgyn/ LINKS MENTIONED: IG account measure the placenta: https://www.instagram.com/measuretheplacenta/ Listen to our episode with Dr. Florescue here: ​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEex1HJId2o BIRTH EDUCATION: Learn how to stay in control of your birth and reduce the risk of unnecessary interventions in our Avoid a C-Section Webinar. HeHe breaks down the cascade of interventions, explains what's really happening in the hospital, and shares practical strategies to protect your birth plan, advocate for yourself, and navigate labor with confidence. Perfect for anyone who wants a positive, informed hospital birth experience: https://www.thebirthlounge.com/csection Feeling nervous about speaking up in labor? Our Scripts for Advocacy give you the exact words to handle the most common conversations that can make or break your birth experience. From declining unnecessary interventions to asking the right questions about procedures, these scripts empower you to stay in control, speak confidently, and protect your birth plan — even when the pressure is on. Think of it as your personal toolkit for advocating like a pro, so you can focus on your baby, not the stress: https://www.thebirthlounge.com/Scripts-for-Advocacy And if you haven't grabbed it yet… Snag my free Pitocin Guide to understand the risks, benefits, and red flags your provider may not be telling you about, so you can make informed, powerful decisions in labor: https://www.thebirthlounge.com/pitocin Join The Birth Lounge for judgment-free, evidence-based childbirth education from HeHe that shows you exactly how to navigate hospital policies, avoid unnecessary interventions, and have a trauma-free labor experience, all while feeling wildly supported every step of the way: https://www.thebirthlounge.com/ Want prep delivered straight to your phone? Download The Birth Lounge App for bite-sized birth and postpartum tools you can use anytime, anywhere: https://www.thebirthlounge.com/app

As a Woman
Fertility Q&A: Failed IVF Transfers, IUI, Embryo Banking, and More

As a Woman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2026 22:30


How do you know when to continue the same fertility treatment and when it is time to change course? In this episode of the As a Woman podcast, fertility doctor Natalie Crawford, MD, answers your questions about failed IVF transfers, IUI, embryo banking, low AMH, thin uterine lining, progesterone levels, sperm morphology, pregnancy after methotrexate, and recurrent implantation failure. She explains what your results can tell you, what they may miss, and when a different protocol or second opinion deserves a conversation. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Fertility Q&A 00:14 What Causes a Thin Uterine Lining After Surgery? 03:21 What Progesterone Level Is Needed for Embryo Transfer? 05:42 How Many Embryos Do You Need for 2 or 3 Children? 08:09 Can IUI Help With Low Sperm Morphology? 09:52 How Many IUI Cycles Should You Try? 11:06 Can AMH Change From Month to Month? 11:42 Do You Need Estrogen or Progesterone After IUI? 12:37 Can High Cholesterol Affect Fertility and Pregnancy? 13:54 When Should You Repeat a Semen Analysis? 14:46 What Is a Pregnancy of Unknown Location? 15:30 Why Should You Wait After Methotrexate to Conceive? 15:49 Do You Need an HSG After an Ectopic Pregnancy? 16:08 Can IUI Help With a Varicocele? 16:48 What Should You Do After Pregnancy Loss With a Euploid Embryo?18:15 What Are the Different Embryo Transfer Protocols? 19:19 What Testing Can Help After Failed Implantation? 20:20 When Should You Get a Second Opinion? AS A WOMAN WITH DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLveZDgg3_HZ9m7Wy3C6Vvyrj_NtEOwj_l  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/as-a-woman/id1449553339  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12IYOLH9liu60gk5D0bRPk  HOST RESOURCES: Order The Fertility Formula: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book  Newsletter: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliecrawfordmd  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NatalieCrawfordMD  Become a patient: https://www.forafertility.com  Earn FREE CE/CME: https://learnatpinnacle.com/education  This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network. ABOUT DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, co-founder of Fora Fertility, and author of The Fertility Formula. She helps women understand their hormones, fertility, and reproductive health so they can make informed decisions about their bodies. Disclaimer: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a doctor, but she is not your doctor. This content is for general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Egg Whisperer Show
Minimally Invasive, Maximum Impact: Dr. Brooke Winner on Fibroids & Endometriosis

The Egg Whisperer Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2026 18:44


In this episode of The Egg Whisperer Show, I'm joined by Dr. Brooke Winner, a board-certified OB/GYN and fellowship-trained minimally invasive gynecologic surgeon. We dig into fibroids and endometriosis—two of the most common conditions that can affect fertility. Dr. Winner sheds light on when these issues need surgical intervention, highlights the benefits of minimally invasive procedures, and discusses how to manage symptoms while supporting reproductive health. In this episode, we cover: How fibroids and endometriosis can impact fertility, implantation, and IVF outcomes The signs, symptoms, and most effective diagnostic approaches for both conditions When surgery is recommended and the advantages of minimally invasive techniques What to expect during recovery and how to prepare your mind and body Patient advocacy tips for navigating care and finding personalized treatment options Read the full show notes on Dr. Aimee's website Find Dr. Brooke Winner's website here Do you have questions about IVF? Click here to join Dr. Aimee for The IVF Class. The next live class call is on Monday, September 14 at 4 pm PST, where Dr. Aimee will explain IVF and Egg Freezing, and there will be time to ask her your questions live on Zoom. Other ways to follow Dr. Aimee: Visit my YouTube channel for more fertility tipsSubscribe to the newsletter to get updatesJoin The Egg Whisperer SchoolRequest a Consultation with Dr. Aimee   Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America's most well‑known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby‑making gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.

Dinky
What It's Like To Be An Abortion Provider In Alabama

Dinky

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2026 99:52 Transcription Available


Want more exclusive content from Dinky? Join the Patreon!EVERYONE who signs up to our giveaway wins a FREE spicy toy or gift card for toys! https://www.bboutique.co/vibe/dinky-podJOIN US FOR Christmas Markets 2026!!! OR Colombia 2027!!!! Our returning guest today is the fearless Dr. Danielle Gershon. Dr. Danielle is an OBGYN working and living in Alabama. She is a fellow of the Physicians for Reproductive Health and she is also childfree by choice. We are so excited to chat with her about her experiences as an abortion provider in the South, recent trends she's noticing, Black maternal mortality, and more. Shop items from our Dink Yourself segment. PLUS: Treat yourself to new merch!Wanna connect with us on social media? You can find us on Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads at @dinkypod.Follow us on YouTube.If you have a question or comment, email us at dinky@dinkypod.com#bbpartnerBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/dinky--5953015/support.

SHE MD
Fertility 101: What Every Woman Should Know About Her Body

SHE MD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2026 56:17


Mary Alice and Dr. A sit down with reproductive endocrinologist and fertility expert Dr. Natalie Crawford for a deep dive into everything women should know about their fertility before they're ready to have a baby. They discuss why fertility can be an important reflection of overall health, how inflammation, endometriosis, PCOS/PMOS, and autoimmune conditions can impact reproductive health, and why women shouldn't have to wait until they're struggling to conceive before they start asking questions.The conversation also breaks down AMH and ovarian reserve, egg freezing, when it makes sense to see a fertility specialist, and what women should know about long-term birth control and fertility. Dr. Crawford shares why getting more information earlier can give women more choices later, and why understanding your own body is one of the most important parts of advocating for your health.Subscribe to SHE MD Podcast for expert tips on PMOS, endometriosis, fertility, hormonal balance, mental health, and more. Share with friends and visit SHE MD website and Ovii for research-backed resources, holistic health strategies, and expert guidance on women's health and well-being.SponsorsProlon: For a limited time, Prolon is offering SHE MD listeners 15% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit ProlonLife.com/SHEMD Olly: Shop Precise Probiotics with Skin, Stress Response or Metabolism Support at a Walmart near you. David: David is offering our listeners a special deal. Buy four cartons and get the fifth free when you go to davidprotein.com/shemd. Gusto: Try Gusto today at gusto.com/SHEMD, and get three months free when you run your first payroll. Hers: Ready to reach your goals? Visit forhers.com/shemd to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. Egglife: Find Egglife chillin' in the fridge at Aldi, Whole Foods, Kroger, Target, Walmart & more. Visit egglifefoods.com to find a retailer near you. What You'll LearnWhy fertility can be an important marker of overall healthHow inflammation can affect reproductive healthWhat AMH measures and what it can tell you about ovarian reserveWhen women should consider fertility testingWhen it may make sense to see a fertility specialistWhat to know about egg freezing and ovarian reserveHow endometriosis, PCOS/PMOS, and autoimmune conditions can affect fertilityWhether long-term birth control can impact fertilityWhat to consider before coming off birth control and trying to conceiveHow to advocate for yourself when you feel dismissed by your doctorKey Timestamps00:00 Male Fertility Is Half the Puzzle01:42 The Fertility Formula Meet Dr. Natalie Crawford02:15 Reproductive Endocrinology: Her Path to Fertility Medicine05:34 Inflammation: The Hidden Root of Infertility08:01 Chronic Inflammation vs. Normal Immune Response10:07 Celiac, Endo, Hashimoto's Medical Causes of Inflammation11:16 Undiagnosed Infertility13:02 Anti-Inflammatory Eating Explained16:09 Gut Microbiome Fiber & Healthy Fats25:01 AMH:The Ovarian Reserve Test29:53 Missed Diagnoses Endometriosis & PMOS30:16 Private Equity and Fertility Medicine40:28 Endo Test New Blood & Saliva Diagnostics43:18 Does Birth Control Hurt Fertility?45:02 IUDs: Thin Linings & Scar Tissue Risk50:33 When to See a Specialist? 53:05 Pregnancy After 40Key TakeawaysFertility is about more than getting pregnant. Fertility issues can sometimes point to underlying health conditions that deserve attention.You don't have to wait until you're trying to conceive to learn about your fertility. The conversation explores how earlier testing can give women more information and more choices.AMH is one piece of the fertility puzzle. Understanding ovarian reserve can help women make more informed decisions about their reproductive timeline and options.Birth control does not appear to cause long-term infertility. Dr. Crawford explains that research has not shown a long-term difference in conception rates after stopping the pill, while noting that hormonal birth control can affect how certain fertility markers are interpreted.You can see a fertility specialist before experiencing infertility. Fertility specialists can help women understand ovarian reserve, discuss egg freezing, and identify potential issues before someone begins trying to conceive.Guest Bio: Dr. Natalie CrawfordDr. Natalie Crawford is a reproductive endocrinologist, fertility specialist, educator, podcast host, and author of The Fertility Formula. After completing her OBGYN residency at Parkland Hospital, she completed a three-year fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility. She now practices at Fora Fertility in Austin, Texas, and has spent more than a decade educating women about fertility and reproductive health.She is also the host of the As A Woman podcast, which has reached millions of downloads, and wrote The Fertility Formula to give women the foundational fertility education she believes they should have much earlier in life. Her goal is to help women understand their bodies and fertility before they're ready to have children, so they can make informed decisions when the time comes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Good Life Project
The Menopause Timeline Most Women Never Learn Until Midlife | Dr. Jessica Shepherd

Good Life Project

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2026 44:33


Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy decisions, and why nearly 40% of a woman's life happens after menopause even begins. It's less a symptom checklist than a new starting point for the next several decades.What you'll explore:The gas-tank way to picture where you actually are between reproductive years and menopauseWhy symptom severity has almost nothing to do with how "together" you otherwise areThe difference between the "symptom bucket" and the "longevity bucket" in deciding on hormone therapyWhy perimenopause itself splits into an early, mid, and late phase, and why the late phase is the window with the most protective upside for starting hormonesWhat the SWAN study found about how menopause symptoms differ by race, and why that matters long-termIf you've been treating menopause as a phase to survive rather than a stage to prepare for, this resets the starting point.You can find Jessica at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptNext week, we're sitting down with Priya Parker to talk about why conflict, handled well, might be one of the things that makes your closest relationships stronger instead of weaker, and what most of us get backwards about the moment right before it happens. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Management Blueprint
360: Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice with Alex Fernandez

Management Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2026 30:41


https://youtu.be/B9j1nlRifHM Alex Fernandez, CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is driven by a mission to help physicians Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice that creates wealth, equity, and independence beyond their personal labor. By bringing independent physicians together, building scalable organizations, and expanding access to integrated services, Alex helps doctors operate as entrepreneurs while delivering a more convenient and cost-effective patient experience. In this conversation, Alex introduces The Multi-Site Scaling Framework—Visualize Your Target EBITDA, Align With Your Partners, Remove Yourself From the Center, Build Systems, and Build Margin Around Your Core Business. He explains why starting with the desired enterprise value creates a clearer path for growth, why alignment must be a gate for every partnership or acquisition, and how strong systems allow a business to operate without depending on its founder. Alex also shares how vertical integration, company culture, geographic expansion, and AI-assisted processes can improve profitability while preserving independent medical care. — Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice with Alex Fernandez  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and welcome Alejandro “Alex” Fernandez, the CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, a team of surgeons and specialists that believes in providing patients with an integrated approach to musculoskeletal—I’m glad I could pronounce this—medical care through 15 locations throughout San Diego. Alex, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I’ve enjoyed your show, and I’m happy to be here.  Well, I’m always interested when I meet with medical provider companies or CEOs who have been doctors, because I grew up in a family of two doctors, and so I was exposed to some of the challenges of being a doctor and running a hospital. So that’s going to be interesting. So my favorite question that I ask recently to all our founders is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business?  Yeah, for sure. And so my why, as you put it, comes from where I started. I actually don’t come from a family of physicians. I started not where I ended up. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants. My parents fled Castro in the ’60s, and I was born in Puerto Rico. Later on, my family took a lot of our family in the Mariel boatlift in 1981 and took hundreds of people out of Cuba. But in reality, the concept or the reality is that my parents didn’t have a lot of money. They had some connections, but they believed that I should have a college education.  But I had to work my way through eight years of college to get my bachelor’s. So I landed in healthcare as an accident. It was a small medical practice. I was basically doing front desk and medical records, and then later on learned how to do the billing, all by hand at that time. There were no electronic medical records. And I started basically at the front desk, and I watched something that I never really forgot, which is, you have these brilliant physicians, people that can diagnose patients and help them and cure them, but when it came to business, they were never taught anything about business.  So this is where I believe I have generated value over the years: basically, built companies that actually create wealth, and the wealth for the physicians in particular.Share on X I think physicians are very entrepreneurial. At least that’s the idea to begin with, is, “I’m going to go into the practice of medicine and have my own business.” But somewhere along the line, the business becomes almost like an ATM machine. It’s no different than any other entrepreneur that starts a business. They are the business. Without them, if they go away for a couple of days, the business doesn’t make any money, and they don’t really know how to do that. So what I’ve done over the years is I have gotten smaller groups of physicians to come together, form larger organizations, larger groups, and eventually built larger private businesses that can have EBITDA, equity earnings that can basically provide some additional wealth.  Particularly, I try to help them think of themselves as capitalists, not as day laborers. Because in reality, in most businesses, and particularly physicians, they’re cranking the wheel, and the more they produce, the more they work, the more they earn. But in some cases, they don’t understand how to get away from that. How to earn from all the other things that they control. Because physicians do control 80% of the spend in healthcare but earn probably no more than 5% of it.  Wow. That is shocking. So they’re not using the leverage properly, probably.  Yeah. Sometimes they know it’s there, but physicians in general are risk-averse. Just starting their own business is hard enough. Then having to figure out how to capitalize from all the levers that they have, that’s completely different. And they’re no different than, I would say, lawyers or accountants that start a small business. At some point in time, you have to figure out, how do you make the business big enough that it operates and works without you?  Yeah, I love that. I love that. And what makes you feel strongly for physicians?  Well, particularly independent physicians, I think it’s a dying breed. Years ago, I would hear the stories of my parents where they’d say, “Hey, we took you to the pediatrician,” and my dad would be friends with the OB-GYN that took care of my mom and the pediatrician. And I remember them naming them by first name or even meeting them at the social club. But nowadays, it’s very transactional. It’s very fast. There’s no connection.  So I think that’s why there’s been this whole surgence of concierge physicians where you pay extra. Because in truth, in order to make a living, the business of healthcare is compressed by downward pressures from the government and from other institutions that say, “We’re going to pay you less, but you have to have a significant amount of compliance, and you have to spend more money on this, and you have to do that.” And then at the same time, the cost of living goes up.  The employees need to make more money. Your rent goes up. The supplies continue to increase. So you have the static or lower reimbursement from the different payers, whether it’s Medicare, the government, or private institutions, and then an increase of expenses happening. That’s very strange to any business. In any other business, you say, “Well, if my costs go up, I increase my prices, and then maybe my margins are a little bit less, but I still have a significant margin.” In healthcare, you almost have to just work more in order to generate more revenue, and the expenses hopefully will increment a little bit more, but your earnings will be the same or less. So it’s a very tough situation for an independent physician.  That’s why more and more, especially physicians coming out of training, look for jobs with health systems, with the Kaisers of the world or the different large institutions in the United States, so that way they can go ahead and just go to work and take care of patients and not worry about the business of healthcare.  Yeah. But then these big hospitals turn into bureaucracies, and then they still have to worry about that in a different way.  And that’s personally the second part to that question you asked me. That’s why I like working with physicians and not necessarily with health systems. I’ve never held a job with a hospital. Not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s just, I think the nature of the bureaucracy of a health system creates some things that I’m not personally interested in.  Yeah. Well, I can see that. So Alex, this is a podcast of frameworks, as you know. So what’s a framework that has helped you build your business, maybe generate an insight, understand situations, maybe influence these physicians to come together in your roll-ups? Whatever framework you developed, could you share something with our listeners?  Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Most owners in a business—and I’ll talk in generic terms. I’ll try to make sure I don’t use any slang for healthcare—but most businesses build their business for income. They want to make income for their families, for themselves. They want to be able to take care of the people that they’re with. But they don’t really think about it from a perspective of, “Let me build a business that can multiply.” Maybe they want to, but in a lot of areas, it’s just hard for them.  I actually grew up in the bridal business. My parents had bridal stores. They basically did wedding packages, and that’s the business that I grew up in. Every summer, I would go and do the cash register or help rent tuxedos and things like that, or do filing and bookkeeping. So that’s where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from. It’s my parents. But I always saw them where maybe they built one or a couple stores, two, three stores, and they would kind of stop there. But I think I learned a lot from my dad in particular around multi-site operations in a retail industry, and I took that back into the healthcare business.  So one of the first things I think that a business owner has to do is they have to underwrite their own exit first.Share on X They have to think of growth and particularly of the value of the business if they were ever going to sell it. Figure out what your EBITDA or enterprise value is going to be, and then go from there. Then make the alignments first, but don’t make it the goal. Most people chase the volume, the customers, more locations, more deals, spend years fixing what they bolted on in order to flip it, but they don’t really take the time to align it. So I think the client, the partnership, the acquisition—you have to figure all that out at the beginning and then fix it later.  If I run into an acquisition that we’re looking at, and I don’t see the alignment from whoever I’m going to partner up with, I know it’s going to be a deal that’s going to go bad eventually. We all have to be thinking the same way. Then the other thing, like I already mentioned this a couple of times, but you have to take yourself out of the center. If you’re the CEO, you’re the business owner, and the business depends on you—you can’t go on your two- or three-week vacation to Europe or wherever you want to go, and when you come back, the business is in disarray or didn’t survive—you don’t really have a business.  You just have a job that costs you a lot of money to maintain. I think that’s where operating systems earn their keep. I haven’t really run the EOS program, but I’ve read the book, and I really like the idea of the scorecards, and I used it particularly when I came to this opportunity in San Diego. Getting everybody to row in the same direction. A business that runs with a founder and a single thing, it’s one that won’t get very far.  But on the other hand, if the founder figures out a way to build systems around them and bring in the right people, that’s going to make the business way more successful. And the last one I would say is own the margin around your core. Don’t just sell the core service. Figure out what else you have. And I think in healthcare in particular, I was mentioning this: doctors control a significant amount of what happens to a patient, but they don’t figure out ways to vertically integrate the business to have access or have the opportunity to earn some revenue and some earnings from the actual business they refer to.  So what I’ve done over the years, particularly in gastroenterology, I grew a medical practice of gastroenterologists. A couple of them came together, and it was around 50 million in revenue when I came in. And one of the first things I started doing was figuring out, how do we add, let’s say, imaging services? So we added CT. How do we add infusion services? Because back then, there were some significant drugs that were coming into market around infusion. But later on, we said, “Hey, we have an investment in an ASC, but why don’t we do the investment so the investment’s part of the group? So all the doctors can benefit from that.  And when we actually equitize the business in the future, that could be part of our exit if there’s equity there.” And then the next question was, “Well, why don’t we sell the prep that we give people before they get the colonoscopy?” So we got licensing around pharmacy, and then we said, “Well, what about anesthesia? What about pathology?” And so on and so on. So when I went to New York City and I ran a dermatology group, we built a path lab for the derms. When I came here to the orthopedic group, we had PT locations, expanded to multiple PT locations, improved the contracts around durable medical equipment, the bracing, even added anesthesia and started our own ambulatory surgical center.  So always trying to figure out, how can you vertically integrate the business to try to capture as much as you can from the client that’s in front of you? Not only just from a money perspective, but also from an experience perspective, being able to provide it all under one roof and being able to give the patient, the customer, a great experience. You want to provide outstanding medical care. Quality medical care is kind of like a base. If you go to a doctor, you expect to get better. But what we see in healthcare a lot is that people don’t think about it.  Like, in our offices, we say, “Thank you for choosing Synergy Orthopedics.” We know patients have a choice, so we have to develop a model that allows the patient to say, “Hey, I want to go here because these guys have it all under one roof.” But more importantly, that’s typically what the hospitals have. But hospitals charge for the same thing I provide two and three times more because they have a different type of leverage with the contracts. So I always say, “Why did the duck cross the road? Oh, because they went from the hospital to the ambulatory surgical center to get a colonoscopy to save 700 bucks.” I mean, it’s literally that simple.  And I don’t think patients in general know that, but I think the doctors have a great opportunity to control the delivery system, provide a great experience for the patients, and at the same time, make some money from things that they don’t physically have to do. They can hire the physical therapist, et cetera.  Yeah. Okay, so that’s great. So what I’m hearing, the framework is: think of growth first—what’s the EBITDA you want? Then create alignment, take yourself out of the center, build systems, and build margin around your core business. So that’s wonderful. Now, step two, I’m not 100% clear on. So you said make alignment with partners, but don’t make it the goal. What do you mean by that?  Well, because particularly I’ve been involved in private equity medical groups. So with private equity, you have cash, you have leverage, so you can go and buy, buy, buy, buy. In private equity, to a degree, they want growth. But I’ve been in deals where the thesis was, for example, we’re all going to be rowing in the same direction with the same flag, same brand, and we’re going to transfer from having—there were four medical groups, so four different, distinct medical groups—and we’re putting them together under what’s called a management services organization, a management company, and basically form one larger group.  But that was never aligned because the doctors, in their head, said, “You’re acquiring me, so you’re buying this magnificent, outstanding business. Now why do you want to change my electronic medical records? Why do you want to change the way we do our, let’s say, revenue cycle management or billing? Why do you want to change our brand? Our brand’s fantastic.” Even though they were all called Dermatology blah, blah, blah, something and something. So you have to make sure that the people that you’re going to bring on board, whether it’s through acquisition, merger, or just employment, that they really believe in your story, that they believe in the core vision of the business.  Not just try to put people in there and make more deals, get more locations, spend more years, and then you put all these things together and you bolt them up, but you spend more time trying to fix it. In my Gastro Health and in the ortho business, we always started with, “Let’s make sure we have our house in order before we go out and start growing the organization and adding more to what we have.” The last thing you want to do is add more and then find out that you have to spend more time fixing it.  No, that makes sense. But then you qualified it. You said, “Don’t make it the goal. Don’t make alignment the goal.” So how does it become the goal? What’s the risk there?  So no, make it the gate, not the goal. Meaning, alignment is extremely important, but you want the alignment to be the one thing that puts you together. But at the end, everybody has to be buying into the idea. It’s not the only goal. Their goal is also money. The goal is growth. But it has to be one of the key things. In healthcare, I tend to think, and particularly with private equity, that’s not perceived. It’s more about getting deals done.  Yeah. They don’t care about the mission. They don’t care about the vision, the alignment.  I think they do. In their thesis, they do, and they want it. But it’s kind of like, at the end, you’re looking at this business. They want to sell, you want to buy, you have money, they want money, and sometimes it’s just easier to say, “Well, we can grow from $30 million to $60 million, from $10 million of EBITDA to $20 million of EBITDA. We’re going to get, instead of a 10 multiple, we’re going to get a 15 multiple.”  So sometimes that gets in the way. And I would say, by the way, I worked with great and fantastic private equity firms, so I’m not saying they all think that way. But for sure, the perception is that they’re going to go in and try to make deals happen because they do have an end goal. Their end goal is to their investors that gave them funds, that they told them they were going to get them a four-, five-, seven-times multiple on their investment.  So in your own business, Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is this a private equity-funded business or is it bootstrapped?  No. No, it’s bootstrapped. The physicians, when I came on board—at that time, I started with them six years ago in 2020, and the market was really hot still, ’21, ’22, ’23, and then the interest rates went up, and then things have softened. I think also they got softened for what we’ve been discussing earlier. There’s been a lot of deals that have been done where acquisitions were done in multiple states. There’s not a lot of synergy or a lot of things that were worked out to try to make sure that the organization was working together, the multiple organizations that were acquired.  And the idea was, if we buy four million-dollar businesses, they will be, instead of an eight-times multiple, they’ll be a 10- or 12-times multiple. So I think there’s a lot of deals that are stuck in the marketplace right now, and the groups are trying to figure out how to evolve the organization after five, six, seven years from, “Hey, we let you alone. We let you be. But now we need to start integrating. Now we have to start building an enterprise. Now we have to start building a real platform.” And I think that the organizations that did that earlier have been able to exit and done a much better multiple and growth.  And also the key is, in these transactions where people get together, a lot of times it’s all about the fun. “Hey, we go out to dinner, and everybody’s well, and everybody’s happy, and how much money we’re going to make,” and blah, blah. But nobody really asks the tough questions, or some people do because they actually don’t want the deals to get done. But I think it comes from the buyer. The buyer needs to be very upfront with what they want to accomplish with a transaction, whether, again, a merger or an acquisition.  You want to make sure that you’re extremely transparent about what the end goal is going to be. And if the end goal is like, “Hey, I’m going to leave you alone for a year, but in a year and one day, your name’s going to change, your software’s going to change, your HR is going to change. And by that time, we’ll figure out about your staff, and we might probably cut 25% of your staff because you’re bloated, and we actually have to make you a little bit more fit and trim so you can actually be able to grow and provide better care to your patients.”  So what I’m seeing is, it’s quite impressive. You have 15 locations, you have a huge service mix. You have, compared to the number of locations and service mix, a limited number of people. So how do you maintain the Synergy standard? And how do you manage this complexity with such low—low per— It took— How many people?  Yeah, it’s—right. Yeah, I agree. It’s taken some time. Again, I wouldn’t say that it’s perfect. We’re always evolving, changing. I mean, I always say the only constant thing in healthcare is change. But it started with the company culture. When I first got here, there were four or five organizations that came together, and they were still using their old names. Synergy Orthopedics was like this little kind of byline under their business cards. It wasn’t really the brand.  And then over time, we got people in the organization rowing in the same direction, using the same flag, and over time we started to dominate the market. We started to be perceived, and we are today, the largest independent medical orthopedic group in San Diego. So when people think of MSK, we take care of the hockey team, we take care of the soccer team, we take care of professional players. The larger organizations reach out to us about developing contracts, direct contracts to provide services to them.  So that took a long time, but it started with building that company culture. And along the way, some people left. Some people just didn’t fit what we were trying to build. And it wasn’t just me. I didn’t do this by myself, of course. The reality was we built a team around what we were trying to create. Physicians, in this case, are the leaders. Physician leadership was there, and this is what they wanted as well. So I think, yes, when we’re now in other counties we’re in Riverside County, so we’re north of San Diego. We’re all the way to Palm Desert and looking to grow into Orange County and L.A. County eventually.  So the goal is also in growth, and size allows leverage and negotiation power with the different payers. And that’s very different than in other industries where you have a payer, let’s say Blue Shield or Anthem or United, that kind of controls how you’re going to provide service, how much they’re going to pay you, et cetera, et cetera. So the only way to really have any type of seat at the table is that your organization has to be large enough and a market leader and basically be something, or an organization, that they can’t say no to, that they want to have in their network. So that’s how we’ve been able to do this over the last five, six years now.  So what drives the growth? Is it the acquisitions? Is it geographic expansion? Is it payers refer business? What’s the driver?  All of it. You have to do everything. It’s like that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s like you have to do everything. We started by first creating the brand and the company culture, expanding that brand and company culture by figuring out who having the right seats on the bus, making sure the right people that wanted to be with us were there. And then we said, “Okay, we don’t have a spine program. Let’s figure out how we recruit a spine doctor. Let’s figure out how we recruit a pain doctor.  Let’s get a foot and ankle specialist because we don’t have one. Let’s expand our sports medicine program.” So we took over a fellowship training program in San Diego that was probably going to expire, and then we took it over and continued the legacy of the physician that started it from the beginning. We’ve done some mergers. We’ve done some acquisitions. We’ve done some new locations. We’ve expanded our physical therapy footprint. We built out an ambulatory surgical center. That was a big endeavor. These things cost millions and millions of dollars. Just in construction alone, it was like $600… I think our overall investment’s somewhere around $12, $15 million, so highly leveraged. We brought in a partner, a national partner, to help us run and fund the enterprise.  We started an anesthesia division. So I would say you have to do everything, and all of it together, as time goes by, creates that vision. As long as you have the vision, like I said, the beginning thing is you have to start with the end goal. And the end goal is we want to build a business that’s independent. That’s our goal. We don’t want to be sold or be part of the hospital system. So you have to build the end goal, work through the process, grow it, and do all the things at the same time, which is extremely hard, I would say.  Yeah. This is fascinating. So you have a lot of complexity. You have a lot of locations, a lot of services, 50 providers. I mean, sometimes doctors can be cats, hard to manage them. Eagles, eagles. I always say, try to get eagles to fly in a straight line. Impossible. Yeah.  But if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would it be?  I will be honest, it’s expenses. Expenses can and I’ve talked about this before the pressures in the healthcare industry really are driven around expenses. We just got an increase in minimum wage in healthcare, specifically in California, where a physician practice now has to pay $23 an hour for a minimum-wage job, where minimum wage is almost half of that if you’re in any other industry. So I think everybody should make more than $23, particularly in San Diego. It’s a very expensive place to live.  But I think it’s more around the pressures that are put on the industry, but the levers are not there to increase revenue to be able to support or subsidize those expenses. So, for all intents and purposes, we’re looking at how we increase revenue by keeping expenses the same, or fixed, or a little bit higher than what they are, by augmenting with AI, like every other industry is doing. Figuring out whether it’s using AI in your MRI to be able to process the imaging faster, clearer, better, and be able to add three or four more patients a day. That profit goes straight to the bottom line.  It might be before we had people that are scribes that basically did the documentation of the history, the notes, and the medical records. Now doctors are using—well, they’ve been using voice recognition for a while—but now you’re doing ambient AI, where basically it’s listening to the conversation with the patient, of course with the patient’s approval, and being able to document all that information into the record much faster, quicker, better, and more precise. And so on. Answering the phones, being able to—when the patient gets statements, we typically send out statements every two weeks.  But when we send them, we send thousands of statements, so we get thousands of phone calls. You can’t get all those phone calls when somebody says, “I owe $50, and I don’t know why,” and being able to have an AI that tells you, “The $50 is because you had a copayment or you had a deductible, and it’s due to your insurance program with whatever the insurance is.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay.” “You want to pay that right now?” “Yes.” It sends you a text to your phone, qualifies who you are, you click on it, you put your payment information. The information goes in, the payment gets posted. Nobody got involved. AI took care of the whole process. So we’re trying to figure out how to assist the staff without having to let go. At least my intent is not to let go of people.  My intent is to try to make sure that we do the best job possible and use AI to augment the process, not to replace the staff. I get very worried, in general, about what’s going on with AI as an industry, where people are saying, “Well, I use it as my assistant. I use it as this.” Well, I started at the front desk. If there are no front desk jobs, how could I have been CEO of this multimillion-dollar organization if I didn’t get a foot in the door to begin with? So I feel very worried for my kids that are growing up. One’s studying to be a psychologist, the other one’s in marketing. How are they going to learn and grow in an industry or a business if they can’t get their foot in the door?  Yeah. That is a concern. I don’t know if we can fix it, but I’m worried about it too. So Alex, who would you like to listen to this podcast and to take action? And what kind of action should they take?  Well, I think it’s generic. I always say, I have an MBA in healthcare administration, but I could have gone and done any type of business. Like I said to you, I grew up in the retail industry. So I think it’s more around, if you’re an entrepreneur and you have talent and you’ve worked really hard at doing something, you have to figure out how to hire the right people so that they can do a job that maybe you don’t know how to do, how to scale up a business by investing in it, making sure you don’t look at your business as an ATM machine or a salary that pays you every week or every period of time, but look at it as you’re an entrepreneur, a capitalist.  You’re building an organization. You’re providing jobs for people. But at the end, the business has to give you more than your salary. There has to be equity in the enterprise, and that’s the money you’ll be able to use to maybe have leverage or to use in order to add that next location or look at what’s the next opportunity, whether you’re, again, a doctor or you’re running a retail organization that wants to have multiple locations. The key is, think of the end goal. And the end goal, not necessarily that you’re going to sell, but what is it going to be? What is the business that you want to have valued at, and how have they grown?  Look and listen to other people like yourself, Steve, and all the different things that you do in regard to building that journey of the business, and figure out how to take the next step and the next step and the next step. It doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t get from a $50 million company to a $150 million company. It took me seven years to get there. But it’s done by augmenting and adding features and adding services, but doing it very intelligently, thinking it through, not just adding it for the sake of adding it, then, like I said before, having to bolt it on and try to fix more of the problems, creating more problems.  No. Fix your house, figure out where you’re at, make sure it’s earning equity. Maybe you have to reprice. Maybe you have to figure out how the business needs to run a little bit nimbler. Maybe you have to use technology, whether it’s AI answering the phone because you’re the guy that—you have a pizza shop. Why do you have to have people answering? Have the AI take the order, have the AI tell people to go to the website, and so on, so you can have pizzas going out of your store every five minutes. So for sure, there are great opportunities. And if you’re a business owner, I want you to think that you can. It’s not impossible. It can be done. You don’t need an MBA. You just need to work hard and think it through and come up with a business plan and an idea on how you want to get there.  Yeah. Well, this is very inspiring. So if you are a founder, you’re running a business, or you’re about to start a business, look at what Alex has done. He was a son of Cuban immigrants, came to this country, built from nothing a 15-location, 50-provider medical group, and works with private equity, advises companies as well. Follow his example.  So Alex Fernandez, thank you for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you’re listening and you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because I have a couple of exciting entrepreneurs every week who come on the show and share their secrets and frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Alex, and thank you for listening. Important Links: Alex's LinkedIn Alex's website

The Film Bros
ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

The Film Bros

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2026 111:13


Grab your stinky locket and your mystery smoothie and come hide from the neighbors with us, because we're diving into the 1960's womanly nightmare, Rosemary's Baby! Along the way, we discuss OBGYN stories, the frog-in-the-pot point of scary movies, and, of course, the existential horror of knowing your neighbors! Head to our PATREON to watch the video episode, join in on the conversation, and more! Check out HOT DATE with Vicky and Dan for more movie listening!

PLANTSTRONG Podcast
Ep. 367: Menopause Is Not the End: Dr. Jessica Shepherd on Hormones, Plants, and Thriving in Midlife

PLANTSTRONG Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2026 56:10


Rip sits down with OB-GYN, women's health expert, and author of Generation M, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, for a candid, empowering conversation about perimenopause, menopause, hormones, nutrition, sex, sleep, strength, and what it really means to thrive in midlife and beyond.For too long, menopause has been framed as a decline — something to dread, hide, or simply suffer through. Dr. Shepherd is here to change that narrative. She explains that menopause is not a failure of the body, but a natural biological transition — and one that deserves far more education, support, and celebration.In this conversation, Rip is joined by PLANTSTRONG Podcast producer Carrie Barrett, who, at 53, brings her own lived experience in perimenopause to the discussion. They eplain why estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone affect far more than reproduction — influencing the brain, bones, heart, muscles, metabolism, skin, sleep, and sexual health.And because this is Plant Strong, they also dive into the power of nutrition. Dr. Shepherd emphasizes that food is one of the most important tools in the menopause toolbox, especially during the 10–12 year perimenopausal window. A colorful, plant-centered diet rich in beans, greens, whole grains, berries, legumes, soy foods, fiber, and fermented foods can help support heart health, gut health, metabolic health, inflammation, muscle maintenance, and long-term vitality.This episode is not about one magic fix. It is about building the full toolbox: plants, movement, resistance training, sleep, self-advocacy, and, when appropriate, hormone therapy. As Dr. Shepherd reminds us, women deserve agency, options, and the chance to live their 70s, 80s, and 90s with strength, clarity, and confidence.Learn More About our 2026 Live PLANTSTRONG Events: https://plantstrongevents.com/ Let Us Help Your PLANTSTRONG JourneyLearn More About Our Corporate Wellness Program: https://liveplantstrong.com/corporate-wellness/ COMPLEMENT: Use code PLANTSTRONG for 30% off at https://lovecomplement.com/pages/plantstrong-special-offer Follow PLANTSTRONG and Rip Esselstynhttps://plantstrong.com/ https://www.facebook.com/GoPlantstrong https://www.instagram.com/goplantstrong/https://www.instagram.com/ripesselstyn/ Follow the PLANTSTRONG Podcast and Give the Show a 5-star RatingApple PodcastsSpotifyEpisode WebpageWatch on YouTube

Mo News
Interview - The Postpartum Mental Health Gap: Lessons From The Clancy Trial

Mo News

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2026 40:41


The Lindsay Clancy trial has sparked a national conversation about postpartum psychosis and maternal mental health. In this episode, Mo News Producer Sari Soffer sits down with Dr. Noa Sterling, an OB-GYN and mental health expert, for a broader conversation about the Clancy trial, postpartum mental illness, and why many women fall through the cracks in the existing medical system. The conversation covers the differences between intrusive thoughts, postpartum depression, anxiety, and psychosis; risk factors like sleep deprivation and bipolar disorder; and the challenges of diagnosing and treating serious postpartum mental health conditions. They examine the systemic barriers for new mothers including a fragmented health system, lack of sustained support, and the burden to coordinate their own care during a time of intense struggle. They also discuss what better postpartum care could look like. Dr. Noa Sterling is also the creator of a paid app called Obi, which helps women through pregnancy and postpartum. She has made the following resources available free for the Mo News audience: - Mental Health Support Guide: Everything You Need to Know - A Letter to the Partner of Someone Struggling With Their Mental Health Postpartum If anything in this conversation resonated with you or someone you love, Postpartum Support International's HelpLine is ⁠1-800-944-4773⁠, call or text, and 988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Couch Talk w/ Dr. Anna Cabeca
Suffering Is Optional: 8 Women, 8 Menopause Turnarounds

Couch Talk w/ Dr. Anna Cabeca

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2026 94:03


You were told to just power through it. These eight women were told the same thing, and they're done accepting it. Dr. Anna Cabeca, triple board certified OB/GYN and host of The Girlfriend Doctor, sits down with the very first graduating class of her Magic Menopause Hormone Restoration Coaching Certification for an honest, unscripted, girlfriend-to-girlfriend conversation recorded live in front of an audience. Eight women. Eight completely different paths into hormone chaos, from surgical menopause after a hysterectomy, to a postpartum hormone crash after baby number four, to years of being dismissed as "just stressed." In this episode, you'll hear real stories and practical takeaways on: Why "that's just menopause" is one of the most common and most misleading things a woman can be told What actually happens hormonally after a hysterectomy, and why estrogen alone often isn't the full answer Why unexplained weight gain during perimenopause is common and not a personal failure The daily hydration and sleep habits these coaches consider completely non-negotiable How to open honest conversations with your husband and your daughters about hormones, before the silence gets passed down Why vaginal dryness and discomfort don't have to be something you just accept starting in your mid-thirties This one is personal. These are Dr. Anna's own students, women who did the work, then turned around to help the next woman behind them. If any part of this sounds like your story, you don't have to figure it out alone. Learn more about the Magic Menopause program at dranna.com, and if this episode helps you, share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it today. Key Timestamps 00:00 – Welcome and introduction to the Magic Menopause coaching graduates 04:00 – Emily's story: burnout, invisible labor, and postpartum hormone crash 12:00 – Anna's story: fertility challenges into perimenopause 18:00 – Amy's story: surgical menopause after hysterectomy 27:00 – Angela's story: losing friends, and the wake-up call 38:00 – The myths panel: "power through," hormones and cancer, suffering as normal 52:00 – Meet Chelsea, Song, Tara, and Jamie 58:00 – Why weight gain happens and what actually helps 1:10:00 – Daily non-negotiables: hydration, pH testing, sleep 1:20:00 – Talking to husbands and daughters about hormones 1:32:00 – Vaginal and sexual health, and why dryness isn't something to just accept 1:45:00 – Final thoughts: choosing empowerment over silence Memorable Quotes "Menopause is natural. Suffering is optional." — Angela "It's the difference between common and normal." — Emily "Hormones are not the enemy." — Amy "This is an empowering journey." — Song "You're not broken." — Dr. Anna Cabeca Connect With Dr. Anna Website: Dranna.com  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegirlfrienddoctor/   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thegirlfrienddoctor   TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drannacabeca  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegirlfrienddoctor 

Pregnancy Pearls Podcast
Breech Doesn't Always Mean C-Section—but Should It?

Pregnancy Pearls Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2026 21:46


Your baby is breech. Does that automatically mean you need a C-section? It's a question that can create anxiety, confusion—and plenty of conflicting advice. In this episode of Pregnancy Pearls, double board-certified OB/GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Nicole Plenty breaks down what expecting parents need to know about breech babies and the complicated decision between a planned C-section and attempting a vaginal breech delivery. Dr. Plenty explains the different types of breech presentations, why most breech babies in the United States are delivered by C-section, and the very specific circumstances in which a vaginal breech delivery may be considered. She also discusses the potential risks to both mother and baby, why the experience of the delivering provider and hospital team matters so much, and how an external cephalic version (ECV) may offer another option by attempting to turn a breech baby head-down before delivery. Then, a listener who is 38 weeks pregnant with her third baby writes in with a real dilemma: after two uncomplicated vaginal births, her baby is now frank breech. One physician recommends a C-section while another says she may be a candidate for vaginal delivery. How do you make a decision when there may not be one perfect answer? Dr. Plenty walks through the questions patients should be asking—not only about their own pregnancy, but about their provider's experience, anesthesia availability, nursing support, emergency C-section capability, and whether ECV should be considered first. Most importantly, she emphasizes the need for balanced counseling, informed decision-making, and patient advocacy without fear, pressure, or shame. Today's Pregnancy Pearl: A vaginal breech delivery is not automatically unsafe, but it is highly selective. The safest outcomes depend on the right patient, an experienced provider, and the right delivery environment and support systems. Find more shows like this on the Mean Ole Lion app.

Evidence Based Birth®
EBB 408 - "What They Didn't Tell Me about Birth and Parenthood" with Dr. Jessica Vernon, Board-Certified OB/GYN and Perinatal Coach

Evidence Based Birth®

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2026 37:06


Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care should support the whole person, physically and mentally. In this episode, Dr. Rebecca Dekker talks with board-certified OB/GYN and perinatal coach Dr. Jessica Vernon about how integrative medicine can create a more holistic and personalized approach to obstetric care.   Dr. Vernon explains how integrative care combines traditional Western medicine with complementary approaches such as therapy, physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga, breathwork, meditation, and nutrition. She also shares how her own experience with postpartum anxiety and depression transformed the way she practices medicine and deepened her understanding of the physical, emotional, and identity-related transitions into parenthood. Plus, get practical guidance for changing providers, asking informed questions after a prior Cesarean, and navigating the overwhelming, and sometimes unreliable, health information found through social media and artificial intelligence.   (00:02:03) Dr. Vernon's journey into obstetrics and the influence of midwifery (00:05:47) Understanding matrescence and the transition into parenthood (00:07:14) What integrative medicine looks like in pregnancy and postpartum care (00:09:59) Bringing perinatal mental health and integrative medicine into obstetric practice (00:12:19) Gaps in traditional perinatal care and the need for individualized support (00:16:59) Supporting parents after infertility, pregnancy loss, birth trauma, or a difficult postpartum experience (00:21:32) Why it is okay to change providers (00:24:31) How infertility and pregnancy loss can shape a subsequent pregnancy (00:27:25) Practicing evidence-based, person-centered care that protects patient autonomy (00:29:02) Finding trustworthy pregnancy information online (00:32:27) Balancing medical evidence with personal intuition and individual circumstances   Resources Connect with Dr. Vernon and learn more about her 1:1 perinatal coaching: https://www.drjessicavernon.com/ Follow Dr. Vernon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.jessicavernon/ Then Comes Baby: An Honest Conversation About Birth, Postpartum, and the Complex Transition to Parenthood by Dr. Jessica Vernon: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/then-comes-baby-9781538195925/ Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714054/matrescence-by-lucy-jones/ Free Postpartum Support International online support groups: https://postpartum.net/get-help/psi-online-support-meetings/ PSI Perinatal Mental Health Provider Directory: https://postpartum.net/get-help/provider-directory/   For more information about Evidence Based Birth and a crash course on evidence based care, visit www.ebbirth.com. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube! Ready to learn more? Grab an EBB Podcast Listening Guide or read Dr. Dekker's book, "Babies Are Not Pizzas: They're Born, Not Delivered!" If you want to get involved at EBB, join our Professional membership (scholarship options available) and get on the wait list for our EBB Instructor program. Find an EBB Instructor here, and click here to learn more about the EBB Childbirth Class.

Louisiana Considered Podcast
Infighting and ghost-written policy at Public Service Commission; Louisiana surgeon general's ties to MAHA movement

Louisiana Considered Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2026 24:29


Louisiana's Public Service Commission (PSC) is overseeing one of the biggest industrial buildouts in state history. They're considering 10 new gas plants and other infrastructure, like transmission lines, in order to power Meta's data centers in Richland Parish.Last week, the PSC voted to overturn a judge's ruling that Meta had to turn over information about how it calculated jobs and power usage. And the meeting got heated, as Michael McEwen reported for our Coastal Desk.But just ahead of that meeting, an investigation from the Gulf States Newsroom's Drew Hawkins found that an Entergy executive ghostwrote motions that some commissioners filed in support of projects like Meta's data center.Both Michael McEwen and Drew Hawkins join us for more on the latest.Louisiana's surgeon general, Dr. Evelyn Griffin, is a longtime OBGYN who is aligning herself with the Make America Healthy Again movement. She's fought against government mandates and questioned vaccine safety. Now, she's pushing for greater emphasis on wellness and disease prevention. New York Times fellow Rosemary Westwood has been reporting this story. She joins us for more on her look into Griffin's background and agenda. –Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Adam Vos. Our managing producer is Alana Schreiber. We get production support from Garrett Pittman and our assistant producer Aubry Procell.You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at noon and 7 p.m. It's available on Spotify, the NPR App and wherever you get your podcasts. Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you!Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to.Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!

Shameless Sex
#499 The Couple's Guide to Aging & Intimacy with Dr. Castillo

Shameless Sex

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2026 76:40


We talk a lot about long-term couples growing together emotionally—but what happens when their physical selves begin to change, too? As we age, our bodies change, and those changes can have a real impact on intimacy, confidence, sexual function, and relationships. In this episode, we take an honest and often lighthearted look at what happens to both women and men as they grow older—and why these changes are something couples should face together, rather than allowing them to create insecurity, doubt, or blame. We're joined by Dr. Castillo, a fellowship-trained Female Pelvic Medicine specialist and the founder and director of Swan Medical Intimate Wellness in Los Gatos, California. Dr. Castillo brings extensive expertise in the changes that can occur as a consequence of childbirth, aging, and menopause, as well as the emerging treatments designed to improve sexual health and overall quality of life. We start with women, exploring some of the most common changes in sexual function that occur with age, including the impact of menopause and shifting hormones. We also talk about the enormous beauty standards women face—and whether men might need to start “playing the game” a little more when it comes to maintaining their physical health and appearance. Then we turn the conversation toward men. What changes can they expect as they age? What treatments and options are available? And, yes, we even ask the question you may have been wondering about: Are penile fillers for increased girth actually a thing? Most importantly, this conversation is about removing the shame and stigma surrounding sexual health. Aging doesn't have to mean giving up intimacy, confidence, or connection. Understanding what is happening to our bodies—and knowing that there are options—can help couples approach these changes with compassion, humor, and a willingness to work through them together. About our guest: Dr. Castillo completed his OB/GYN residency at St. Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey before completing a three-year fellowship in Reconstructive Pelvic Surgery and Female Pelvic Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. After five years of clinical practice at Kaiser Permanente, where he oversaw resident research and education and taught medical students as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Stanford University, he founded the first private Intimate Wellness Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Castillo remains actively involved in clinical research and serves on several women's health advisory boards, helping shape emerging therapies and advanced treatment protocols for conditions that affect intimacy and quality of life. His mission is to address the root causes of common symptoms associated with aging while empowering women to embrace longevity and helping erase the stigma surrounding female sexual health through education, seminars, and compassionate care. To learn more go to https://swanmd.com, and mention Shameless Sex for a special gift. And click here to set up a free 15 minute consult to discover if you are in menopause Come to our October 2026 Couple's retreats! Learn more and reserve your spot here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.shamelesssex.com/retreat⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Do you love us? Do you REALLY love us? Then order ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠our book⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ now! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠shamelesssex.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to snag your copy Support Shameless Sex by sending us gifts via our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon Wish List⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on IG ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@shamelesssexpodcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Other links: Get 10% off getting soaking wet with code SHAMELESS at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://soakingwet.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get 45% off our favorite ethical (and educatonal) porn with code PLEASURE at ⁠⁠http://erikalust.com ⁠⁠— that's Erika with a K Get 10% off + free shipping with code SHAMELESS on Uberlube AKA our favorite lubricant at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://uberlube.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get 15% off the best sex toys with code SHAMELESSSEX at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://purepleasureshop.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with some of our favorite sexual health and hormone specialists at ⁠⁠⁠https://swanmd.com⁠⁠⁠ + mention Shameless Sex for a discount

As a Woman
Perimenopause Symptoms: The Early Signs You May Not Recognize with Dr. Alicia Robbins

As a Woman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2026 38:39


Your periods are still regular and your labs may even look “normal.” So why aren't you sleeping? Why has your mood changed? And why do you suddenly feel like a different version of yourself? In this episode of the As a Woman podcast, Dr. Natalie Crawford talks with Dr. Alicia Robbins, a board-certified OB/GYN, certified Menopause Society Practitioner, and founder of The Elm. They discuss why sleep and mood can change before hot flashes or irregular periods begin, how cycle tracking may reveal patterns, and how progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone are considered in individualized perimenopause care. They also explain the connection between fertility and perimenopause, what else should be ruled out, and how to advocate for better care when your symptoms are dismissed. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 What Is Perimenopause and When Does It Start? 03:20 Why Dr. Alicia Robbins Changed Her Approach to Perimenopause 09:55 Perimenopause vs. Menopause: What's the Difference? 11:23 Fertility and Perimenopause 12:22 How Do You Know if You're in Perimenopause? 14:47 How to Track Perimenopause Symptoms 16:02 Hormone Therapy During Perimenopause 17:38 Symptoms of Low Progesterone 18:11 Hormone Therapy, Birth Control, and Pregnancy 20:17 Testosterone and Pregnancy 21:21 Testosterone for Women 23:43 Symptoms of Low Estrogen 25:12 When to Start Hormone Therapy 27:04 Estrogen Patches vs. Pills 27:40 Do You Need Hormone Testing for Perimenopause? 30:01 Is It Perimenopause or Something Else? 32:13 How to Advocate for Better Perimenopause Care GUEST RESOURCES: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aliciarobbinsmd/ Website: https://www.theelmgreenwich.com/ Podcast: https://www.draliciarobbins.com/podcast AS A WOMAN WITH DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLveZDgg3_HZ9m7Wy3C6Vvyrj_NtEOwj_l  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/as-a-woman/id1449553339  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12IYOLH9liu60gk5D0bRPk  HOST RESOURCES: Order The Fertility Formula: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book  Newsletter: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliecrawfordmd  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NatalieCrawfordMD  Become a patient: https://www.forafertility.com  Earn FREE CE/CME: https://learnatpinnacle.com/education  This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network. ABOUT DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, co-founder of Fora Fertility, and author of The Fertility Formula. She helps women understand their hormones, fertility, and reproductive health so they can make informed decisions about their bodies. Disclaimer: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a doctor, but she is not your doctor. This content is for general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SHE MD
HRT, GLP-1s & the Health Misinformation Women Need to Know

SHE MD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2026 46:50


What if your health is about more than your lab results? In this episode of SHE MD, Mary Alice sits down with Dr. Lucy McBride, physician and author of Beyond the Prescription, to talk about how women can become better advocates for their health while navigating an overwhelming medical system. They discuss HRT and perimenopause, GLP-1s, cortisol, alcohol, health misinformation, vaccines, AI, and how to know which medical information you can actually trust. Dr. McBride shares how to make the most of a 10- or 15-minute doctor's appointment and why sometimes the most important health question isn't the one you think you should be asking.Subscribe to SHE MD Podcast for expert tips on PMOS, endometriosis, fertility, hormonal balance, mental health, and more. Share with friends and visit SHE MD website and Ovii for research-backed resources, holistic health strategies, and expert guidance on women's health and well-being.SponsorsMidi Health: Book your first virtual visit today at joinmidi.com. Opill: Opill is birth control in your control. Check out Opill to see if it is right for you. You can find Opill at most major retailers in store and online at opill.com.Olly: Shop Precise Probiotics with Skin, Stress Response, or Metabolism Support at a Walmart near you. Figs: So if you're in healthcare - or know someone who is - get 15% off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FigsRx. Ka'Chavaa: Go to kachava.com and use code SheMD for 15% off your first order. Blueland: If you're looking to make a small change in your routine, you can get 15% off your first order at blueland.com/SheMD.What You'll LearnWhy your health is about more than what shows up on a blood testHow to prepare for a short doctor's appointment and advocate for yourselfWhat Dr. McBride wants women to understand about HRT and perimenopauseHow she approaches GLP-1 medications and the growing conversation around “microdosing”Why cortisol has become a misleading catch-all explanation for women's health concernsHow to think about your relationship with alcohol rather than simply how much you drinkHow to identify misinformation and evaluate medical claims onlineHow to use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude more thoughtfully when researching your healthWhat questions women should ask when thinking about preventive healthWhy finding the right doctor and building an ongoing relationship with them mattersKey Timestamps00:00 Welcome Dr. Lucy McBride04:02 How to Advocate for Yourself at the Doctor's Office07:33 What Women Need to Know About HRT10:58 Testosterone in Women: Benefits, Risks & When to Consider It12:20 The Truth About the "Cortisol" Wellness Myth14:19 Alcohol, Women's Health & Your Relationship With Drinking21:10 What Preventive Health Really Looks Like23:51 The Pandemic & Why Dr. McBride Wrote Her Book25:24 How to Navigate Health Information in the Age of AI27:50 Spotting Misinformation & Finding Trusted Medical Sources30:23 How to Use AI to Ask Better Health Questions36:05 How to Read Medical Studies & Spot Misleading Headlines38:24 Dangerous Wellness Trends & Medical Misinformation39:39 Vaccines, COVID-19 & What the Data Shows41:36 Understanding Long COVID43:27 Dr. Lucy McBride's Three Takeaways for Patients45:52 Final Thoughts & SHE MD TakeawaysKey TakeawaysHow to advocate for yourself during a short doctor's appointmentWhy your health is about more than your lab resultsWhat women should know about HRT during perimenopause and menopauseHow to think about GLP-1 medications and who they may be right forThe truth about cortisol and chronic stressHow alcohol can impact women's physical and mental healthHow to spot health misinformation onlineHow to use AI to ask better questions about your healthWhat preventive health questions women should be asking their doctorsWhy finding the right doctor can make all the differenceGuest Bio: Dr. Lucy McBrideDr. Lucy McBride is a physician, author, and medical communicator whose public-facing work grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she began sharing evidence-based information and helping people separate medical facts from misinformation. She has written for The Atlantic, appeared regularly on MSNBC, and testified before congressional committees. Her book, Beyond the Prescription, draws on her own experience as a patient and more than 25 years of medical experience to explore a more holistic approach to health. She is also the author of the weekly Substack newsletter Are You Okay?, which focuses on cutting through medical noise and helping people better understand their health.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

White Coat Investor Podcast
MtoM #288: $20 Million Net Worth on an OB-GYN Salary

White Coat Investor Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2026 20:10


How does an OB-GYN earning a fairly typical physician income build a net worth of more than $20 million? In this episode of the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast, Dr. Jim Dahle talks with Carlos, an OB-GYN who has spent 25 years steadily building wealth through disciplined investing, consistent saving, and thoughtful real estate investments. Carlos explains how he and his wife started by saving roughly 30% of their income and investing in broad stock market index funds. As their career progressed, they expanded into commercial real estate, purchased medical office buildings, and eventually added short-term rental properties to create additional cash flow. One of the biggest milestones came after refinancing their home in 2011 and using $100,000 to purchase a Florida foreclosure near the bottom of the housing market. Through appreciation and multiple 1031 exchanges, that investment ultimately grew into approximately $3.6 million while allowing them to defer capital gains taxes. They also discuss balancing a portfolio between equities and real estate, using leverage responsibly, building income-producing properties, estate planning, and preparing for retirement after decades of disciplined investing. This conversation is a reminder that extraordinary wealth rarely comes from chasing the next hot investment. It is far more often the result of earning well, investing consistently, remaining patient, and allowing compounding to work over many years. This podcast is sponsored by Bob Bhayani at Protuity. He is an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state and a long-time white coat investor sponsor. He specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage or to get this critical insurance in place, contact Bob at https://whitecoatinvestor.com/protuity today by email info@protuity.com or by calling (973) 771-9100. Celebrating your stories of success along the journey to financial freedom! Tune in every Monday to the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast, where we celebrate the financial achievements of our listeners and share practical tips for reaching your own milestones. We want to celebrate your milestones—no matter how big or small—and help inspire others to follow your lead. Every week, these episodes feature one listener who has recently achieved a milestone they are proud of and want to celebrate, and they give any advice they have for those who want to follow their example. Make sure to listen every Monday to be inspired by your fellow white coat investors. Celebrate YOUR Milestone on the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast: https://whitecoatinvestor.com/milestones  Website: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com  YouTube: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/youtube  Student Loan Advice: https://studentloanadvice.com  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewhitecoatinvestor  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewhitecoatinvestor  Twitter: https://twitter.com/WCInvestor  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewhitecoatinvestor  Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor  Online Courses: https://whitecoatinvestor.teachable.com  Newsletter: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/free-monthly-newsletter 

Unstoppable
879 Alex Taylor: Co-Founder of Perelel

Unstoppable

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2026 35:26


Building a women's health company that is also pushing for systems change — that's the magic ✨ On The Kara Goldin Show, I sit down with Alex Taylor, Co-Founder of Perelel — the first and only OB/GYN-founded vitamin company offering clinically backed nutrition for every stage of a woman's hormonal life. We talk about how Perelel was built around a long-overdue idea: women deserve better support, better information, and clinically backed products through fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond. Alex shares what she saw missing in women's health, why trust matters so much in the supplement category, and how Perelel is creating doctor-engineered formulations designed to simplify women's health routines. We also get into why women's health has been underfunded and overlooked for so long, what is finally starting to change, and what still needs to happen to make women's health a national priority. Alex also shares more about the Perelel Pledge for Women's Health Equity — a $10 million commitment to fund women's health research and expand access to maternal care in the United States, with more than $5.5 million already deployed in five years. If you're interested in learning what it takes to build a brand rooted in clinical expertise, earn trust in a confusing category, or create a company that can also push for real change — check out the interview on my podcast. You can find it here or anywhere you listen to podcasts

Healthy Matters - with Dr. David Hilden
S06_E05 - An IVF Q&A with an OB-GYN...

Healthy Matters - with Dr. David Hilden

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2026 31:03


08/16/2026The Healthy Matters PodcastS06_E05 - An IVF Q&A with an OB-GYN...With Special Guest:  Dr. Samantha Pace, OB-GYNStarting a family isn't always as simple as we might have in our heads - and for millions of people, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has helped bridge the gap between hoping for children and having them.  But what does the process actually entail?  Who's eligible for this treatment?  And why does the process feel like an emotional rollercoaster of hope and heartbreak?We couldn't have a better guest to walk us through all of this than an OB-GYN who has walked this road herself.  We'll be joined by fertility specialist Dr. Samantha Pace to go over the entire process and explore how this treatment has helped millions of people successfully have a child.  We'll go over the procedures, risks, outcomes and why Anne Boleyn gets an unduly bad rap.  Whether you're considering IVF yourself, supporting someone who is, or are just curious about how this science is shaping how families are built today, this is a conversation you won't want to miss.  Join us!Got healthcare questions or ideas for future shows?Email - healthymatters@hcmed.orgCall - 612-873-TALK (8255)Get a preview of upcoming shows on social media and find out more about our show at www.healthymatters.org.

Talking Sleep
Sleep and Perimenopause

Talking Sleep

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2026 54:31


In this episode of Talking Sleep, host Dr. Seema Khosla welcomes Dr. Andrea Matsumura, a sleep physician with specialized certification in menopause medicine and national advisor for Monarch MD, to discuss how sleep clinicians can better support patients struggling with perimenopausal sleep disturbances. Since the FDA removed the black box warning on hormone replacement therapy, more patients are inquiring about medications to treat perimenopausal sleep symptoms. Dr. Matsumura, who left traditional practice to pursue menopause certification and now works at the intersection of sleep medicine, mental health, and women's midlife health, provides practical guidance on this increasingly important clinical area. The conversation begins with Dr. Matsumura's career evolution. After training as an internist with a leadership role at Kaiser Permanente and practicing sleep medicine in a group setting, she pursued specialized menopause certification—a credentialing process explained in detail. Dr. Matsumura discusses what menopause certification encompasses, who can pursue it, and her own path into this specialty. She also discusses her work developing specialized supplements for perimenopausal sleep support. The episode systematically addresses how perimenopause disrupts sleep. Rather than focusing solely on hot flashes, Dr. Matsumura explains the full spectrum of sleep-related changes. She clarifies the timeline of perimenopause—when it starts and ends—and discusses less commonly recognized phenomena like menstrual hypersomnia that clinicians may not immediately associate with menopause. A critical discussion addresses patient expectations around hormone replacement therapy. Many patients expect sleep clinicians to prescribe HRT, which raises legitimate concerns for providers unfamiliar with menopause management. Dr. Matsumura provides practical guidance on these conversations and clarifies the role of hormone level testing—addressing the debate between treating symptoms versus checking levels before initiating therapy. The conversation explores the complex relationship between sleep apnea and menopause. Dr. Matsumura explains why and how obstructive sleep apnea may worsen during perimenopause, how to have these conversations with patients, and when referral to OBGYN colleagues is appropriate for collaborative care. Additional topics include the role of hypnotics in perimenopausal sleep disorders, absolute contraindications to hormone replacement therapy, how to initiate HRT when appropriate, and whether restless leg syndrome worsens with perimenopause. Dr. Matsumura addresses common misconceptions about menopause and sleep, helping clinicians understand what practitioners and patients frequently get wrong about this life stage. The episode emphasizes that sleep medicine clinicians don't need to become menopause specialists, but understanding these connections enables better patient care and appropriate referrals. Join us for this important conversation about supporting women's sleep health through midlife transitions.

The Brian Lehrer Show
What is Post-Partum Psychosis?

The Brian Lehrer Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2026 30:14


Nikki Sapiro Vinckier, PA-C, OB/GYN physician assistant, reproductive health advocate and author of We Deserve More: Why Reproductive Healthcare is Broken--And What You Can Do About It (Jossey-Bass, 2026), explains the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, a rare but serious psychiatric emergency that affects about 1-2 mothers per 1,000 births, as the trial of a Massachusetts mom has brought the condition to the forefront. Plus NSV talks about the overall problems with postpartum health care in the United States. Stock illustration by Lin Shao-hua via iStock/Getty Creative Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

SHE MD
Kim Kardashian's Battle With Psoriasis: What Finally Helped

SHE MD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2026 45:53


Kim Kardashian joins Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thais Aliabadi on SHE MD for an honest conversation about living with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. Kim opens up about her first flare, the challenges of managing psoriasis in the public eye, the treatments and lifestyle changes she's tried, and what finally helped get her symptoms under control. Alongside Dr. Wallace, Mary Alice and Dr. Thais break down what psoriasis actually is, how it can affect the joints and other parts of the body, how it's diagnosed, and when it's time to see a dermatologist or rheumatologist. They also discuss genetics, stress, self-care, and why understanding what's happening beneath the skin is so important.Kim also shares why she's chosen to be open about her health and use her platform to bring more awareness to psoriasis and help others feel less alone.Subscribe to SHE MD Podcast for expert tips on PMOS, endometriosis, fertility, hormonal balance, mental health, and more. Share with friends and visit SHE MD website and Ovii for research-backed resources, holistic health strategies, and expert guidance on women's health and well-being.SponsorsSmile Set:  Listeners of our show get an additional 35% off discount when they go to smileset.com/shemd. With this discount, you can get the smile of your dreams for under 1,300 bucks. Ladder:  If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit/shemd. Take the quick quiz and find your plan. You'll get a free seven-day trial, no credit card required, and $10 off your first month when you join.BEAM Minerals: Get 20% off your first order at beamminerals.com/shemd with code SheMD.Gusto:  Try Gusto today at gusto.com/shemd and get three months free when you run your first payroll. Acely:  If your student is heading into testing season and you wanna help them achieve a life-changing score, go to acey.com and use code SheMD for 20% off today.Skylight Frames:  Go to myskylight.com/shemd for $30 off your 15-inch calendar. What You'll LearnWhat psoriasis is and how it affects the skinWhy psoriasis is considered an immune-mediated conditionThe different types of psoriasis and how they can presentHow psoriasis can be connected to psoriatic arthritisWhy diagnosing psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis can sometimes be complicatedWhen topical treatments may be enough and when systemic therapy may be consideredWhy certain topical steroids need to be used carefullyHow stress and the mind-body connection may relate to psoriasisWhat Kim Kardashian experienced throughout her own psoriasis journeyWhy seeking medical care is important instead of relying solely on social media or home remediesKey Timestamps00:00 Welcome Kim Kardashian & Dr. Daniel J. Wallace02:25 Kim's First Psoriasis Flare at Age 3009:04 What Exactly Is Psoriasis?15:05 When to See a Dermatologist or Rheumatologist22:25 How Doctors Diagnose & Evaluate Psoriasis26:22 Topical Steroids & How to Use Them Safely29:32 Kim's Psoriatic Arthritis & Flare-Up Experience33:45 Kim's Skincare & Self-Care Routine35:45 Kim on Living With Psoriasis in the Public Eye38:13 Kim's Workout, Supplements & Wellness Routine41:04 Kim's Advice to Her Younger Self43:48 5 Things to Know If You Think You Have Psoriasis44:39 Final Thoughts & GoodbyeKey TakeawaysPsoriasis can look different from person to person and may range from localized skin lesions to more extensive disease.Psoriasis can affect more than the skin, including the joints and potentially other parts of the body.Psoriatic arthritis can develop in people with psoriasis and may cause joint pain and swelling.Treatment depends on the type and severity of psoriasis, and some people may require systemic therapy.Strong topical steroids can be effective but need to be used carefully, particularly on the face.Stress, self-care, exercise, and overall lifestyle can be important parts of managing health, although individual triggers and experiences vary.Medical evaluation is important when psoriasis is suspected, especially when joint symptoms are present.Guest Bio: Kim KardashianKim Kardashian is a cultural trailblazer, actress, fashion icon, activist, entrepreneur, and devoted mother of four. She revolutionized the shapewear market with her cult-favorite brand SKIMS and has significantly transformed the beauty industry through her highly successful cosmetic and fragrance lines, KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance. Beyond her business acumen, Kim is a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform and is currently pursuing a law degree. Her influence on contemporary culture is unparalleled, making her a defining figure of our time.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Pregnancy Pearls Podcast
Managing Medication During Pregnancy

Pregnancy Pearls Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2026 42:41


When you're pregnant, should you keep taking your regular medications—or stop them until you talk to your doctor? The answer could be more important than you think. On this episode of *Pregnancy Pearls*, Dr. Nicole Plenty welcomes Dr. Andrea Palmer for an essential conversation about **medication management before and during pregnancy**. From blood pressure medications and antidepressants to prescriptions you may have taken safely for years, pregnancy can change the conversation. Dr. Plenty and Dr. Palmer explain why medication planning should ideally begin **before conception**, why abruptly stopping a prescription can sometimes create more risk, and how your OB-GYN, pharmacist, and other healthcare providers can work together to determine the safest treatment plan for you and your baby. They also discuss managing chronic conditions such as hypertension and mental health during pregnancy, medications that may need to be changed, and the importance of keeping an accurate list of your prescriptions, medical conditions, and health history. Most importantly, this episode is about **advocacy**. Ask questions. Tell every provider you see that you're pregnant or planning a pregnancy. Understand why you're taking a medication. And never assume that stopping a medication on your own is automatically the safest choice. **Pregnancy Pearl:** Before you stop, start, or change a medication during pregnancy, talk with your healthcare provider. Safe medication management is a partnership between you and your care team. Find more shows like this on the Mean Ole Lion app. Follow, rate, comment, and share.

Small Town Big Business Podcast
Sono Techniques Academy: Lynn Flamm

Small Town Big Business Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2026 45:16


From Sonographer to App Founder: Lynn Flam Builds SonoTechniques AcademyNick Holdinghausen and his co-host introduce Southern Illinois Now's Small Town Big Business and interview Lynn Flam, a registered diagnostic medical sonographer with 34 years of OBGYN experience who launched the SonoTechniques Academy OBGYN ultrasound teaching app and The Seasoned Sonographer podcast after career burnout and a lack of local teaching jobs. Flam describes identifying an education gap as busy OBGYN offices struggle to take students, using SBDC Carbondale resources to plan and find developer Jeremy Packer (Packer Labs), and marketing primarily through social media, including TikTok, plus costly conferences. The app is used by SIU's program and a local hospital system as a reference for protocols and checklists. She also became a CME lecturer, presenting on ectopic pregnancies and first-trimester evaluation, and discusses AI's growing role in ultrasound.Recorded at EThOs Small Business Incubator and Co-working Spaces in Marion, Illinois.https://members.ethosmarion.org/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCASTOur guest: https://sonotechniquesacademy.com/

Babes in Bookland
Women Taking Care of Women // Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari's Memoir "Labor"

Babes in Bookland

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2026 57:39


What is your ripple effect?This week I'm joined by bookstagrammer and journalist Ashley Kritzer (@ashleykrtizer on instagram!) to talk about LABOR by Dr. Mary Afsari, a memoir Ashley championed hard-- and once I read it, I understood exactly why. In under 200 pages, Mary tells two intertwined stories: her own path as an OBGYN pushed to the edge by burnout, policy, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and her search for the truth about her grandmother's death in Iran. The result is a book that is medically intense without ever being gratuitous, and that manages to be both deeply personal and urgently political.Ashley and I dig into what makes the memoir work: its restraint, its refusal to wander into subplots that don't serve the story, and the dual timeline that lets Mary's family history illuminate her present-day fight for women's healthcare. We talk about the hardest case in the book, a child patient whose story exposes how broken the systems meant to protect her really are. We talk about Mary's decision to build a mobile OBGYN practice out of an RV, entirely self-funded, because the traditional system wasn't serving the women who needed her most. And we talk about the eerie, direct line she draws between the crackdown on women's rights in 1979 Iran and what's happening in America right now. We land, as we always seem to, on the same idea: women taking care of women is one of the most beautiful things.Grab a copy of LABOR by Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari, then come back and listen. Share this conversation with someone who needs the reminder that women taking care of women is still one of the most powerful things in the world."My belief that we were doing the right thing as the right time is what kept me going." - Dr. Mary Fariba AsfariConnect with Dr. Mary Fariba Asfari:@maryfaribapdxConnect with Ashley Kritzer:@ashleykritzerAshley Kritzer's SubstackBooks Referenced:LABOR by Dr. Mary Fariba AsfariSupport the show:Buy us a bookBuy cute merchon PatreonSubscribe on AppleSubscribe on SubstackThis episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me. Xx, AlexConnect with us and suggest a great memoir!Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TELUS Talks with Tamara Taggart
Optimize your health in perimenopause: Dr. Jennifer Tomas

TELUS Talks with Tamara Taggart

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2026 34:41


Navigating the early signs of perimenopause can feel like a guessing game. Dr. Jennifer Tomas wants to demystify the complex transition leading to menopause. As TELUS Health's Menopause Clinical and an OB/GYN, Jennifer helps people understand their hormone fluctuations, sleep disturbances and mood changes. We debunk the myth of one-size-fits-all treatment and explore practical strategies for optimizing your health.

Black Women’s Health
The Increasing And Global Incidence of Fibroids - Why Don't They Tell You

Black Women’s Health

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2026 14:08


An interview with Dr. Cheruba Prakabar - an OBGYN , gynecologic surgeon focusing on holistic, medical and surgical management of uterine fibroids. https://www.thefibroidDoc.com#fibroiduterus #womenshealth #hysterectomy #femalereproductivehealth #uterinefibroid

As a Woman
Egg Quality: Can You Improve It Naturally in 90 Days? What Actually Helps?

As a Woman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 25:12


Your eggs begin developing months before ovulation. So what can you actually do during that window to improve your egg quality? In this episode of the As a Woman podcast, reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Natalie Crawford explains the 60-to-90-day process of egg development and why age is only one part of the egg-quality conversation. She explores how nutrition, inflammation, mitochondrial health, blood sugar, sleep, stress, exercise, supplements, and environmental exposures may shape the ovarian environment during this critical window. You cannot reverse age-related changes, but understanding how an egg develops can help you focus on the factors that may be within your control. Whether you are trying to conceive, preparing for IVF, freezing your eggs, or thinking about your future fertility, this episode offers a science-backed place to start. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Can You Improve Egg Quality Naturally in 90 Days? 01:45 How Many Eggs Are Women Born With? 02:23 Is Egg Quality Determined by Age? 03:32 Egg Quality vs. Egg Quantity: What Is the Difference? 03:13 How Long Does an Egg Take to Develop Before Ovulation? 04:50 When Should You Start Preparing for IVF or Egg Freezing? 05:30 What Causes Chromosomal Abnormalities in Eggs? 06:55 How Does Mitochondrial Health Affect Egg Quality? 08:04 How Are Estrogen and Progesterone Connected to Egg Health? 08:47 What Can Follicular Fluid Reveal About Egg Quality? 10:36 What Foods Help Support Egg Quality? 11:15 Do Healthy Fats Support Fertility and Hormone Health? 12:02 Which Protein Sources Are Best for Fertility? 12:47 Can Omega-3 Fatty Acids Support Egg Quality? 13:33 How Does Oxidative Stress Affect Egg Quality? 13:55 Should You Take CoQ10 for Egg Quality? 14:42 Does Vitamin D Affect Egg Quality and Implantation? 15:21 Can Melatonin Support Egg Quality? 16:22 How Do Blood Sugar and Insulin Affect Egg Quality? 17:41 How Can You Improve Insulin Sensitivity? 18:30 Can Strength Training Support Egg Quality? 19:00 Can Inositol, Metformin, or GLP-1 Medications Support Egg Quality? 19:40 How Do Sleep and Stress Affect Egg Quality? 21:02 Do Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Affect Egg Quality? 21:44 How Can You Reduce Endocrine-Disrupting Chemical Exposure? 23:02 What Should You Do 90 Days Before Conception, IVF, or Egg Freezing? AS A WOMAN WITH DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLveZDgg3_HZ9m7Wy3C6Vvyrj_NtEOwj_l  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/as-a-woman/id1449553339  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12IYOLH9liu60gk5D0bRPk  HOST RESOURCES: Order The Fertility Formula: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book  Newsletter: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliecrawfordmd  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NatalieCrawfordMD  Become a patient: https://www.forafertility.com  Earn FREE CE/CME: https://learnatpinnacle.com/education  This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network. ABOUT DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, co-founder of Fora Fertility, and author of The Fertility Formula. She helps women understand their hormones, fertility, and reproductive health so they can make informed decisions about their bodies. Disclaimer: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a doctor, but she is not your doctor. This content is for general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finding Genius Podcast
Supporting Mothers Through Every Stage Advice On Pregnancy, Postpartum & Women's Health

Finding Genius Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 39:17


Join us in this episode as we sit down with Dr. Ricki Pollycove to discuss her upcoming book, A Happy, Healthy Mom: Your Guide to Less Stress, Better Teamwork, and More Joy on the Journey. A nationally recognized OB-GYN with more than four decades of clinical experience, Dr. Pollycove shares practical guidance for navigating pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and the many physical and emotional changes that come with motherhood. Drawing from both her medical expertise and personal experience as a mother, she offers a compassionate perspective on helping women thrive through every stage of life. Dr. Pollycove practices at San Francisco Integrative Gynecology, where she focuses on women's health, hormone optimization, healthy aging, and preventive care. Throughout her career, she has educated both patients and healthcare professionals on topics including fertility, menopause, bioidentical hormones, breast health, and maternal wellness. She is also the author of The Pocket Guide to Bioidentical Hormones and continues to lecture internationally on women's health and integrative medicine. This conversation covers: How new mothers can reduce stress during the postpartum transition. The importance of teamwork and support throughout parenthood. Strategies for balancing self-care while caring for a growing family. Common challenges mothers face during pregnancy and postpartum recovery. Whether you're preparing for your first child, navigating the early years of parenthood, or simply interested in women's health, this episode offers thoughtful advice and practical strategies for supporting both mothers and families! Connect with Dr. Pollycove: Website LinkedIn Preorder A Happy, Healthy Mom

The Thick Thighs Save Lives Podcast
S14 EP9: Advice on GLP-1s, Hormones and Longevity from Dr. Jila Senemar, OB/GYN

The Thick Thighs Save Lives Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 63:18


Is your doctor listening to you?Because you deserve to be heard.In this episode, we sit down with OB/GYN, menopause specialist, and longevity physician Dr. Jila Senemar to discuss how menopause care is changing. The good news? It's NO LONGER something you need to just get through. Wait out. Hot flashes?Weight gain?Poor sleep?Brain fog?Low libido?We have answers. No more merely accepting your fate! In this episode, we talk about:The currency of longevity.GLP-1s and HRTHow to check your body composition.What biomarkers to demand. The surprising leading causes of death among women.How to get your insurance to cover your tests.When to get a DEXA bone density scan and a CAC scan. If you've ever wondered whether you're "too young" for perimenopause, or you've felt dismissed by your healthcare provider, this conversation could completely change how you think about your current and future health. Listen and learn how to build the healthiest decades of your life. Because YOU are in charge!Connect with Dr. Jila Senemarhttps://www.instagram.com/drjilasenemar/Website: https://www.jilamd.com/Her Time, Her Health Podcast(00:00:50) Welcome Dr. Jila Senemar to the podcast(00:04:30) The Women's Health Initiative and why women were told "no hormones"(00:10:33) GLP-1s for weight loss in women in midlife(00:14:33) Body composition vs weight, and the importance of muscle for longevity (00:17:56) GLP-1s, HRT and muscle mass (00:22:42) PMOS and treatment of hormone imbalances with GLP-1s (00:26:07) Visceral fat loss, mortality in women and GLP-1s(00:29:00) Microdosing GLP-1 medications explained(00:34:00) Blood work every woman should ask for(00:39:45) What longevity really means and what to optimize today(00:47:25) Can you naturally boost your own GLP-1s?(00:52:57) When should women start preparing for perimenopause and menopause?(01:00:24) Where to find Dr. Jila SenemarWant to leave the TTSL Podcast a voicemail? We love your questions and adore hearing from you. https://www.speakpipe.com/TheThickThighsSaveLivesPodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The CVG Nation app, for ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠iPhone⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The CVG Nation app, for Android⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fitness FB Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thick Thighs Save Lives Workout Programs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Constantly Varied Gear's ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Workout Leggings⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Disclaimer: The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The views expressed are those of the hosts and guests and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical diagnosis, treatment, or advice. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, exercise routine, medications, supplements, or healthcare plan.Guest opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the hosts or producers. 

SHE MD
Is It ADHD or Anxiety? Why Women Are So Often Misdiagnosed

SHE MD

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 53:49


What if the anxiety, emotional sensitivity, and overwhelm you've experienced for years are actually connected to ADHD? On this episode of SHE MD, Mary Alice sits down with board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD specialist Dr. Sasha Hamdani to unpack why ADHD is so often missed or misdiagnosed in women. They discuss the emotional side of ADHD, rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), hormones and ADHD symptoms, ADHD during perimenopause and postpartum, medication options, and why treating ADHD is about so much more than improving focus. Dr. Hamdani also shares the science behind her new book, Too Sensitive: Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply.Subscribe to SHE MD Podcast for expert tips on PMOS, endometriosis, fertility, hormonal balance, mental health, and more. Share with friends and visit SHE MD website and Ovii for research-backed resources, holistic health strategies, and expert guidance on women's health and well-being.SponsorsSera: To learn more you can visit PreTRM.com. Talk with your provider about whether the PreTRM Test might be right for you.Momentus: If you want to try Momentous Signature Spec Creatine, head to livemomentous.com and use code SheMD or SheMDpod for up to 35% off your entire first order. Talkiatry: Head to talkiatry.com/shemd to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. Larine: Right now, Larinco is offering our listeners up to 50% off at buylarine.com/shemd. DripDrop: Right now, DripDrop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code SheMD. Olly: You can find OLLY Precise Probiotics with skin, stress, or metabolism support at a Walmart near you. What You'll LearnWhy ADHD can look different in women than in menWhy women with ADHD are often diagnosed with anxiety or depression insteadHow estrogen fluctuations can affect ADHD symptoms and dopamine regulationWhat happens to ADHD symptoms during PMS, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, and menopauseThe difference between stimulant and non-stimulant ADHD medicationsHow medication decisions can be personalized for women and childrenWhat rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is and how it can affect relationships and daily lifeWhy emotional dysregulation is an important part of the ADHD conversationWhether supplements can help with ADHD symptomsWhy you can't “give yourself” ADHD by spending too much time on your phoneDr. Hamdani's favorite ADHD sleep hackKey Timestamps00:00 Welcome Dr. Sasha Hamdani02:40 Sasha's ADHD Diagnosis & Her Journey Through Medical School07:28 Why ADHD Looks Different In Women09:07 Why So Many Women Are Misdiagnosed With Anxiety & Depression10:20 How Hormones Can Make ADHD Symptoms Worse16:43 Estrogen, Menopause & ADHD Symptoms18:50 ADHD Medication vs. HRT: What's The Difference?20:56 Finding The Right ADHD Medication23:09 Stimulants Vs. Non-Stimulants & The 80/20 Approach25:26 ADHD Medication For Children31:44 Why ADHD Medication Can Stop Working During Perimenopause32:49 The Long-Term Effects Of ADHD Medication34:11 Are Medication Holidays Helpful?36:40 Understanding Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)40:59 How To Regulate Emotional Dysregulation41:36 Inside "Too Sensitive" & The Science Of Feeling Deeply44:52 Dating Advice For Women With RSD47:16 Do Supplements Actually Help ADHD?48:46 Can Your Phone Make ADHD Worse?50:16 The Biggest Misconceptions About ADHD51:05 Sasha's Favorite ADHD Hack For Better Sleep52:28 Final Thoughts & TakeawaysKey TakeawaysADHD is about much more than attention and focus. It can affect emotions, relationships, sleep, eating, executive function, and everyday life.Women are frequently missed because they may present primarily with inattentive symptoms rather than the stereotypical hyperactive presentation.Hormonal changes can worsen ADHD symptoms, particularly when estrogen drops during the menstrual cycle, postpartum period, and perimenopause.Anxiety and depression can coexist with ADHD, but they can also be diagnoses that obscure underlying ADHD.Rejection sensitive dysphoria describes an intense emotional or physical response to real or perceived rejection or criticism and can be particularly disruptive for people with ADHD.Finding the right ADHD treatment is highly individualized. Medication can be one tool alongside behavioral strategies and other forms of support.Dr. Hamdani emphasizes that the goal of ADHD medication isn't to make someone feel “perfect,” but to provide consistent support that allows them to function more like they do on a good day.Emotional sensitivity isn't necessarily something that needs to be eliminated. The goal can be learning to better understand and regulate it.Guest Bio: Dr. Sasha HamdaniDr. Sasha Hamdani is a board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD specialist who has both personal and professional experience with ADHD. After being diagnosed with ADHD as a child, she went on to become a physician and now specializes in treating ADHD and helping patients better understand the condition beyond traditional symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity. She is also the author of Too Sensitive: Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply, which explores the neuroscience of emotional sensitivity, rejection, hormones, and practical tools for managing intense emotions.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

About Health and Hormones
All About IVF, Insulin Resistance, PMOS, Egg Freezing, Male Fertility, and so much more with Dr. Sahar Wertheimer

About Health and Hormones

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 40:10


Dr. Sahar Wertheimer is a fertility specialist and double board-certified OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist practicing in Beverly Hills, California. She also serves as chair of the Women's Health Committee for the Jewish Orthodox Women's Medical Association. Her research and publications cover topics including placental epigenetics and markers of androgen excess in PCOS and hirsutism. Dr. Wertheimer completed four years of OB-GYN training followed by a three-year fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility.Listen in to hear Dr. Wertheimer share:How to prepare for egg freezing, egg retrieval, IVF, and embryo transferWhat fertility statistics can—and cannot—tell women about egg freezing and future family buildingWhy male fertility deserves greater attention and how sperm health can affect treatment outcomesThe connection between insulin resistance, PCOS or PMOS, ovulation, egg quality, and implantationHow nutrition, sleep, exercise, and evidence-supported supplements may help optimize fertilityHer perspective on GLP-1 medications for some patients with insulin resistanceWhen advanced testing such as sperm DNA fragmentation analysis and PGT-A may be helpfulPotential causes and evaluations following recurrent pregnancy lossWhy IVF, donor-assisted conception, and surrogacy should be discussed without shameEncouragement for anyone navigating the emotional challenges of fertility treatment+so much moreConnect with Lauren:Get my FREE PCOS Guide hereJoin the Empowered Path to Pregnancy hereInstagramWork With MeThank you so much for listening to the About Health and Hormones Podcast! If you loved today's episode, I would love to know! Please leave a rating and review so I can make this podcast even better for you all. I would love to connect with you.I'm so glad you were here today, and I wish you all health and happiness!This episode was edited and produced by Intent Media.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy

Doc Talk with Monument Health
Episode 204: Separating Perimenopause Fact from Fiction with Heather Moline, M.D.

Doc Talk with Monument Health

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2026 28:31


Millions of women are turning to social media for answers about perimenopause and menopause, but how much of it holds up? Dr. Heather Moline, an OB-GYN with Rapid City Medical, joins Mark Houston to cut through the noise: what actually separates perimenopause from menopause, why two decades of fear around hormone replacement therapy were built on flawed research, and what treatment really looks like today. It's a candid, practical look at symptoms, testing, and the long-term health benefits women may have missed out on, and a clear first step for anyone wondering if this is them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Live Out Loud Show
The Truth About Hormones Every High Impact Woman Needs to Know | with Dr. Tabatha Barber

The Live Out Loud Show

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 6, 2026 57:37


In this episode, Brooke is joined by Dr. Tabatha Barber, OB-GYN turned functional medicine menopause expert, to dive deep into why high-performing, faith-driven women must view their bodies as their greatest business asset. They explore the critical mind-body-soul connection, share personal journeys through burnout, adrenal fatigue, and autoimmune struggles, and highlight the non-negotiable necessity of stewarding your physical health to activate your God-given impact. From dismantling hustle culture and the dangers of chronic stress to harnessing the biblical power of fasting and morning routines, this conversation blends faith, practical health wisdom, and vulnerability. Listeners will be encouraged to renew their minds, break free from limiting beliefs, and equip themselves to lead in business and life with more clarity, energy, and peace. Join the Live Out Loud network and see Dr. Tabatha Barber + Candace Bure live on tour here:  https://candacecbure.com/tour Key Moments & Timestamps 00:09 – Stewarding the Vessel: Why your body is your greatest business asset. 01:40 – From Burnout to Breakthrough: Dr. Tabatha Barber shares her personal journey as an OB-GYN and the shift to functional medicine. 05:10 – The Cost of Disconnection: How neglecting the mind, body, and soul impacts business success. 10:00 – Signs of Burnout: Key symptoms women experience and the role of adrenal dysfunction. 18:28 – Healing Through Faith: How nourishing your soul and aligning your morning routine transforms health and business. 35:47 – Fasting as a Superpower: Dr. Tabatha Barber explains why fasting, done properly, is essential for female entrepreneurs.       Resources: Building at a high level but craving deeper alignment? The Elite Mastermind is a 12-month, faith-fueled business mastermind for high-achieving women who refuse to choose between business excellence and their faith. Join Kingdom-minded leaders for luxury in-person retreats, monthly coaching with Brooke Thomas, and a powerful network that will expand your vision, revenue, and impact. When you lead with God as your CEO, anything is possible.  Apply at https://brookethomas.com/mastermind/    Feel Like Yourself Again, From The Inside Out If you've been navigating low energy, hormone shifts, or feeling off in your body, this is the wellness stack Brooke personally uses and recommends. Designed to support inflammation, hormones, energy, and overall vitality, this is what helped her feel strong, clear, and aligned again. Explore the stack at https://brookethomas.com/stack    Find Your People. Build With Purpose.  Activate Your Impact is where faith-driven women stop building alone and start building together. Access monthly teaching, live coaching, and a network of women who are moving in the same direction you are. This is what keeps you plugged in, growing, and activated between the big moments. Join today at https://brookethomas.com/activate    Activate Your Impact! There's a version of you God is waiting to activate. This book will show you how to step boldly into your calling with unshakable faith and build a life and business that honors Him.  Get your copy and special bonuses at https://brookethomas.com/book 

The PedsDocTalk Podcast
What Every Mom Should Know About Labor and Postpartum Recovery with OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Lincoln

The PedsDocTalk Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2026 55:41


Have you ever entered a medical environment feeling like your voice was completely secondary to the fast-moving machines and rigid hospital policies around you? It is a vulnerable position that leaves far too many birthing parents carrying psychological scars, but what if knowing the right language ahead of time is the ultimate shield against a traumatic birth? In this episode, I sit down with board-certified Ob-Gyn and author Dr. Jennifer Lincoln to demystify the intense world of labor, delivery, and postpartum recovery. Dr. Lincoln discusses why true informed consent requires deep clinical communication, provides practical tips on how to build a flexible birth preference sheet, and fearlessly tackles the complex systemic hospital policies that families are rarely warned about. Writing the Legacy: What drove Dr. Lincoln to write a comprehensive, doctor-backed guide dedicated entirely to the raw realities of giving birth. The Hidden Trauma Metric: Why up to half of birthing people experience psychological birth trauma and how clinical dismissal fuels it. Birth Plans vs. Birth Preferences: Why shifting your terminology can protect your mental health and set you up for empowered choice in any delivery scenario. The Corporate Blindspots of Delivery: How hidden out-of-network insurance bills can strike you even when you deliver at an in-network hospital. Why Hospital Ideology Matters: The quiet systemic impact of a hospital's religious affiliation on your personal birth control options during a C-section. The Candy Wrapper Analogy: Why the current healthcare system abandons moms immediately after birth and the 3 things you must know before being discharged. Normalizing the Unspoken: A refreshing, unfiltered look at bodily functions in the delivery room and a vital resource for navigating the heaviest pregnancy outcomes. Connect with Dr. Jen Lincoln on Instagram @drjenniferlincoln, visit her site drjenniferlincoln.com and buy her new book: The Birth Book https://go.shopmy.us/p-76800588 (paid link) 00:00 - Introduction to the Episode and Guest 02:42 - The "Labor of Love": Publishing a Book 05:35 - The Role of Social Media in Medical Education 07:00 - Why Focus on Labor and Postpartum? 10:40 - True Informed Consent in the Delivery Room 14:53 - The Impact of Feeling Heard vs. Dismissed 20:04 - Birth "Preferences" vs. Birth "Plans" 24:08 - Navigating Hidden Hospital Policies 30:41 - The Reality of Out-of-Network Medical Bills 33:00 - Three Crucial Postpartum Realities 39:42 - How to Advocate for Yourself in a Medical Setting 44:25 - Discussing Stillbirth and Delivery Fears 46:47 - Finding Joy and Setting Boundaries 48:56 - Episode Outro and Final Reflections Our podcasts are also now on YouTube. If you prefer a video podcast with closed captioning, check us out there and ⁠subscribe to PedsDocTalk⁠. Get trusted pediatric advice, relatable parenting insights, and evidence-based tips delivered straight to your inbox—join thousands of parents who rely on the PDT newsletter to stay informed, supported, and confident. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠! Shop Dr. Mona's favorite products: https://shopmy.us/shop/pedsdoctalk (paid link) And don't forget to follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠@pedsdoctalkpodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠ on Instagram—our new space just for parents looking for real talk and real support. We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on the ⁠PedsDocTalk Podcast Sponsorships⁠ page of the website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Woman
Will You Ever Want Sex Again? Low Libido, Hormones & Desire with Dr. Kelly Casperson

As a Woman

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2026 52:22


Low libido in women is often blamed on stress, aging, or relationship problems, but changes in desire may begin years before menopause and can involve hormones, medications, pain, sleep, blood flow, and the difference between spontaneous and responsive desire.  Dr. Natalie Crawford sits down with board-certified urologist Dr. Kelly Casperson, author of “You Are Not Broken” and “The Menopause Moment,” to explain why women may stop wanting sex, how testosterone and estrogen affect sexual health, and what to discuss with a clinician when something feels different. They also examine birth control and SSRI side effects, hormone therapy, vaginal estrogen, and why women's sexual health deserves greater attention. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Why Women Can Lose Desire Before Menopause 02:10 Can Your Hormones Change While You Still Have a Period? 03:38 Why Testosterone Matters in Women 05:41 Can Birth Control Lower Your Libido? 08:04 How Estrogen Affects Desire, Arousal, and Vaginal Health 10:02 What Does Low Libido Actually Mean? 10:56 When Low Libido Is Really Painful Sex 13:15 Spontaneous vs. Responsive Desire 15:25 Are You Having Sex Worth Desiring? 16:53 What Causes Arousal Problems in Women? 17:20 How SSRIs Can Affect Sexual Function 17:50 How Couples Can Navigate Mismatched Sex Drives 21:05 Why Perimenopause Can Make You Feel Unlike Yourself 21:24 How Sleep, Estrogen, and Progesterone Affect Desire 21:50 Testosterone's Role in the Brain, Mood, and Motivation 24:40 How Is Testosterone Prescribed to Women? 27:15 What Happens When Testosterone Is Too High? 30:30 Can Testosterone Affect More Than Libido? 32:00 Testosterone, Wound Healing, and Bone Health 33:25 Could Testosterone Support Hip-Fracture Recovery? 34:00 Can Hormone Therapy Still Help Women Over 60? 36:00 Systemic vs. Vaginal Estrogen 37:00 Why Hormone Treatment May Begin Before Menopause 39:55 Can You Get Pregnant During Perimenopause? 41:41 When Vaginal Estrogen May Help 46:12 How to Talk to Your Doctor About Hormones 48:25 Where to Find Dr. Kelly Casperson GUEST RESOURCES:Website: https://kellycaspersonmd.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellycaspersonmdPodcast: https://kellycaspersonmd.com/you-are-not-broken-podcastYou Are Not Broken: https://kellycaspersonmd.com/you-are-not-broken-bookThe Menopause Moment: https://kellycaspersonmd.com/the-menopause-moment-book AS A WOMAN WITH DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLveZDgg3_HZ9m7Wy3C6Vvyrj_NtEOwj_l  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/as-a-woman/id1449553339  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/12IYOLH9liu60gk5D0bRPk  HOST RESOURCES: Order The Fertility Formula: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/book  Newsletter: https://www.nataliecrawfordmd.com/newsletter  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliecrawfordmd  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NatalieCrawfordMD  Become a patient: https://www.forafertility.com  Earn FREE CE/CME: https://learnatpinnacle.com/education  This episode is brought to you by The Pinnacle Podcast Network. ABOUT DR. NATALIE CRAWFORD: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist, co-founder of Fora Fertility, and author of The Fertility Formula. She helps women understand their hormones, fertility, and reproductive health so they can make informed decisions about their bodies. Disclaimer: Natalie Crawford, MD, is a doctor, but she is not your doctor. This content is for general education and is not a substitute for individualized medical care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Food Code
#1002: Dr. Bill Rawls - Why Everything Fell Apart in Perimenopause (It's Not Hormones)

The Food Code

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2026 49:23


Perimenopause didn't give you a new disease — it exposed one you've been carrying. Dr. Bill Rawls, MD, spent 20 years in OB/GYN, crashed, and couldn't get an answer from his own colleagues. He explains the "boiling point" where cellular damage and dormant microbe reactivation start feeding each other, why chronic infection testing fails, why only some people get sick from mold in the same building, and why your insomnia, constipation, and stalled detox are one problem instead of three. If your labs are normal and you are not, start here. Connect with Dr. Rawls: Intagram | Web | Vital Plan *** CONNECT:

White Coat Investor Podcast
MtoM #286: How This OB/GYN Paid Off $200K in Student Loans in 4 Years

White Coat Investor Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 3, 2026 28:22


What does it actually take to get $200,000 in medical school loans forgiven through a state program most doctors have never heard of? In this Milestones to Millionaire episode, Rachel, a generalist OBGYN in Texas six years out of residency, shares how she paid off nearly all her medical school debt through the Physician Education Loan Repayment Program, a Texas state initiative that repays primary care physicians in graduated yearly amounts for working in health professional shortage areas and seeing a minimum number of Medicaid patients. She walks through how the program actually worked in practice: the qualifying requirements, the uncertainty of waiting on state bureaucracy each year, and the moment she finally paid off the last few thousand dollars herself. Rachel also discusses how she and her husband manage their household finances, including why they've chosen to keep some accounts separate despite the common advice to combine everything, and how their asset allocation and retirement savings have grown since paying off the debt. Six years out of residency, with a combined household income just over $500,000, Rachel and her husband have built a net worth over $1 million between retirement accounts and home equity. Not every debt relief option is well advertised. Sometimes the biggest financial win comes from doing the research to find a program you didn't know existed. This podcast is sponsored by Bob Bhayani at Protuity. He is an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state and a long-time white coat investor sponsor. He specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage or to get this critical insurance in place, contact Bob at https://whitecoatinvestor.com/protuity today by email info@protuity.com or by calling (973) 771-9100. Celebrating your stories of success along the journey to financial freedom! Tune in every Monday to the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast, where we celebrate the financial achievements of our listeners and share practical tips for reaching your own milestones. We want to celebrate your milestones—no matter how big or small—and help inspire others to follow your lead. Every week, these episodes feature one listener who has recently achieved a milestone they are proud of and want to celebrate, and they give any advice they have for those who want to follow their example. Make sure to listen every Monday to be inspired by your fellow white coat investors. Celebrate YOUR Milestone on the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast: https://whitecoatinvestor.com/milestones  Website: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com  YouTube: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/youtube  Student Loan Advice: https://studentloanadvice.com  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewhitecoatinvestor  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewhitecoatinvestor  Twitter: https://twitter.com/WCInvestor  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewhitecoatinvestor  Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/whitecoatinvestor  Online Courses: https://whitecoatinvestor.teachable.com  Newsletter: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/free-monthly-newsletter 

Transform your Mind
AI and IVF: The Future of Fertility Treatments

Transform your Mind

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 3, 2026 56:33 Transcription Available


 Artificial intelligence is transforming in vitro fertilization (IVF) by improving embryo selection, personalizing hormone protocols, and automating lab tasks. These tools aim to boost success rates, reduce human error, and make treatments more efficient. Myrna Young hosts Dr. Marina Siri, an OB GYN educator, to discuss natural ways to restore fertility and improve reproductive health. With over 30 years of experience, Dr. Siri shares insights on combating declining fertility rates with holistic approaches focused on lifestyle, diet, and exercise. The conversation explores topics like the impact of environmental factors on fertility, the importance of understanding reproductive health, and effective natural strategies for enhancing fertility. Tune in for empowering insights to help women align with their bodies for better health outcomes.The conversation delves deep into the link between lifestyle choices and reproductive health, addressing the misconceptions surrounding infertility treatments. Dr. Marina stresses the importance of understanding one's body, making informed lifestyle changes, and recognizing the role of stress and trauma in fertility issues. For women delaying childbearing, she provides insights on maintaining fertility through holistic health practices, thus empowering listeners to take control of their reproductive futures. Discover how knowledge and proactive self-care can make significant differences in fertility outcomes, giving hope and agency to those on this challenging journey.Key Takeaways:Lifestyle and Fertility: Dr. Marina highlights the crucial role diet, exercise, and avoiding environmental toxins play in maintaining reproductive health and improving fertility.Personalization Over Standardization: Emphasizing a departure from the one-size-fits-all medical approaches, she advocates for tailored health strategies based on individual needs and circumstances.Impact of Stress and Trauma: Chronic stress and past traumas can significantly affect fertility, suggesting that addressing these issues is vital for reproductive success.AI in Fertility Treatments: Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform fertility treatments by assessing egg quality, showcasing the interplay between technology and reproductive health care.Empowerment through Knowledge: The episode reinforces the power of understanding and working with one's body to enhance fertility naturally, rather than relying exclusively on medical interventions.Timestamp Summary0:02 Transform Your Mind and Life with Coach Myrna1:15 Restoring Fertility and Addressing Reproductive Health Challenges10:24 The Impact of Age and Health on Female Fertility16:39 The Impact of Chemicals on Global Infertility and Health22:09 Elevate Your Wardrobe With Quince's Luxury Essentials23:36 Challenges and Realities of IVF and Fertility Treatments29:17 Optimizing Fertility and Longevity Through Lifestyle Changes36:04 Exercise, Lifestyle, and Longevity in Different Climates41:05 Impact of Stress and Trauma on Fertility44:12 Empowering Women to Optimize Fertility Naturally Through Lifestyle ChangesResources:Website: Dr. Marina Suri OB GYNBook: "Optimize Your Fertility Naturally" Link to Transcript https://www.buzzsprout.com/1761155/19581918-ai-and-ivf-the-future-of-fertility-treatments/transcriptSponsors for this podcast QuinceQuince is not just apparel. Quince also offers elevated essentials for your home, from bedding and bath, to kitchen essentials and furniture.Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to Quince.com/tym for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns See this video on The Transform Your Mind YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@MyhelpsUs/videosTo see a transcripts of this audio as well as links to all the advertisers on the show page https://myhelps.us/Follow Transform Your Mind on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/myrnamyoung/Follow Transform Your mind on Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063738390977Please leave a rating and review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transform-your-mind/id1144973094Feedspot Top 100 Mental Health Podcast For sponsored Brand interviews and sponsorship inquires please visit Partner With The Transform Your Mind Podcast | Myrna Young Life Coach

The Lila Rose Show
She Almost Died: Here's Her Lessons on Motherhood w/Dr Lauren Rubal | BONUS Lila Rose Show

The Lila Rose Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2026 33:28


Dr Lauren Rubal is a mother, OBGYN, and a dear friend of mine. Today she shares about her faith, medicine, family, and health journey to share what she's learned along the way. Note: This is a bonus episode we filmed several months agoNEW: Check out our Merch store! https://shop.lilaroseshow.com/Join our new Patreon community! https://patreon.com/lilaroseshow - We'll have BTS footage, ad-free episodes, and early access to our upcoming guests.A big thanks to our partner, EWTN, the world's leading religious network! Discover news, entertainment and more at https://www.ewtn.com/ Check out our Sponsors:-EveryLife Women: https://www.everylife.com/lila Buy diapers and women's health products from an amazing company and use code LILA10 to get 10% off!-We Heart Nutrition: https://www.weheartnutrition.com/ Get high quality vitamin supplements for 20% off using the code LILA.

The John Fugelsang Podcast
Republican Courage is Like Baldness - It Begins when there's Nothing Left to Lose

The John Fugelsang Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 30, 2026 91:43


John discusses the Senate Judiciary Committee postponing its scheduled vote to advance Todd Blanche's nomination for Attorney General. The delay occurred because Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina refused to commit to voting for Blanche and are demanding written assurances regarding a controversial Department of Justice settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS. Trump responded by threatening to temporarily withdraw the nomination until January when both of them are out of congress. Then, John interviews Dr. Erin Stevens, an OB-GYN with the Committee to Protect Healthcare. She sheds light on the recent court ruling regarding mifepristone, emphasizing the importance of science in reproductive health care amidst the ongoing political battle over abortion access. Next, he welcomes back legal analyst and consultant Dr. Tracy Pearson for a discussion on the implications of Todd Blanche's nomination and the ongoing political theatrics surrounding Trump. They dissect the questionable fitness of Blanche for the role of Attorney General, exploring the conflicts of interest and the peculiar dynamics of a Senate that seems to operate under the shadow of Trump's influence. Tracy shares her insights on the motivations behind the actions of Senators Cornyn and Tillis, and whether their apparent courage is genuine or simply a product of political convenience. And then finally, John is joined by the extraordinary explorer and retired naval officer Victor Vescovo, who shares his remarkable experiences navigating the most extreme environments on Earth. From climbing the highest mountains to skiing at the poles and even traveling into space, Vescovo's adventures have taken him to places few have ever seen. He discusses the profound psychological shift known as the "interview effect," which he explores in his latest essay, emphasizing how descending into the ocean can alter our perspective on the planet and ourselves. John and Victor delve into the contrasts between the overview effect experienced in space and the enveloping nature of the deep ocean, highlighting the fragility of Earth and the need for greater environmental awareness. They also touch on the sobering reality of human pollution in the ocean, the emotional weight of exploring shipwrecks, and the importance of personal connection to nature in fostering conservation efforts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The World of Phil Hendrie
Episode #3880 The New Phil Hendrie Show Radio Archive Hour

The World of Phil Hendrie

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2026 31:40 Transcription Available


The Radio Archive Hour is with Dr Jim Sadler from July of 2000. To cut back on healthcare costs Dr Sadler, a dentist, will also take online instruction in being an OBGYN so women can have their teeth worked on while he's examining their breasts.Sign up for a Backstage Pass and enjoy Hours of exclusive content, Phil's new podcast, Classic podcasts, Bobbie Dooley's podcasts, special live streaming events and shows, and oh so very much more…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.