The Truth About Hormones & Menopause with Dr. Felice Gersh

Felice Gersh

In order for women to actually be successful with pregnancy, they really need to have a really healthy neurological system, cardiovascular system, immune system, which is so heavily modified during pregnancy. All the systems, musculoskeletal system. When women get to the stage of perimenopause, the women who have the worst symptoms, they tend to be the women who did have a lesser status of health earlier. So women live a few years longer, but they live with more chronic diseases than men, and I want to change that.

Lorne Brown

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. Today’s guest is Dr. Felice Gersh. She is a board certified OB-GYN and one of the leading voices in integrative medicine when it comes to women’s hormonal health, particularly in the areas of perimenopause and menopause, PCOS now known as PMOS, metabolism and whole body hormone physiology. Now, Dr. Gersh is the founder and director of the Integrative Medical Group of Irvine, where she combines conventional gynecology with a deeply holistic and systems-based approach to medicine. She reminds me of a Chinese medicine doctor based on her holistic approach. Her work helps bridge the gap between mainstream medicine and integrative care. And there’s a focus on how hormones influence nearly every system in the body, from the brain and cardiovascular system to metabolism, thyroid health, inflammation, sleep, and longevity. And I’m sure in our conversation we’re going to learn a few more as well.

I also had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Gersh professionally for several years. She was one of our feature speakers in the 2021 Integrative Fertility Symposium where she gave an outstanding presentation on PCOS, as I mentioned, is now referred to as PMOS. And she was highlighting the metabolic hormonal inflammatory drivers affecting so many women today. I had originally hoped to have Felice on our M-Factor panelists as our integrative MD, but she speaks a lot, travels a lot, and so she was off venturing off in Europe, so we weren’t able to have her. However, I feel fortunate that our schedules have aligned and we’re here today to talk about hormonal health, perimenopause, menopause on the podcast. So Dr. Gersh, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Felice Gersh

Well, it’s a pleasure to work with you again and to have this opportunity to talk about topics that are so important for everyone to know.

Lorne Brown

You’ve been a great voice on helping women find their voice and take information to their healthcare providers. This age group where they’re in perimenopause, menopause, I think have been underserved, possibly because the medical profession has been undertrained in this area. Interesting enough, it’s probably the largest population that women that live to their late 40s and 50s are going to experience this transition. And so thanks for being that voice. And today we’re going to go even deeper, I hope. Most people, when they think of perimenopause or especially menopause, they think hot flashes, night sweats. I get that your message is how this is more of a whole body approach or whole body physiological transition. So can you just start to introduce to us what is happening in this perimenopause phase and why it may not just be hot flashes and night sweats for many of the women that are going through this phase of their life?

Felice Gersh

Well, foundational to understanding how the perimenopause and then ultimately the menopausal stage of life is really transformational metabolically for every organ system is to recognize that the prime directive of life, whether we want to or don’t want to have babies, which I’m totally in favor of women having or not having babies when and if they wish, but the prime directive of life is the creation of new life. And humans are the only species on planet earth that really tries to control their reproductive destiny. You never see a cow say, “Oh, let’s not make any calves this season,” or like dogs say, “Let’s not mate.” I mean, it just doesn’t happen, but humans try to control it. And so we stop thinking about the prime directive of life. But when you understand the female body as designed for reproductive success, which means you have to have every organ system in the female body optimally functioning, and it has to function for many, many years because to replace the species so that it continues, a female is supposed to have multiple pregnancies, deliver multiple babies and raise each one to their own sexual maturity so that they in turn can have their own children.

So for that to actually happen, you need to have a successful fertility of course, and successful pregnancy. And pregnancy is now finally, I’ve talked about this for decades, is recognized as the ultimate stress test of reproductive age women. And unfortunately we have higher rates of pregnancy related complications, whether it includes preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, all of these things that happen when women are pregnant that don’t happen at other times. And in order for women to actually be successful with pregnancy, which is such a stress test on all their organs, they really need to have a really healthy neurological system, cardiovascular system, immune system, which is so heavily modified during pregnancy, all the systems, musculoskeletal system. So what is going on in the female body to actually optimize total body health for total success with fertility and reproduction? It’s the so-called sex hormones, which I now call life hormones, the givers and sustainers of life.

The primary one at the top of the pinnacle is estradiol. And then of course there’s progesterone. And for the moment we’ll leave out testosterone because that’s sort of a little bit different in a variety of ways, but you can’t make estradiol without testosterone. That’s the precursor. So the bottom line is that these hormones are not just functioning in the uterus, the fallopian tubes, the ovaries, the vaginal canal and so on. They have receptors in every single organ system of the body. So I call estradiol, which is a form of estrogen. Estrogen is a family of hormones. It’s not a hormone. And in the adult female, there are three types of estrogen and estradiol also known as E2 is the one that’s made by the functioning ovaries. So in order to facilitate health throughout all the organ systems, there are receptors for estradiol in every organ system.

So I call estradiol the master of metabolic homeostasis. And what’s fundamental to creating energy, to maintaining cell life? When should cells that are old die? We call that the cell cycle. It’s the mitochondria, what sometimes are called the powerhouses of the cell, but they’re way more complex than just that. And that’s enough even as it is, but it’s more than that. And estradiol and progesterone are key to the health and functioning of mitochondria, which create energy, the spark of life. So basically when you’re going through perimenopause and these vital life hormones are being produced erratically and then ultimately in lesser quantities, you have effects that are seriously impacting every organ system in the female body, every single organ system, and the very foundation of life itself, the creation of energy and the determination of when cells live and when cells die, the mitochondria become less and less effective as these hormone production levels are declining.

So understanding this is vital to helping women to get through this stage of life. And menopause now is often consisting of 50% of a woman’s life. If you figure you’re going to live to a hundred and the typical age of menopause is around 50, 51, you’re going to live potentially half your entire life as a menopausal woman. So do you want to live with degenerative diseases which are now known to be related to loss of these vital life hormones, not just how many years you’ve lived, but how many years you’ve lived without adequate hormone production and levels, then if you want to have an optimal life, it just is foundational that you need to have optimal hormones, not just a little bit to reduce night sweats and hot flashes, which you mentioned, because it turns out that it takes almost like a whiff, just a pinch, like a pinch of salt, a pinch of hormone to actually suppress night sweats and hot flashes.

But in order to have optimal mitochondrial function, optimal total body organ function, metabolic homeostasis, you need to have an optimal physiologic level. By physiologic, I mean levels that are somewhat similar. We can’t make it exact, but similar to what a woman would have in her body when she’s optimally healthy, like around age 21. Now that is not the standard of care, which is really disappointing to me. It is the standard of care for women who go into early menopause or what we call premature ovarian insufficiency, which we used to call ovarian failure, but they decided that was politically incorrect. So when the ovaries cease to produce hormones before the age of 40 is premature, menopause or before the age of 45 is down to age 40, between 40 and 45 is early, that group is actually officially recommended to be treated with physiologic doses of hormones.

But somehow when a woman hits 50, 52, goodbye, you’re not supposed to have them anymore. You’re supposed to go to either no hormones or these tiny, tiny doses just to suppress the most classic symptoms, night sweats and hot flashes. So I say the heck with that, let’s continue optimization. How long? How about forever? At least to age a hundred.

Lorne Brown

Well, that makes you why you think like a Chinese medicine doctor and an integrative practitioner that you are, even though you’re board certified as an OB-GYN, because in the Chinese medicine naturopathic world, if there’s a range, our goal is not for you to be just in the surviving range, low end. Our goal is thriving on the other end. That’s why your labs can be normal, but your symptoms tell us you’re not optimized, so let’s optimize you.

A lot of our listeners are actually even trying to grow their families. You talked about how people are doing things to not get pregnant with that only kind of species. In my practice, I have this saying and I had this observation. One is perimenopause is not the problem. Perimenopause reveals the problem. So this is the whole system like cardiovascular, inflammation, metabolic health. In this phase, there is a shift, your window of tolerance decreases, and now all of a sudden you start to see these underlying imbalances that might’ve been there for a while anyhow, and now they’ve come to the surface. And so in my practice, it was something of phenomena. It’s not a study. It’s an observation that I noticed that the women that I saw in their prime that had really bad premenstrual symptoms or had to do IVF cycles, not because of male factor, because of their issues, they’re the ones that had the more challenging perimenopause phase.

Meaning to me, huh, we can already see the underlying imbalance of what’s going on here with the estrogen progesterone, but cardiovascular health, metabolic health, the mitochondria health. We could already see that there was something not quite optimized in this woman. And then later in life when we’re older and things start to wear down a little bit more at accelerated rate, it reveals itself. So to me, it’s aligned to what you’ve shared that you talked about the mitochondria health. Well, that’s a big important for fertility. So hence they’re going through fertility treatments. But some of the symptoms that people may not be aware of that they get prescriptions, and I don’t think you do it this way, where somebody’s mood is off, they’re raging or they’re severely depressed, so they’re given an antidepressant. They have aches and pains. In my house, my wife made us flip the mattress many times and buy a mattress for her hip stuff, but I was kind of aware and now she’s into it.

I don’t think it’s the mattress. You’re in your early 50s. I think we need a little bit extra support for you. There’s the brain fog and forgetfulness. There’s all of a sudden the mast cells, you start to have itchy ears and all of a sudden you’re getting these weird allergies. This is what you talk about when it’s a whole body physiology health system because the receptors for estrogen progesterone are all over the body, and that’s why people can have all these variety of symptoms, but giving them anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, sleep prescriptions is really a Band-Aid effect. And it’s not going after the issue where you talk about you may need some other life factor changes and menopause hormone therapy, if I’m understanding correctly.

Felice Gersh

Oh, well, getting back to really what you have just said is so brilliant. Number one, when women get to the stage of perimenopause, the women who have the worst symptoms, they tend to be the women who did have a lesser status of health earlier. So I call it like your health savings account. Depending on the quality of your lifestyle choices, plus luck and poor luck as far as where you were born, the diet you were fed when you were a child, the stressors you have lived through as a child, whether they were traumatic or not and so forth, they set the stage for how you’re going to deal with this transition. So women who had irregular cycles, like women who had PCOS/PMOS, they tend to not do as well when they go into the perimenopause and menopause because they were not really optimally healthy throughout their reproductive years.

Women who spent most of their reproductive years on oral contraceptives tend to have more difficulty when they get off of them and they’re into the perimenopause and menopausal years because their hormone receptors have been modified in ways we don’t even understand and they don’t necessarily do as well. And in terms of all the different symptoms, you just actually kind of gave what could be the preface to my last book, Menopause: 50 Things You Need to Know, which I went into 50 different symptoms of perimenopause and menopause that most women know nothing about, but they’re all signs and symptoms of loss of these vital life hormones. So absolutely, when you really understand foundationally what’s going on in the body, suddenly it all makes sense. Your immune system, like you mentioned, mast cells. So your immune system is modified when you go into menopause because every immune cell in the body, whether it’s the mast cells, the macrophages, the neutrophils, the lymphocytes, all of them have hormone receptors to estradiol and progesterone, and estradiol is the master modulator of the inflammatory response.

So it keeps you in a non-inflammatory state, which is where you should be normally if you’re not being traumatized and injured or you’re infected with pathogens, you should not be in a pro-inflammatory state. But when you don’t have enough estradiol, which is universal as you transition into menopause, you have a deficiency of estradiol because your ovaries run out of eggs and you need eggs in order to make estradiol and progesterone, then you go by default into a pro-inflammatory state. And this has actually been shown, the immune cells actually have a lower threshold to creating and releasing their inflammatory cytokines that circulate throughout the body, creating inflammation everywhere, including neuroinflammation, hence mood swings and sleep problems and all of those types of things. So the immune system becomes more pro-inflammatory and through a lower threshold, for example, you get leaky gut. Every woman transitioning into menopause will have an altered gut microbiome composition, and it becomes what we call dysbiotic, “dys” as in abnormal, “bio” as in life.

So the life forms that live, these trillions of microbes that live in the gut become modified in a way that is harmful. They usually become more actually male-like, which is not what women want in their gut. And they get impaired gut barrier because you take the proper microbes and our own cells, the Paneth cells, the goblet cells to make this protective mucus proteinaceous layer of protection to keep the toxic stuff in the gut from actually touching the gut lining, but that protective layer gone. And so the toxic stuff in the gut get right up to the lining cells and break down the little fibers that hold the cells, what we call tight junctions. And the cells actually start drifting apart because the little scaffold that holds them together is breaking down. And then the contents of the gut pass between these cells into the body proper where you have a lot of the immune cells residing around the gut, the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, and they react at a lower threshold to release more inflammation that creates this chronic low level systemic inflammatory state of being in perimenopause and menopausal women.

And we now know that chronic inflammation underlies all the degenerative diseases like inflammation in the bone that leads to osteoporosis in the brain to mood disorders, to cognitive decline in the arteries, to vascular disease, plaque formation, heart attacks and strokes. And you can go on and on. In the connective tissue, they break down. You have hernias in the vagina that we call cystoceles and rectoceles, and you have joint problems, so you get osteoarthritis. Women have more joint replacements than men. They make up 80% of osteoporotic fractures. They make up 70% of age-matched. So all people, male and female, the same age, we’ll say 75, 70% of those with Alzheimer’s disease will be female, 70%. So women live a few years longer, but they live with more chronic diseases than men. And I want to change that.

Lorne Brown

Yeah, that’s the message. That does not have to be that way.

No. All these signs and symptoms is due to how we’ve managed and educated the public and the medical profession. And so you’re part of that voice that’s changing that. So let’s go into, I want to ask you about the pillars of health and just tying back to the reproductive health and perimenopause menopause, when I had that observation like, hey, I’m in over two decades in practice since 2000, I see women go through their fertility journey and then later I see them in the perimenopause menopause. And that was like, hey, I only see that population, so I don’t know if every woman’s going through that, but the women I saw, the ones that had severe premenstrual symptoms, they had a tough time with perimenopause. The IVF and the recurrent pregnancy loss, hey, a lot of them are having a tough time. Hence, perimenopause reveals the underlying problem.

It is not the problem. In my practice, most of the women I treat are perimenopausal. They’re in their late 30s, early 40s, but they’re trying to have their babies. And so this was in Chinese medicine, how we would treat somebody. It was interesting. Somebody goes, how is it that you have a practice with fertility and also perimenopause? How can you be good at both? And I’d say, from a Chinese medicine, it’s the same treatment because we’re working on inflammation, we’re working on blood sugar regulation, we’re working on mitochondrial health, we’re working on nervous system regulation, we’re working on the gut-brain axis. And if that becomes into balance, and then you have robust, good estradiol production and you have a healthy follicle, so it turns into good progesterone production, you talked about the life hormones, then if you’re trying to get pregnant, there’s a higher chance hopefully of optimizing egg quality getting pregnant.

But if you’re not and you’re just 44 and you have hot flashes, itchy ears, vaginal atrophy, aches and pains because of the hormone changes, you’re going to be happy when those symptoms go away, whether you have baby or not. So it’s the same treatment. It’s just one wants a baby and one just doesn’t want symptoms. The one that wants the baby, we’re pretty good at giving them the relief around those symptoms. We just haven’t gotten to that God level where we can promise you a baby, but we can pretty much feel we can help with this. And in our clinic, by the way, we do all the natural and we do menopause hormone therapy, so it’s very holistic integrative. Question I wanted to ask you, because a big part of these foundational pillars to us are important. So we do menopause hormone therapy in our practice, but we are very interested in the diet.

So anti-inflammatory, low glycemic index, we’re interested in movement, we’re interested in sleep, we’re interested in stress reduction. I’m curious in your practice, because we’re going to get into the hormone therapy, is it just take these hormones, you’re good, or are these foundations from an integrative medical doctor also key? And if so, can you unpack that for us? For the women listening that heard of all the issues can happen, what are the things that they can do now to change this? And then I want to get into the medical part of it, hormone therapy, but what are the natural things that I listed off? Do you dismiss or agree with any of those?

Felice Gersh

Well, 100% agree. In fact, I say if being optimally healthy is like putting together a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, we’ve all played around with those, the hormones would make up the 400 central pieces. Now, if you don’t have those pieces in there, you’re not going to see the whole puzzle, you’re not going to see the picture. But the 600 surrounding puzzle pieces, that’s the lifestyle component. You need all the puzzle pieces, all 1,000 put in the right place to make the whole picture of that puzzle visible and clear. So in my office, we emphasize lifestyle medicine. I’m a member of the American Academy of Lifestyle Medicine. I 100% do that. We have a gym in my office. We have a fitness center in my office where we do fitness assessments, exercise prescription, and for those who want it, personalized training sessions with a certified personal trainer.

In addition, for stress reduction, we do guided meditation. I talk about different apps you can buy, of course, and downloads. We have medical massage therapists that can do craniosacral massage, myofascial release. I do aromatherapy. So I mean, I try to cover… I can teach progressive relaxation and tapping. All of these things are critical. Back in the day before COVID, I had actually a Chinese medicine practitioner. We actually had acupuncture in my office, but with COVID, she ended up retiring and I could never really replace her, but I sometimes refer out for acupuncture for people who would be best served by that, and it sort of resonates with them. And we teach nutrition classes, we do gut reset or gut rehab type of processes and so on. So lifestyle is not optional. It’s essential. It’s part of putting that 1,000 puzzle piece together and it goes together.

It’s like to be healthy at any age, like you’re talking about say a 25-year-old who just finished her master’s degree for college, and I see this all the time. When people go to college, their health goes to pot. I mean, they don’t have time, they’re busy, they’re stressed. And then finally they grow up and they get a job, they’re done with all their education, and suddenly they realize that they’ve had no good health habits at all since they graduated high school and left home. And so then suddenly they have a little bit of money and they really want to get on board with lifestyle. And so we just start with everything. And I always explain as well, like you said so perfectly, fertility is a vital sign of life. So even women who don’t want to have a baby at that time, I want them to be fertile because even ancient peoples worshipped fertility gods.

They knew fertility was vital to life and health itself. And so having a normal menstrual cycle, having strong muscles, a clear brain and good sleep. Oh, we talk about sleep all the time and stress management, all these things. So every aspect of lifestyle medicine is part of my treatment protocol. And I try to put drugs in their place. I’m not alternative medicine, I’m integrative. So I integrate all the different therapeutic utilizations and optimize every option. And I try to go with what we would call the safest, most efficacious way to optimize health, which almost always, unless someone walks in the door, their blood pressure’s 200 over 150, it’s not just go on vegetables, then you have to give drugs for hypertension. But in most cases, we would start with lifestyle modification, hormonal optimization. And if they’re young and they don’t need hormone therapy, then we want to do everything to optimize ovarian health and ovarian function.

And it’s through reducing inflammation. So we talk about an anti-inflammatory diet. So in order to get a healthy body, and this has now become, it started with Chinese medicine, now it’s everywhere, and that is a healthy gut microbiome. So you have to give food that the gut microbes, you got to feed those little microbes, the trillions that are there. And they love fiber and they do this special dance when you feed them polyphenols. I call them the special sauce of food. They’re all the different, many of them are phytoestrogens and they’re only found in plants. You don’t get them in animal or fat products from animals. So I’m not into everybody should be a vegan, but I am plant focused. So I say more plants than animals. And if you are one of those people that say, “I can’t feel well unless I’m on a carnivore diet,” that means you have a really messed up gut microbiome, just FYI, because it means that the only way that you can feel good is by basically starving your gut microbes because most of them are bad.

They’re the wrong ones. They’re pathogenic because they’re creating inflammatory products and it’s what we call lipopolysaccharides or endotoxins that are getting throughout your body, creating an inflammatory response. So it means that we have to work extra hard on your gut microbiome. If the only foods that you can eat and feel good on are ones that basically are starving your gut microbes because the animal protein is not what gut microbes love and they don’t love a lot of animal fat. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any in your diet, but if that’s mostly all you feel you can eat, then we’ve got a problem we need to identify and then treat it. So I love plants, all kinds, you know what they say. It sounds cliche, but the colors of the rainbow and lots and lots of fiber. And if you can’t tolerate fiber, once again, it means we have to work on your gut microbiome.

Maybe we have to introduce it more slowly. Maybe you have SIBO or SIFO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or small intestinal fungal overgrowth. And so everyone has to be treated uniquely because they may have their own unique problems. But the ultimate goal is to get people eating a lot of variety of different kinds of plants and a little bit of animal protein, the most optimally sourced as possibly obtainable. And then work on every aspect of lifestyle, stress, and I didn’t mention it, but reducing environmental toxicants exposure. Nobody would say at a restaurant, “Well, how much mercury shall we put in your food today?” It’s like, “None, please.” So we don’t want heavy metals. We don’t want phthalates and bisphenols. We don’t want plastic microplastics in our food. We don’t want pesticides and herbicides and solvents. We don’t want how much xylene and styrene do you want in your food?

How about some benzene? No. And we don’t want it in our air. We don’t want it in our water. So I emphasize water purification, the best system you can get. We want the best air purifiers. And now there’s a lot of fires that are happening and now we’re getting into fire season. And whoa, in California, did we ever have a lot of fires and really poor air quality? Everyone needs to invest in air purifiers just about wherever you live. So all of this goes into healthy aging and fertility. It’s all one. So of course there is a point when fertility is gone forever. That’s the end of the road. But then we just focus on healthy aging and that’s just where we are. And when you’re younger, fertility is a vital sign of health. So women who don’t have regular cycles or have PMS or bad cramps or heavy bleeding, those are all red flags that there’s something wrong.

So the treatment shouldn’t just be just give them all birth control pills because that’s not root cause medicine. You want to say, why are your periods messed up in any way whatsoever? That is a sign. Everyone out there, if your periods are really bad in any way whatsoever, it’s a sign that something is wrong with you. We want to fix that, not just sweep it under the rug.

Lorne Brown

In Chinese medicine, the first tenet when you’re working with a female for reproductive health is to regulate the cycle. So that is the first that we want to know about. And so when they come and they say, “Well, I’ve been told my cycle’s normal.” So they have big clots, heavy profuse bleeding, one day bleeding or 10 days bleeding, severe PMS, menstrual pain, and they said it’s normal. I said, “Normal doesn’t mean healthy in the Western medicine. Normal means a lot of people have it and you’re not going to die from it. That’s what normal means.” So we’re aligned here because the first thing we want to do is regulate the cycle. And so thanks for sharing this about trying to reduce the toxins that you can, eat that low glycemic anti-inflammatory diet. Like Michael Pollan says, eat whole foods, mostly plants, but you can have edible protein.

A shout out to the Acubalance diets, they’re free. There’s a longevity diet and a fertility diet on our website. Just Google Acubalance Fertility Diet or Longevity Diet. It has 21 days of recipes based on that philosophy. The movement is important. So all those pillars are important. Now going to the provider to talk about menopause hormone therapy. So there’s been really good social media push from influencers to talk about hormone therapy again, but there’s some people that are listening to this going, wait, I thought that’s bad. So can you update us on what the latest evidence is as of today and then talk about hormone therapy that could be also part of this integrative approach? Because a quick tangent, you talked about you’re integrative. So you will use prescription drugs. If somebody’s coming in with the high blood pressure, I have a story where somebody came in and they told me they’ve been diagnosed with a kidney infection and they don’t want antibiotics.

They came to me because they wanted a natural treatment. And I said, “You need to go back to your doctor, actually the hospital and get the antibiotic.” And she goes, “But I like natural.” And I go, “But if you’re dead, I can’t treat you. So why don’t you go get the antibiotic and then we’re going to…” She goes, “But it’ll hurt my microbiome.” I said, “It will, but then you’ll be alive and then we will repopulate your microbiome.” So there is a place for everything. And I think of hormone therapy, bioidentical hormone therapy, even though they’re prescribed, I don’t think of them as drugs because they’re actually, you make them endogenously in your body. But the other thing I want to share, just to put on your radar, in our practice, when I see somebody with perimenopause, menopause, I often put my low-level laser therapy known as photobiomodulation over the gut microbiome because there’s a…

This all along with what you said, there was a study done in Australia for Parkinson’s because they linked the Parkinson’s and brain inflammation to the gut microbiome inflammation. And so they treated the gut plus the brain, which they saw changes in symptoms as well as dopamine changes. And when they did gene sequencing before and after, they saw that the microbiome changed in the gut, which was cool. I know you do integrative, just to let you know, photobiomodulation, low level laser has been shown to improve the microbiome because again, it’s regulating inflammation, it’s improving the mitochondria on the cellular level and what else it’s doing, who knows? Well, we do know, but just that was a quick tangent. Menopause hormone therapy used to be called HRT, got a new rebrand.

Felice Gersh

Not to me. Not for me.

Lorne Brown

So I want to hear your take on hormone therapy then, please. The message of the fear around it and why are you excited about it?

Felice Gersh

Well, back almost 25 years ago, a study which those of us who were around at that time and thought at all knew that it was wrong from the get-go, because prior to the Women’s Health Initiative that has been talked about so much, which used Prempro, that was the commercial brand of a combination of conjugated equine estrogens. In other words, a pregnant horse known as a mare put out conjugated estrogens. It means that it went through the liver for the sole purpose of helping it to get out of the body of that horse by making it converted from fat to water soluble through a liver process called conjugation so that it could go out with the urine, which requires water solubility. That’s why they call it conjugated equine, as in horse, estrogens. And estrogens meaning it was a whole combination of all sorts of equilin or horse estrogens that would never be found in any human female at any time of life, plus other junk, just stuff that was coming out with it, along with another chemical called medroxyprogesterone acetate, which is an endocrine disruptor officially for progesterone, which is the hormone that is produced naturally in the human body.

And it has a letter P and a number four to symbolize progesterone. But what they used was not progesterone, it was a chemical sort of mimic. So an endocrine disruptor is an agonist and antagonist. So it both activates and also turns off or blocks the receptor for that hormone. And hormones mostly, not exclusively, work by fitting into a receptor and then turning it on. So all kinds of different functions occur in that cell. And so this chemical, which the initials are MPA, would fit into progesterone receptors. And in the uterine lining, it was very powerfully an agonist. It turned it on. So it very powerfully acted as like a super progesterone in the uterine lining, which made it converted to the status of the uterine lining before a menstrual period would happen, which we call secretory phase. But in other organs, it acted into the receptor like a blocker.

So it turned off the receptor. And so it was like you had no progesterone or a negative progesterone. And that is what happened in arteries, the brain, the liver and different places. So it acted as both an activator and a blocker of progesterone. So it turned out, shockingly, it wasn’t so good. So when they analyzed that study, the results did not come out as they had hoped, which was that it was going to prevent heart attacks and strokes. But it turned out that Premarin, the conjugated equine estrogen, is very powerful in terms of creating blood clotting risk, like 400% higher risk than not taking it at all. That’s pretty significant. So women who were on that drug, they call it a hormone, but really, I mean, they’re never in humans. It’s really endocrine disruptor drugs.

Lorne Brown

Those are synthetic hormones, so they were drugs.

Felice Gersh

Well, the ones that came from the horse in a way weren’t totally synthetic. They were natural for a horse, but the horse wanted to get rid of them. They didn’t want them anymore, but they’re never natural in a human. There was nothing in that would ever be found in any human female ever. So it turned out that it increased the risk of blood clots fourfold. That’s huge. So that’s not so good. So it increased the risk of getting blood clots in the legs and in the lungs. So that was a big turnoff. And then it turns out that MPA mildly increases the risk of breast cancer because real human progesterone is anti-breast cancer, but this is the opposite. It’s like the anti-progesterone and it so slightly increased the risk of breast cancer. So just that alone was enough to shut down. And they misinterpreted some of this stuff, so we won’t even go into that.

They then reinterpreted like it caused more heart attacks. It didn’t cause more heart attacks, but they shut down the study.

Lorne Brown

And the study participants were 65 and older, right?

Felice Gersh

Well, they didn’t want the study participants to… Two things. They didn’t want them to know what they were on. Of course, they all knew what they were on because the women who got the real hormones, not the placebo, they instantly had breast tenderness. Most of them had irregular bleeding, the ones who had the uterus. So they all kind of figured out there was a huge dropout rate. In fact, if the dropout rate continued as it was going, the study would’ve had to have been stopped due to lack of adequate numbers. So it was sort of kind of a crazy thing.

Lorne Brown

I want to focus on what is happening now because I don’t want women to think that’s what is being prescribed now. No, so

Felice Gersh

That’s why I wanted to know. That created mass hysteria, mass hysteria. But I knew right from the get-go that none of that made any sense because I had stopped using… That was what we all used at one point. I had stopped using that years before because we already had, at that time when that study was done, we already had estrogen patches, transdermal estrogen, and we already had bioidentical progesterone that the brand name was Prometrium. We already had that. And there was a preceding study called the HERS study that was looking at women who’d already had a heart attack or a stroke and they had not great outcome on Prempro. And so we already knew that that was a bad choice. We already knew it before the Women’s Health Initiative even was started from the previous study. So I just indict everyone involved in that study as a criminal against womankind.

But now finally, I mean, I’ve been screaming in the wind way back since 25 years ago around that time when that study came out. But now due to innovation in terms of business models of online hormone deliverers and more interest in pharmaceutical production of hormones and so on, it sort of came back on the scene. So now there’s way more interest. Menopause is very trendy. To me, it’s always been very trendy, but now it’s more recognized as trendy and important and it’s now getting universally recognized. I don’t really know that it is as universally recognized as it is in my little circle of life, but it’s more and more recognized that menopause is what we’ve been talking about, a huge environmental change within the female body, that it’s a huge metabolic shift and that it has repercussions all over the body. But what is not being promoted is optimization of hormones for healthy longevity.

That has not become the standard of care. The standard of care, which means it’s not what I believe in, but it’s what is promoted by medical societies like the Menopause Society, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that type of thing. The medical societies, even the American College of Cardiology, they don’t recommend hormones as a way to prevent cardiovascular disease or bad outcomes as women age. So there’s no medical society that currently is endorsing using hormones for optimal aging in any way whatsoever. The only standard right now is to give the lowest dose that’s effective, which is very low, by the way, to suppress night sweats and hot flashes. Although it’s FDA approved, interestingly enough, as a prevention of osteoporosis, it’s almost never ever advocated for that use. So when we have a system now that is saying menopause is a significant issue, but we’re not going to actually use hormones for healthy aging, but we can use them safely because the Women’s Health Initiative was a disaster and gave wrong feelings and information and everything else to everybody, doctors and healthcare providers and patients alike.

So now we’re saying, we meaning the conventional world, that we should give women treatment when they have significant night sweats and hot flashes, but only for that purpose. Separately, you can give vaginal estrogen in different formats for just genitourinary syndrome of menopause, but that’s not going to affect any other organ system. Somehow that’s the only organ system that really deserves any attention. And the bottom line is that you just want to suppress night sweats and hot flashes for the shortest period of time that you need. And if you need to do it longer, yeah, but you want to use the very tiniest doses you can get away with. And the current philosophy of all these medical societies is not creating healthy aging, healthy longevity by optimizing the hormone environment, except in women who go into premature menopause, like I mentioned, or early menopause, but then they recommend that when you get to 50 to 52, just cut it off, stop with those hormones and give either little teensy doses, not using a physiologic regimen or stop it altogether.

So to me, it’s a disconnect with reality. We’ve had some progress, but it is not where it should be because it’s still not understanding that these hormones are life hormones. They’re not just sex hormones. They don’t just work in the thermoregulatory centers of the hypothalamus. They work in every aspect of the brain, not just that one center in the hypothalamus. They work throughout all the neurological system, the immune system, the cardiovascular system, the musculoskeletal system. We still have a long ways to go. I’m still in a state of depression all the time because the medical world, the conventional medical world is now saying treat those symptoms, menopausal, hot flashes and night sweats for the shortest time with the smallest dose. That is still the standard of care. Fear is still rampant that it’s going to give you something bad happening. The Women’s Health Initiative legacy, that’s why I wanted to touch on it, is still pervasive.

In spite of it being debunked, the legacy of fear and not understanding that hormones are not optional for healthy longevity, along with, of course, all the lifestyle stuff we talked about. It’s like putting the pieces of the puzzle together. You need it all. The hormones are the information delivery system to the cell. It’s what tells the cell what to do with all the nutrients, the macronutrients, the micronutrients, what peptide to make, what enzyme to make, and so on. It’s like you have a dish that you need to make, the special dish for a big event, and you have all the ingredients and you don’t know what to cook it in. You don’t know what the dish is supposed to look like. You have no recipe. That’s what the cells actually are like when they don’t have the hormones. They may have nutrients, but they don’t know what to do with them.

Am I supposed to make a peptide? Am I supposed to make an enzyme? What the heck am I supposed to do with this? They don’t know. That’s what the hormones tell the cell to do. So you need the ingredients, but you also need the instruction. It’s so crazy. To me, it’s just so crazy that the medical establishment is still so blind, literally blind to what hormones do, why we need them, and why dose matters. Everybody knows dose matters when it comes to exercise. Five minutes of exercise a month is not going to give you the outcome as say 30 minutes, five days a week or high intensity interval training and resistance training multiple times a week. No, it’s not going to be the same as if you did five minutes a month. Well, the dose of hormones matters and the regimen matters. The rhythm matters.

All these things matter. But conventional medical world, they don’t even care. They don’t care about dose. They say less is best. Less is best for what? Poison. We don’t want a lot of poison. Less is best for air pollution and heavy metals, but less is not best for our thyroid. We want optimal everything, but optimization is not the standard of care at this time. So even though I was screaming in the wind 20 something years ago, I’m still screaming in the wind. I’m still saying we don’t want just any dose. We want an optimal dose.

Lorne Brown

And my understanding is your bioidentical estradiol and progesterone, not the synthetic forms that were in the research. So what about –

Felice Gersh

Always human identical.

Lorne Brown

Human identical, yes. Not your cat, not your horse. No. So question for you on the perimenopausal. So they’re still cycling in this phase of their life. We have Dr. Jerilynn Prior in our city, so I’ve had her on the podcast. I’ve had times to meet with her. She’s done a lot of research around progesterone and bioidentical progesterone. She’s a retired now endocrinologist.

Felice Gersh

Oh, I need to meet her.

Lorne Brown

Oh my gosh.

Felice Gersh

I do. I love progesterone. Almost nobody cares about progesterone.

Lorne Brown

Go to cemcor.ubc.ca. It’s the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research, cemcor.ubc.ca. She’s got tons of published research. I think she’s been talking about this for well beyond 25 years. She’s now in her 80s, just retired recently. She was in the day when everybody’s like, “Just give everybody estrogen, estradiol,” she was in the perimenopause phase, actually progesterone. And my understanding is during this phase, the estradiol is fluctuating. A lot of times you have high levels of estradiol as the inhibin B drops, FSH increases, and now you got the grand finale of fireworks where she wrote a book called Estrogen’s Storm Season, actually. So you have fluctuating estrogen, lots high, but you’re having irregular ovulation or not robust ovulation. So in the perimenopause phase, you have a decline in progesterone and fluctuating estrogen, and then in menopause, you have decline in both. She talks about using progesterone cyclically in perimenopausal women, especially those that aren’t sleeping well.

Her study did show that it worked with hot flashes and night sweats as well.

Felice Gersh

It does.

Lorne Brown

So question is in your practice, because what I’m seeing on the influencers and the media is everybody needs to be on estradiol, estrogen, estrogen. It’s all estrogen, but what about their sister progesterone? And so I don’t hear much about progesterone except in our city, in our clinic, we use both and perimenopausal definitely progesterone. I’ll put it this way and then see if this aligns. In Chinese medicine, I just love the theory. Yin and yang have to be in right relationship for health. When yin and yang are out of relationship, you have disease. When yin and yang separate, there’s death. I think of yin and yang as estrogen… And yin and yang is a relative term. There’s nothing yin or just yang, but yin and yang, I think of estrogen progesterone as they’re interdependent. They’re not opposites. They’re supporting each other. And so I would imagine you want some balance there, yin and yang relationship.

So can you tell me about this estrogen progesterone relationship? Because right now all I’m hearing about on the media and the influencers is it’s all about estradiol.

Felice Gersh

Well, progesterone is often, I agree, it’s the forgotten critically important hormone. The way that it’s viewed by the conventional world and maybe influencers, I don’t actually pay much attention to that crowd. But the bottom line is that progesterone is in general viewed as almost a necessary evil, as bizarre as that sounds, to prevent uterine cancer that can be caused by giving estrogen. It’s like the weirdest view of progesterone and estrogen ever. They think estrogen gives you uterine cancer and progesterone prevents uterine cancer. So if you don’t have a uterus, then you don’t need progesterone, and you only give progesterone for that one single purpose to balance out the effect of estrogen on the uterine lining so you don’t get uterine cancer. The reality is that progesterone has receptors in many organs throughout the body. It is neuroprotective. It actually is critical for the production and maintenance of myelin, which is like the conducting protective sheaths of nerves and neurons.

It is critical for being very modulating of the immune system as an anti-inflammatory. It critically is involved with estradiol in regulating the whole endocannabinoid system. That would be like a podcast for another day. The whole endocannabinoid system is dependent on these vital hormones, estradiol and progesterone, and it’s critically important for vascular health. It also works in mitochondria. There are mitochondrial receptors to progesterone. It also increases nitric oxide, and so it works in the skin. It works in the bone. The progesterone works with the osteoblasts to produce more bone. So it’s a beautiful synergy or dance between estradiol and progesterone. During a normal menstrual cycle, progesterone is produced after ovulation by a temporary endocrine structure called the corpus luteum, which is produced in the ovary after ovulation. And if you become pregnant, it lasts only as long as it’s necessary up to 12 weeks until the placenta takes over all the hormone production.

And if you’re not pregnant, it just disintegrates and then you get a period because the hormones, estradiol and progesterone are produced after ovulation by this temporary endocrine structure called the corpus luteum. So progesterone, while it’s being made, it actually down regulates or it turns down the function of estrogen receptors so that the uterine lining stops growing or proliferating because estrogen is critical, the form estradiol for making growth factors that are critical in the uterine lining for growing the uterine lining after it sheds at the time of the menstrual cycle. But those same growth factors are different in different parts of the body. So you get brain-derived neurotrophic factor for brain health, nerve growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor for creating new blood vessels, transforming growth factor for tissue rejuvenation and growth. You need all these growth factors, and progesterone is sort of a balancing agent.

So it down regulates growth factors during the second half of the menstrual cycle, but at that time to sort of counter and balance the effect of the progesterone as sort of a negative on growth factors, estradiol production goes up higher in the luteal phase compared to the proliferative phase on an average to sort of balance. It’s a beautiful dance between these hormones. Absolutely. And there’s method in the madness of the menstrual cycle. It’s not just about preparing the uterine lining for implantation of an embryo. Of course, that is very critical, but it’s also having functions throughout the whole body in every organ system. So you do need progesterone, but you don’t want it every single day because now you’re down regulating the production of growth factors every day. And that regimen, what I call chronic low dose static, it’s also called chronic low dose continuous, where you’re giving a little progesterone every single day.

And the purpose of that is to down regulate the growth of the uterine lining and create sort of an atrophy or like a thinning, but you’re not going to get the proper growth factors everywhere that you need them. You’re going to have dysregulation of your immune system, of your bones and so on. So that is not physiologic. It’s not consistent with anything in nature or anything that would be designed for optimal healthy longevity. So I do not like what is happening in our conventional approach to hormones these days. It’s just as messed up only in a different way than it was 20 plus years ago after the Women’s Health Initiative when no hormones were the goal. Now crazy, silly, unrealistic, not scientific hormone regimens are now the rule. They’re both bad and we don’t have long-term data on the current low-dose static or continuous regimens, but we have rat data.

Okay, that’s what we got. We call that preclinical data. And let me tell you, the results are not good. It does not show long-term benefit for much of anything. It actually may be harmful. Rats who go on a regimen like that actually get more rat dementia because you’re probably down regulating the growth factors in the brain that are essential for brain function and health. So this is not the ticket to healthy longevity, in my opinion.

Lorne Brown

So you do the cyclical progesterone.

Felice Gersh

Yes. And not just cyclical. I’m trying to do what is, by the way, the standard of care in women who go into early menopause. If a woman goes into menopause, and this is very bad for her, but it happens, say at age 38, it does happen. It could even be younger.

Lorne Brown

Or medically induced because of a cancer treatment. They go into whatever reason.

Felice Gersh

It could be endometriosis. They take out the ovaries. It could be cancer of any sort. They could have had a lymphoma like non-Hodgkin lymphoma. They had radiation or whatever it was that destroyed their ovaries. They don’t have ovarian function, whether it’s surgically, radiation, chemo induced, or they just had early onset genetically or who knows what, that they ended up with early onset of ovarian insufficiency and they stop having hormone production and they’re young. They’re well below the age of average menopause, 50, 51 or 52. And that group, like women who are in their 30s who go into early menopause, they are given cyclic hormones at physiologic levels. All I’m saying is why don’t we do the same for women who are older? Why would we not want to do that for older women? And it’s given to younger women because, and this is expressly said, to help prevent cardiovascular disease, loss of bone, problems with the brain, cognition and mood.

All the things that I say –

Lorne Brown

Thyroid function, there’s receptors there too, right?

Felice Gersh

You know it, I know it, that the conventional medical world doesn’t get it, but there’s plenty of published articles. There are receptors on the thyroid gland for estrogen. When a woman does not have estrogen, her thyroid gland will not work optimally and thyroid receptors require estrogen for their proper function. So even if the estrogen levels look normal on a test, a blood test, that doesn’t mean that they’re working properly because if the receptors are not accepting the hormone and then the right thing happening in the cell, it’s like you’re in a hypothyroid state. So all women who are not on optimal thyroid will be to some degree, it’s not if it’s just how much, will be in some degree hypothyroid, which is not good. It’s contributing to mental fog, constipation, dysregulation of all their metabolic functions, weight gain, fatigue. Fatigue. Yeah, this is not –

Lorne Brown

Low mood.

Felice Gersh

All those things. This is not good. So all the hormones in the body are interconnected.

Lorne Brown

You shared also that, I think you talked about the estrogen, but I think first time I heard about it, you were sharing how progesterone is also involved in the conversion of T4 to T3.

Felice Gersh

Oh, so all these hormones are interconnected and you need to have a healthy gut. So all these hormones, progesterone, estradiol are interconnected with the gut and conversion occurs in the gut. Also, absorption of nutrients. In order to convert T4 to T3, you need to have the right minerals. You have to have zinc, you have to have selenium. So all these things –

Lorne Brown

This is back to the overall holistic health, everything’s vital.

Felice Gersh

Yeah, that’s right.

Lorne Brown

And this is why in our practice, you’re just reminding me, but in Canada, because social medicine is covered, so they’ll measure TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone. Often they won’t do T4, sometimes T4, but they don’t do the rest. And to me, that’s looking at the tip of the iceberg versus the whole iceberg. In our clinic, our naturopathic doctors always look at free T3, free T4 and the antibodies. And again, if you have this hormonal imbalance happening in your 40s, you could have fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, low mood, constipation, and your TSH is normal, but because of these hormones, the active hormone, T3 may not be where it should be. And so that’s why it’s nice to, going back to that perimenopause is not the problem, reveals a problem, showing that the hormone and the resilience in the body and some of these other organ systems, in this case thyroid, could be the cause of your symptoms and you don’t necessarily need an antidepressant.

You need therapy

Felice Gersh

Or thyroid support. In the US, about 25% of women in their 40s are newly started on antidepressants, and it doesn’t click with the psychiatrists or the primary care doctors that maybe they’re actually perimenopausal in their forties and that it’s the hormones. Also, what happens is when you don’t have enough estrogen, you do not have proper regulation of your autonomic nervous system, so you don’t have enough parasympathetic or vagal tone, and you become more in the stress state, which is the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system. Part of the stress reaction is what’s called adrenergic, as in adrenal. So when you’re transitioning into menopause and going into menopause, you make more cortisol from your adrenal as part of the stress response. And cortisol, when you’re in a chronic stress response, it actually downregulates the conversion of T4 to T3 because it’s preparing the human that is inhabiting that stress response for a potential famine because the stress response is one response.

There’s not like a different stress response for ABC. And the stress response is always preparing for famine because that was always the biggest threat to human survival. So if you’re in a famine, you don’t have enough food, you want to slow your metabolic rate so that the same caloric intake that would be insufficient at that point because you’re not getting enough food to sustain the body at the previous metabolic level can sustain it for longer at a lower metabolic level. That’s how people can be in a starvation type state and somehow survive for a very long period of time. It’s amazing. That’s why humans, Homo sapiens, survived the famines of the sort of semi-ice age, but the Neanderthals, which were actually smarter creatures, they had bigger brains, but they were not as good at famine survival as Homo sapiens. Doesn’t matter how smart you are.

If you have no food, you die. So Neanderthals died out, but Homo sapiens lived. We are amazingly adapted to famines, but that is why when you go into a stress response, you slow your metabolism, which means you slow your conversion of T4 to T3. But what if we’re not in a famine? Then we just get fat and we feel sluggish. And we feel sluggish.

Lorne Brown

If we would’ve led with perimenopause leads to unwanted weight gain and hormone therapy may help with this, people would’ve just been done. Where’s my doctor? So let’s find out where they can find you. So Dr. Felice Gersh, are you still seeing patients? Is it outside of California, just in California? How can people connect with you? Because what happens after… We have multiple episodes, by the way, on perimenopause and menopause, including one with Dr. Jerilynn Prior. And the feedback is, okay, now what? Okay, I understand now. I know what’s going on and I want direction. So how do they get in touch with you if they wanted to work with you, for example?

Felice Gersh

Well, I’m still an old-fashioned brick and mortar doctor. I’m actually talking to you from a converted exam room. I actually have an exam table right over there. So yeah, I see patients all day long in my office. Because of the really crazy licensing laws in the US, I have a license to practice medicine in California, which is a nice big state, but it’s not every state. So if you live in a different state in the US, you have to come to beautiful Southern California. I’m in Orange County, Irvine, California, and come and see me for the first visit and at least once a year, and then I can do telemedicine. If there’s a big problem, we arrange either for you to come back and see me, which say you need a biopsy or something or other, or we work it out through a local doctor.

If you’re from another country, there are no rules or regs, so then you could just do telemedicine. But of course, I can’t legally prescribe hormones or any drug in another country, but I can give a lot of advice and I can write out things so that you can get local docs or you can also get on a plane and come to see me in sunny Southern California where lots of people come for their vacations because we have beautiful beaches and we have Disneyland and we have LA is just down the freeway and so is San Diego the other direction. So that’s just the way it works. But I see patients and I have a team, I have wonderful nurse practitioner and PA that I personally trained. So if I’m out of town speaking or whatever, we have coverage with my team. And so yeah, I’m an old-fashioned practicing doctor that’s not just the social media kind of person, although I do have social media because I’m trying to educate.

So I would love for people to follow me on my Instagram and on my YouTube because I do post a lot of educational material and I’m trying to train other doctors. That’s why I speak at different conferences to healthcare professionals because I’m really trying. I’m not going to be around forever. I’m not immortal. So I have to train other healthcare professionals in how to actually prescribe hormones to be able to optimize women’s health. We’re not just trying to survive, we’re trying to thrive. I know that’s a cliche, but it’s really true because living with chronic degenerative diseases is not anybody’s goal. It’s just not. I tell people I’m trying to condense all the bad stuff that tends to happen to women in their 60s and 70s. And trust me, there’s a lot of bad stuff that happens in those years. I’m trying to push it out to the late 90s.

And I really and truly believe when you combine all the lifestyle medicine combined with optimizing hormone therapy, not just giving it in some crazy ridiculous non-physiologic static low dose method, but when you really optimize it to mimic what is giving the health and status of women who are in their 20s, their optimal health and fertility, we’re not creating fertility, we’re just creating optimal health in women who are in menopause that the odds are we’re dealing in medical probabilities, not absolutes, but the idea and the medical probability of delaying the onset of all the bad stuff that someday is going to happen, something’s going to happen to all of us. But if we delay it out until you’re around 100, that’s a heck of a lot better than living with chronic degenerative diseases for 30 years of your life.

Lorne Brown

Yeah, live long and live well. And so we’ll put your YouTube and your social media links in the show notes. Much better selling point to go to sunny Irvine, California. If you want, you can go to rainy Vancouver, British Columbia.

Felice Gersh

That’s beautiful too.

Lorne Brown

My team can do the British Columbian. So if you want telehealth and you want the hormones in British Columbia, our naturopathic doctors can do that. And if you go in person, you can get the full integrative care as well. So check that out as well. And I want to remind people there’s diet’s important. We have a whole diet with recipes for you to start to help with the gut health and inflammation. And so Dr. Felice, her links are in the show notes. Check out Acubalance, Menopause Current for the online stuff. And Felice, I want to thank you so much for yelling in the wind.

Felice Gersh

Yeah, I won’t stop. Don’t stop. I just wanted to offer people, since I have a couple of eBooks and we can give you the links and they can get some free eBooks. I wrote one on lifestyle for menopause and one on thyroid disease. So those are freebies.

Lorne Brown

We’ll put those in the show notes. You’ll send that. Those are in the show notes then. So all that information should be there in the show notes. And I want to have you back on again because you’re welcome information and I really appreciate the advocacy that you are doing. So thank you.

Felice Gersh

Thank you for having your wonderful platform and your practice.

Lorne Brown

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on Coherence and Healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.