E59: Christian Elliot

The Myth of "Unbalanced Hormones" + Seven Related Misinterpretations of Your Symptoms

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Christian Elliot

Hello everyone. Welcome to episode number 59. I have a whopper of a monologue episode for you today. I recently hosted a webinar called The Myth of Unbalanced Hormones. And judging by the number of registrants and people asking for a replay of the event, I think I struck a chord. It seems the topic of so-called hormone balance is an issue a lot of you are curious about, and it is certainly one of the darlings of the medical community. 

 

And there's also a lot of chatter about how to balance your hormones in the alternative and coaching worlds as well. And what I've found so far is that no one seems to question the premise of trying to test hormone levels and externally balance them. So given the interest in the topic, I thought I'd make an audio version of that event. So those of you who don't want to sit in front of the screen for this long can still hear what I had to say. If you've been to any of my webinars, you know I like to make them visually rich with a lot of metaphors to help the concepts make as much sense as possible.

 

So I'll do my best to describe what was on the screen during the webinar. But if you want to watch the replay of the event, you can find that at our website at healingunited.today. Just look for the resources section and you'll find it in the drop-down. By the way, we now have all of my episodes of this podcast on the website, as well as the video recordings and transcripts for all the interviews I've done. 

 

I'm also happy to say I finally have somebody helping me manage social media so I can focus on what I do best, and that is coaching and attempting to stretch your thinking. And so if YouTube doesn't kick us off, you can find us there, as well as on Odyssey. And we also have snippets of this interview or other interviews on other platforms. So you can find links to those channels in the footer of our website at healingunited.today. As I was preparing for this webinar, I got more and more excited. In fact, I don't know if I've ever been more excited to teach than I was going into that event. I don't know anybody who is talking about hormones the way I see it. 

 

And I think I'm about to give you a feast of clarity and help you avoid wasting a lot of time and experiencing a lot of unpleasant symptoms from all of the hormone-balancing nonsense. So, as some of you know, I'm working on a new book, and The Myth of Unbalanced Hormones will be one of the topics I cover there. So this webinar was kind of a chance to stress test some of the concepts and invite feedback from those hearing it for the first time. So, for anyone interested, know that I would welcome your feedback on my work and on this topic in particular. I am under no illusion that I know everything and I appreciate it when you all reciprocally work to respectfully stretch my thinking as well. So, to give you an overview of where we're going in this episode, I'll start with a few disclaimers to frame the discussion. I'll also give you some information on my background and review my top three theses for this conversation. After that, we'll talk physiology. It would be inappropriate to talk about hormones without setting the table to define what they are and how the body uses them. 

 

Then I'll spend some time unpacking what I call the lab testing trap and especially help you see through the ruse of test, don't guess. Then I'll do, I'm going to do uh what most people never do, and that is give you real informed consent regarding hormone therapy. I think that section might shock you. And after that, I'll step back and show you a simplified way to help have your endocrine system rebalance itself much more efficiently. From there, I'll use the foundation we have laid to show you seven additional ways the medical system completely misinterprets your symptoms and how the narrative constructs of hormone balancing fits into the stories they spin for us. So, by the way, the seven categories, in case you want to know what they are, are cancer, autoimmunity, obesity, the common cold, cholesterol, hot flashes, and so-called erectile dysfunction. 

 

Lastly, I'll tell you an inspiring story and we'll wrap up with some philosophical comments that will probably offend some people. Anyway, as a little bonus for all of you loyal listeners, since this is a longer format show, about 25% of this episode is new material I didn't have time to cover in the webinar. So here we go with the audio version of the myth of unbalanced hormones. All right, I'm calling it a myth because I think the way the healthcare world talks about hormones, it's a narrative construct that's actually not describing what's happening. And I want to teach you how your hormones work, how your endocrine system works, and tell you what the so-called hormone experts will not tell you and give you a window into how to sanely take back agency of your health. So a few disclaimers before I get into the meat here. Obviously, nothing in this presentation is personal. Health advice, I don't know your situation. I'm not making any suggestions about what you should do. 

 

And so if we're going to f if you're gonna follow anything I say, you do so at your own risk. But here are some other important disclaimers pertinent to this episode. Uh, if you're hoping I'm going to tell you the next thing you need to swallow to get well, you can probably skip this episode because there is so much more to getting well than focusing on what pills you can swallow. I've covered some amazing hidden or forbidden health information on various episodes of this show, but I will always stand by the notion that there are no silver bullets when it comes to your health. But if you're interested in how your body works and how you can help it heal, stick around because I'm probably gonna blow your mind more than a few times before I'm done. Another important disclaimer is that my critique in this episode is of the system itself. I'm critiquing a mindset, a paradigm, or a narrative framework for how the body operates. And while I'm also doing gonna I'm gonna challenge some sacred cows, that doesn't mean I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

 

I am not here to tell you that everything pharma, everything hormone, everything lab test is stupid and you'd be silly to try any of that. That is not what I'm saying. But I do think by the time I'm done, you'll agree we don't need most of it. So another disclaimer is that I'm not here to make any judgments about you or your situation. I have not walked a mile in your shoes. I don't know what you're going through, but one thing I will say as I start to challenge concepts, especially if you're in the healthcare profession or and or you use hormone therapy as one of your tools, if you find yourself getting frustrated with me or even defensive, I would just encourage you to get curious about why. 

 

Ask yourself, what is it I'm actually defending here? Or am I defending a business model? Am I defending a revenue stream? Am I am I defending a reputation? Or am I just frustrated that I fell for something, maybe again, and now I see things more clearly? You're allowed to be frustrated with me, and that's fine. You wouldn't be the first. But try to approach this episode from humility and curiosity like I will. If you want to engage with me, do so on the merits of my arguments. Don't just call me names. Okay, another disclaimer is I'm not really going to focus in this talk on some of the more extreme hormonal interventions, things like androgen deprivation therapy. 

 

But since I brought it up, let me pick on that one for a second. So androgen deprivation therapy is another name for wrecking a man's ability to produce testosterone. In other words, it is testosterone deprivation, i.e., it is an intervention designed to blunt a man's ability to make it. So if they spoke plain English and told men that, they'd probably have a harder time selling the idea. So they use words like androgen, which no lay person really knows, and therapy to make it sound beneficial. 

 

But let's just unpack the term for a second. Someone please make it make sense. Can you take the words deprivation and therapy and put them in a sentence next to each other and have it make sense? Can think about it for a second. Can you put anything before that and sound logical? Try it for a second. Oxygen deprivation therapy, sleep deprivation therapy, water deprivation therapy, parenting deprivation therapy, deprivation therapy, community deprivation therapy. No, friends, that's called solitary confinement. That's the way you break a human. It's called trauma. And the system has the gall to call deprivation a therapy. It's one of many medical oxymorons. I think it's a lot more accurate to call androgen deprivation therapy targeted medical violence. Another funny oxymoron in the medical world is medically supervised diets, but you'll have to wait for my book where I'll tear that one apart. 

 

Okay, so other extreme interventions that I think are that are not really focus of this episode, but that are biological trauma that I won't be covering are things like insulin potentiated therapy, which you can apply what I just said to that one. I'm really not going to get into cortisone shots too much, or ablasions, also known as mutilations or radiating, also known as burning your glands, or the practice of removing glands altogether, which in that instance you have an unbalanced endocrine system because you're missing one of your parts. And that does change the conversation we're about to have. So in this presentation, I'm going to be sticking mostly with common ways hormones, like antibiotics and painkillers, are handed out like candy when people experience symptoms. Okay, with those disclaimers out of the way, let me ask you this. Can you relate to any of the following? 

 

Especially when it comes to the topic of hormones. So maybe you've been told that you need hormones for some reason. That could be a painful period, hot flashes, erectile dysfunction, poor sleep, pain, hypothyroid, etc., or you've been on hormones and you feel better for a while, and you then you realize they don't seem to work so well, and you develop some other symptoms that you think might be related, and so your doctors just keep tinkering with the dose and swapping out different brands of hormones. Maybe somewhere on that journey you've also noticed that there are a lot of opinions out there when it comes to hormones. So maybe you went and looked for a second opinion within the medical world and you found there's really a lot of infighting about which treatments are best. And the so-called hormone experts, they just quietly tell you that the other doctors don't do it right and you need to try their new way. 

 

But at the end of the day, you're kind of just left to practice your own integrated medicine and hope whoever you pick does a better job managing your symptoms. So if you had enough spins around the medical merry-go-round, it may have finally occurred to you that the medical world isn't in the health business, which may sound funny to hear, but it is really in the symptom management business. And they can't really spare a thought to go about the business of identifying root causes. In reality, they are in a highly profitable sickness management system that is a conveyor belt of more and more meds, leading to more extreme intervention. 

 

So if that's you, the second scenario that you may have pivoted away is you pivot you pivot away from the medical world to the so-called functional or integrative or alternative world, and you probably ended up with sticker shock and a practitioner who has one main modality, who wants to run a bunch of expensive tests, and after those tests come back, the doctor has a suitcase worth of pills for you to swallow. You're told to swallow all the pills, eat a complicated diet, and get back to him or her in three to six months, and they'll run another test, at which point the alternative Mario go round continues to spin. 

 

Why? Because for the most part, the integrative or functional world isn't looking for root causes either. It's the same model with different pills. People tend to find me after they've been through that phase and they feel like they've tried everything, they've wasted thousands of dollars. Some of you have spent a healthy five figures worth of money on practitioners and lab tests and supplements, and it all seems fancy. And then you realize it's basically the same medical model, but they swap out meds for supplements and they call it functional. All right, the last scenario that may be used that maybe you've learned enough to see through both of those first two scenarios, but perhaps with little to no success, you've tried a lot of shiny objects that are pedaled by the so-called influencers on social media. 

 

You've probably seen the long-form ads from Captain Infomershall, or got caught up in the shamwow effect and had an emotional hangover from trying another silver bullet. And at this point, it's such a torrent. You kind of just feel like you're throwing darts in the dark and you don't really have an idea of what's a gimmick and what's not, or how to put all the pieces together. And if that's you, boy, can I sympathize because I've lived a lot of this. It's how I've learned what I've learned. 

 

And I can say that if health is not your profession, if marketing scripts are not something you're familiar with, if you don't know how to see through the Shamwow presentation or a celebrity infomercial disguised as a breakthrough, it is really hard to get above the noise and find what works because it all sounds convincing. So I say all that to say that the topic of hormones is flooded with similar nonsense. Every symptom you have can logically be blamed on hormones in some way. And once a marketer can describe your symptoms better than you, they have your attention. 

 

So my thesis for this presentation, I've actually got three, is first, I'm going to say that hormones have been falsely assigned a causal role in your health conditions, and they are not a causal factor. Whatever your hormone profile, it is a response to a causal factor. They're not the cause themselves. They don't just magically become unbalanced. And similar to the chemical imbalance marketing slogan invented by Eli Lilly to sell us psychiatric medications, hormone balance is the same thing. It's another marketing gimmick with an overly simplified story designed to sell you a pill or a patch or a cream or even a pellet inserted into your rear end. In the medical world, hormone balancing is an unquestioned therapeutic darling, and the same applies for so many of the so-called functional practitioners or naturopathic type practitioners as well. 

 

I find this to be a topic that just doesn't get much critique or criticism, just marketing about who has the best mallets for playing hormone whack-amole. And frankly, I think the whole construct is faulty. So, my second thesis is that your hormones are never unbalanced. In fact, I would argue that they are perfectly balanced for the situation your body finds itself in, and given the challenges it's facing and the resources it has to work with, your body knows what it's doing and it's doing the best it can. 

 

And third, I would say that it is hubris, that it is shocking, off the charts, arrogant to attempt to manage or balance hormones externally. And doing so is the path to unwanted side effects and glandular problems and even glandular atrophy or glandular trauma. And if you want to change the balance of your hormones, here's what you do: you change your situation. You do that, and your hormones will work much more efficiently. So there's my thesis. That's where I'm taking you. Now let's see if I can back it up. Okay, a quick introduction for those of you who have not met me. In case this is your first episode, my name is Christian Elliott. I'm a husband, I'm a father of six homeschooled kids. 

 

I've logged about 20,000 hours of one-on-one coaching since 2005. I have been in the trenches for a long time where I get paid for outcomes, not prescriptions. So, like I said, a lot of people come to me after they've tried so many different things, which I have no formal medical training. Um, I see that both as an asset and a limitation. So, my critique that what I give you today is from outside the system, which in many ways I think helps be me, helps me be more objective because I really don't have a dog in this fight. I also don't know everything. I don't know all the insider lingo that doctors use, but I do reason from first principles, which I think you'll see as I go along, makes most of the lingo they use totally irrelevant. 

 

Okay, another thing to know about me that some people find interesting is that along with various health certifications, I also have a Master's of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary, and I come from a Christian perspective. There is a minister's heart behind what we do here. Uh, I feel like the work I do is my calling. I'm the co-owner of Healing United, which is a private membership association where I get to work with other doctors and coaches, and I get to interview some of them on it on my podcast and spar with them, and we sharpen each other. And even though I say mean things about the medical system, there are some great doctors out there that I really respect and they do tremendous work, and it is an honor to know them. 

 

Okay, here we go. Let's talk a little bit of physiology. How do hormones work? Well, if we were why if you were watching the presentation I did, you'd be able to see a picture of the human body with 10 glands. Those glands are collectively known as your endocrine system. The 10 we're talking about are your pituitary hypothalamus, pineal gland, or pineal, depending on who taught you how to say it, thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenals, pancreas, and ovaries, or testing. So that's 10. But if we're going to be comprehensive, we're talking about, and when we talk about hormones, we had we should also talk about the liver because it makes hormones and puts them into the blood. We should also be talking about the kidneys because they make important hormones, and we could also talk about adipose tissue or your fat tissue because it makes hormones that helps the body know how much it has in storage. So that's your endocrine system. But let's be more specific here. 

 

Let me give you an analogy. You can think of your body as a city with branches of government. There's a mayor, which is your brain and your gut. They are more or less in charge of what goes on in the rest of the body. And the city council is your endocrine glands that I just mentioned. And then you have the public works department, which is like the systems of the body, your respiratory, musculoskeletal, circulatory, et cetera. And then you have the cells that are the citizens of this city. So you could think of your body as the city with trillions of cells and citizens that have needs, and they all contribute to the whole. 

 

It's magnificent. So, quick recap: there's a mayor, city council, public works, and citizens. And so the city council is the focus of this episode. The city council is made up of the glands, and their job is to communicate with the rest of the body to make things happen. To do that, they use messages called hormones. And you can think of hormones like carrier pigeons if you want. The job of a hormone is to take this message around the body and make sure the public works department and the citizens are aware of what's happening and what to do in response to what's happening. But it gets more interesting. 

 

The city council, these regulators, they don't just sit back and bark orders. There is three-way communication going on. They take in information as well, and they respond to what's happening when they communicate with the citizens about how to manage your mood and your energy and your sleep and your hunger and your focus and sleep and sex drive and a whole lot more. Your glands are making these messages and sending them out through the blood to help the body know how to function in real time all of the time. Okay, with so with that basic anatomy in hand, here is a fundamental principle. So if you've been half listening, don't miss this nugget because it's important. The fundamental principle is that everything the body does is directed toward healing. I'm going to say that again because I want it to sink in. 

 

To build an effective strategy to manage your health, we have to work from first principles. So to restate the principle, everything the body does is directed toward healing. From individual cells to larger system, everything works together to build health and keep the whole system nimble and able to adjust to life. You could say the body is working toward homeostasis or toward functioning optimally all the time. But the body has to constantly adjust to your day in real time. And the systems work together to clean and repair you as you go about your day. 

 

So said differently, there is no mutiny going on ever. It's not like your thymus gland is like, screw it. I don't like what you guys are doing. I'm tired of this. This is so unbalanced. I don't like the way the city is being run, and I'm gonna go do my own thing. That does not happen. The whole system works together, and your glands have these products, these hormones that they make in order to help orchestrate what your body is doing. So, with that in mind, another metaphor for your endocrine system is that of a symphony. You could think of each gland as representing a different section of the orchestra, right? You've got the horn section and the drum section and the wind instruments and so on. Your different sections, your different glands, perform different functions. And without all of them, the music starts to sound funny. 

 

But like orchestra members that are all responding to the conductor, to the brain and the gut, who are in charge of monitoring the system, they do everything they can to keep the music beautiful. The different orchestra sections, the glands, help regulate your body through information they gather from the conductor and they play off of each other. They don't just all start playing whatever music they feel like or play music out of turn. That is not how the system works. So the question becomes what kind of information is the conductor taking in? Let's think about this practically. So for starters, you've got the five senses, right? 

 

If you're looking at something fear-inducing, your glands are going to be told to produce a specific type of hormones. Those hormones would be different from what your body would make if you were looking at something beautiful or erotic. If you smell something delicious, your glands will make different hormones. And if you smell something foul, your glands will also make something different. So what else do your glands respond to besides senses? Well, it's not a stretch to say that the gut and the brain are taking in real-time information from what you could say is basically an infinite number of inputs. And the glands are also talking to each other. 

 

But it's way more complicated than that. You have trillions of cells, right? Your glands respond to what's going on with the citizens and how well they're working. They take in real-time information, and the nutrients the cells need are relevant to what the glands are supposed to do. So just try to get your head around this. There are over a hundred different nutrients and different combinations that different types of cells need constantly. There are over 5,000 enzymes your body works with, and enzymes are these little scissors that your body uses to take one product and turn it into something else. 

 

You also have 100-plus neurotransmitters, which are chemical messages your nerve sends between each other at lightning speed to make things happen. Your glands play music in response to those inputs. Your liver, by the way, has over 500 functions, and I admit I can't name all of them, but that's a lot of functions. The gut and the brain also coordinate with the 14 different systems in the body, respiratory, musculoskeletal, etc. Oh, and by the way, there's this thing called your microbiome. 

 

So if it wasn't complex enough, take the complexity I just gave you and multiply it by 10. Or you might as well multiply it by infinity. For every cell you have, you have roughly 10 microbes that inhabit you. And these microbes have their own needs and agendas. So your brain and your microbiome, largely based in your gut, monitor what is going on in your body and they communicate at lightning speed to your glands, who in turn communicate and eat with equally impressive speed to the various cells in your body. It's amazing, right? 

 

Your glands are part of a masterful orchestra that helps conduct the symphony of life. Okay. Let me give you a few examples of and to add some context here of hormones you you probably have heard of, but they'll lead to the point I'm making here. So collectively, your glands make and distribute about 50 hormones. That's roughly five different hormones per gland. Some people argue there's up to 200 different hormones that our bodies use to help regulate us, but whatever the number is, it's a lot. So we're gonna get to the idea of externally balancing this in a second, but let's just circle back to the point I made earlier. Your hormones are a response to the situation your body finds itself in. 

 

So, for example, there are two hormones called insulin and glucagon. You probably know these that their job is to regulate your blood sugar. So the pancreas makes uh insulin in response to too much sugar, and it makes glucagon if the sugar gets too low. There's cortisol or cortisone, and those are the hormones your adrenal glands make to help your body regulate your stress response. Do you need more energy? Are you in danger? Do you need to run away? The adrenal glands help with that. Uh, your hunger hormones are ghrelin and leptin. They are like there, you're like, okay, I'm hungry, please feed me, or we're good. I'm full. 

 

You can stop eating. Thank you. That's what those hormones do. Then there's aldosterone, that's a hormone that your body makes to help regulate how much salt your body retains and how much to get rid of. There's calcitonin, your parathyroid, uses that hormone to make sure your bones know how much calcium to take up and what they don't need. There are your thyroid hormones. They control how quickly your cells run your engine. And if you're low on resources, they will turn down the speed with which your engine runs, or they can turn up the metabolism in response to a different scenario. So, side note on the thyroid here, I've only ever heard of one doctor who talked about T1 and T2. 

 

Most doctors seem to fixate on the T3 and T4, as if the other two hormones are not relevant. I'm not sure why they do that, but if you wanted a complete picture, why would you not talk about so that's some physiology geek out part of what your glands and hormones are doing? But what is the takeaway? Why did I bother to lay all of that out for you? Well, there's not going to be a quiz later. My hope is that you go, wow, that's a lot. That is an infinitely complex system. The point is, there are a lot of different hormones, and I've just scratched the surface of some of the ones you probably have heard about. But here's the weird part. As I just laid out, your hormones are responding to your body's situation, but they get blamed for your symptoms. 

 

And so here are some of the things your hormones get blamed for: hot flashes, poor sleep, painful periods, high blood pressure, mood swings, low energy, low or no libido, diabetes, inflammation, pain, or that fun marketing gimmick I mentioned before, erectile dysfunction. So those are things that your hormones get blamed for when it's actually their job to respond to and regulate what's going on inside. So here's the thing about blame it's a narrative construct. There's a villain and there's a victim, and your hormones are to blame, and you are the victim, you poor soul. 

 

You are the victim of these rude villains with these mean things called hormones that aren't doing their job properly. And so now we have a villain-victim narrative. Ha ha! We've found the cause, and therefore we've got to do something. We need to intervene chemically. So allopathy, which is a fancy word for the medical system, and most of healthcare, like any other effective marketing construct, it relies on that blame-shifting narrative for you to buy into the idea that your hormones are not, quote, balanced. And so to keep the story going, most of healthcare has to rely on obfuscation and fear. 

 

They rely on you not quite understanding what they're talking about. So they use fancier terms like axis. You've got your HPA axis, you know, your hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis. You know, it's it's complicated. But I'm the doctor and I just I know what to do. You've got dominance, there's insufficiency or dysfunction. Pause that for a second and ponder the idea, the emotional reverberation of labeling a person's body as insufficient or dysfunctional. Think about that. Okay, so the system will also use terms like unbalanced or adrenal fatigue or exhaustion. 

 

Thank you, Captain Obvious. I'm glad to know I'm exhausted. I already knew that. But at least now I know I can blame my adrenal glands because they're the ones that are exhausted and they're not making enough hormones, and I can blame my hormones for not helping me get through my day and cope with life. That's the real villain here. That's the story, the narrative. Now, in fairness, there is a place for simplification or simplifying narratives. But I want to help you tell accurate stories when it comes to your body. So before I get to some of the elegant practical simplicity, let's shift to a different story. And this story might sound like your story. 

 

What is the typical response, the typical story that unfolds when you present symptoms to a doctor? Well, let's run some tests and see what's going on. Right? That's not an illogical thing to do, but it's what we've been conditioned to expect. I would say we have been trained like dogs to expect that. It is Pavlovian at this point. If you experience a symptom, quickly go find a doctor and then sit in the waiting room for an hour. And then whatever you do, expect the doctor to come in and tell you that you're likely going to need to go somewhere else and get a test. 

 

And after the test, don't do anything. Oh my goodness, wait for a couple of weeks or however long it takes for the test results to come in. Otherwise, you might do something, you might even heal. If you heal, then we that would mess up the test results and we would have to do it again. So wait for the tests and then expect some pills to swallow. Friends, that's that's really the whole show. Go to doctor, expect testing, wait for test results, expect pills to swallow. We've just been conditioned that when we have a symptom, I go find doctor, because otherwise, how would I know what to do? We've outsourced thinking, we've outsourced intuition, and the system is happy to take that away from us so we can blindly follow. So let's recap for a second what testing is really all about. Well, tests, for the most part, they're a way to sound scientific. They're cloaked in this luminous garment of science and specialized knowledge. 

 

They are a mostly chemistry centric. So most tests stay in the confines of the periodic table to try to make your health puzzle a chemistry equation. They're a chemistry centric revenue stream, which I don't have a problem with people making money helping, great, but at least tell us that, right? And lastly, tests are designed to sell you something else. You don't get a test in The doctor says, okay, perfect. I hope you feel better. Right. Right? The test is just the waypoint to the next intervention, which sometimes is another test and another test. And then finally you get to do something. 

 

And most of the do something is swallow pills. Do you see it? So here's the important point. Tests tend to trap us into thinking, like, you can't figure this out. Test results are usually full of insider lingo. Instead of the English words for your symptoms, they use Greek and Latin, which I can only assume is because it sounds fancier. Multiple sclerosis means many scars or many hard scars. Atherosclerosis means artery scars or hard scars in your arteries. Osteoporosis means bones porous or porous bones. Arthritis means joint inflammation. Lupus means wolf. 

 

That's a helpful one for that. It's the wolf-looking rash you get on, some people get on their face, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We give the system the power of naming us and naming our symptoms. And because they switch languages when they do that, we think they've discovered what's wrong. No, all they've really done is name your symptom in a different language. Why you're having that symptom wasn't part of the test. 

 

Tests obfuscate. They give it, they give you charts and graphs and numbers and Greek and Latin and abstract molecular explanations to separate you from your intuition. In other words, tests in particular and the system in general disempowers. I don't know how to read Greek and Latin. I don't know what these charts and graphs mean. There's so many pages here and so many terms and numbers. I just need an expert to interpret these things for me. I need an oracle to just know what to do. Friends, that is not a bug of the system of so-called healthcare. 

 

That is a design feature. That is what the model is supposed to do when it was set up by monopolists back in 1910. It may sound crazy to some of you to hear this, but I would go so far as to argue that the medical system more closely resembles a religion, a belief system, or dare I say, a cult, than it does an honest scientific business. If you heard episode two of my show, then you know the word pharmacia, which is where we get the word pharmaceutical or pharmacy. Pharmacia literally means witchcraft or sorcery. The two sacraments of the healthcare are, or healthcare religion, are typically tests and pills or potions. 

 

And if you stick around long enough, you can graduate to the sacrament of surgery or knives. Now, again, hear me. I'm not critiquing the system, not individual doctors. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But once you see the healthcare religion through that lens, it's hard not to see the similarity. The system uses fear and obfuscation and oracles and high priests and sacraments and oracles with access to specialized knowledge. 

 

And they want your unquestioned obedience. If you've ever tried to question a doctor and found them to be defensive or dismissive or arrogant, you've experienced what I'm talking about. So let's talk about this testing sacrament for a few minutes because it's an important part of how they take away your agency and get your consent. And there's this fun, I call it this cheeky, arrogant bluff out there. It's great marketing, it almost rhymes. You may have heard of it. It's called test don't guess. Now, it sounds logical. I mean, who wants to guess when you could know, right? Who wants to throw darts in the dark when it comes to being healthy? Nobody. 

 

But let me back up, and before I explain why test don't guess is a bluff, let me ask you this. Imagine for a second, what would a doctor visit look like if there weren't any tests and you weren't offered any pills? I think a lot of doctors would go out of business. They'd have to start doing what I do. Without tests and pills, they'd be lost. They wouldn't know what to do. They too are fallible people and they are far from independent thinkers. They rely on printouts and so-called standard of care, if X prescribe Y. 

 

And without someone telling them what to do, they don't know how to doctor. Now, in fairness to them, that's what they were taught in school. And we've taught them that a test and pills is what we expect when we go to the doctor. And that comes back to this unquestioned reverence we have for the construct of science that I don't have time to get into here today. But the point is, no one wants to go to a doctor and walk away with nothing, but about the only thing they can hand you is a pill, a chemical potion, after they give you a test. That's what 90% of doctor visits I just described with that right there. 

 

But let's get back to the bigger point. Tests don't guess, while logical, is a false binary. Friends, there's a third option. It's not take a test and have absolute clarity, or take wild stabs in the dark and hope for the best. There's the third option. Are you ready? This is gonna blow your mind here. I'm going to take you back to the old school days of the family doctor before Lab Core and Quest diagnostics started doing most of a doctor's thinking for him or her. Here's the third option. Are you ready? How are you? How are you doing? Seriously, that's that's that's a sincere question. How have you been? Oh, you mean it's just like it's just just me and you talking? You really want to know? Yes. Oh, okay. 

 

Well, thanks for asking. Um, to be honest, I'm a little anxious. I feel like I've got some heart palpitations. Um my other doctor tells me my blood pressure is high. Um, I'm really frustrated I can't lose this weight. I've um I've got some what is words I sometimes lose there. I've got this um brain fog. That's it. Sometimes I lose my train of thought. Um my digestion is gurgly. This reflux is killing me, especially when I try to sleep. I've got a recurring infection and I don't want any more antibiotics. I take them and I I feel better for a few days and then I feel worse. Or I guess while I'm at it, my back hurts and it kind of makes it hard to sleep. I mean that's probably why I have reflux, and anyway. I just am irritable because I'm not sleeping as well. So I mean, if I can be honest, I just feel like I'm letting my family down. Wow, that sounds like a lot. 

 

But here's the point you weren't guessing. You do know how you feel. Well, well, shoot, thank you for that information. I so I have a few more questions for you. Let's let's just start with some of the big whoppers so we can rule out anything obvious that might be causing your symptoms. So, do you have any root canals or metal fillings? Okay, do you have any implants in your body of any kind, especially breast implants? Got it. Okay, do you have any swirling anxiousness? Do you have any traumas or abuse in your past? Okay, a tender topic here. But do you have any bitterness or grudges or unforgiveness? Do you have any sort of inadequacy or unworthiness thoughts running through your head often?

Christian Elliot

No.

Christian Elliot

Okay, are you on any medications? Those can be a big monkey wrench in your physiology. And you know, it says here your doctor's trying to balance your hormones and they have you on a statin, which actually messes up your ability, body's ability to produce hormones. Anyway, did you did you take any of the um you know the safe and effective vaccines that came out lately? That maybe that's part of what's going on. Okay, so those are the big heavy hitters, but you know, if you don't mind, let me go one layer deeper and see if I can figure out what's going on. Uh, how many times have you pooped today? Okay. Uh how many times have you pooped in the last week? For context, if if you're not averaging about two bowel movements a day, you know, we've got a lot more of an issue here. I already know what to do. 

 

So if you you're like, you know, I can't remember the last time I pooped, or you've got like, I don't know, five, six, sometimes ten times a day, I already know what to do. Great. So we've got an important place to start. So let me let me probe a little bit more. So it's getting easier the longer we talk. What time did you go to bed last night? Is that a normal bedtime? Okay, what is it that keeps you up that late? Okay, how much water have you had today? Are you drinking tap water? What have you been eating? When was the last time you how much by the way, how much fat are you eating? What kind of fat is it? How much salt is in your diet? How much screen time are you getting in an average day? Have you gone for a walk or worked out much lately? Do you enjoy your work? Does it fill you with a sense of purpose? 

 

Okay, this is maybe this sounds funny, but when was the last time you had a hug? By the way, when I did that live, I stopped the presentation and I asked those attending if anyone had ever had an experience like that at the doctor, and it was cricket. Not one person raised their hand. Everyone shook their head no. Do you see the point? What I just did was not guessing. Compare what I did, that third option, to whatever your last experience was at the doctor's office. Have you ever had an experience like that? And how long did that take me? Five minutes? I would wager that a common sense guess is likely way more actionable than whatever a lab test is going to tell you. And an educated guess, like what some of the questions I just asked you, could prove way more helpful at helping you figure out how to feel better quickly. 

 

Getting well isn't something that only happens on the other side of a lab test. Most of our health isn't mysterious, or at least it isn't mysterious for those of us who study it. But there's so much actionable information we can leverage in an honest conversation and in honest moments with yourself. Healing is not mysterious. But the system has told you that it's fancy, it's Greek, it's Latin, it's A1C, it's triglycerides, it's TSH, it's T3, it's T4, it's estradiol, it's cholesterol, it's PSH or PSA, it's it's MTHFR, it's it's complicated. It's, oh my gosh, how am I going to know what to do if I don't have a person and a printout? Friends, that's why tests don't guess is disempowering. Now, in fairness, we have to have simple answers. 

 

If we overcomplicate healing, people give up. Bedding Weld can't be mysterious, or it disempowers people. We don't need overly simplified nonsense answers like your hormones aren't balanced. We need foundationally sound, accurately aimed simplicity. So stay tuned. I'll get to that in just a little bit. So again, I'm not here to take away your tests, but if you but I do want you to have a realistic sense of what tests can or can't do for you. And I would argue that tests don't guess is equal parts arrogant bluff, and it's an emotional trap. So we tend to give testing, for whatever reason, the emotional weight as if it accounted for all of the factors synergistically influencing our health, your mental, emotional, relational, physical, and spiritual. 

 

So let me say this differently. See if you can relate to this. Imagine you just did something meaningful and you have a whole bunch of people saying really nice things about you. But there's this one person who says something mean. And that's all you can think about. This is what this one mean-spirited person said. And what's what's happening here? Well, in other words, you just lost context. You got 99% praise and 1% criticism, and it's the critics whose comments stick out in your mind. My experience with clients is that our fixation on testing is similar. We fixate on that one data point where the test says something was supposedly a little off. 

 

There's that is the trap. You get stuck in this emotional loop thinking that the test is unveiling some sort of mystery. And since the system doesn't bother asking the question why something is happening, that ambiguity induces even more anxiety because you don't know where the so-called problem is coming from. Or you don't know the insider lingo or even what the test means. Does that make sense now? That's why tests can be so disempowering, even when you have an oracle present to read the results. So, by the way, if you're someone who really appreciates tests, you could go on to ownyourlabs.com right now and order dozens of tests and spend thousands of dollars and get all sorts of potentially fascinating and potentially useless information about what was going on in your blood or your hair or your spit or your stool at the moment of the test. 

 

But let me say this pay attention in the months and years ahead. The healthcare cartel, I mean the healthcare industry knows that so-called precision testing is all the rage, especially genetic testing. I think the whole thing is a ruse, but that's a topic that would deserve its own episode. My point here is simply that testing as a revenue stream is big business and it's growing. There will be a push for so many more tests in the days ahead. And the new test will promise to solve the mystery that the last test couldn't solve. And so you've been preemptively made aware. Brace yourself for more and more doctors and influencers pedaling a lot of shiny new tests. So, in a couple minutes, I'll give you four key questions you can ask before you agree to another test. So those four questions will probably save you a lot of money and spare you a lot of needless physical and emotional headaches. But before I do that, since we are talking about the myths of hormones or hormones that are unbalanced, let me give you one last analogy here about testing and relate it to hormones specifically. So I call this the football coach hormone testing analogy. I don't have a better name for it, but you're welcome to suggest one. So this imagine you are a football coach or you could soccer coach would work too, and your team didn't play that well in the last game, and you're trying to figure out how to help your team play better, but all you have to work with is a photograph from the sidelines of one moment of the game. 

 

So you have no idea what part of the game you're looking at, you don't know what play your team is running, you don't know how tired your players might be, how many timeouts are left, and there are no fans in the stands to jog your memory about any of that. In other words, you have no context for the photo. So here's the analogy in case you're not tracking with me. The 11 players on your team represent your 11 hormones. Now, to do the analogy justice, you'd need 50 players on the field at once, but let's not overcomplicate it. So the photograph represents your standard blood test, which is a snapshot, a moment in time. And the blood test also happens to be examining the cleanest parts of your body. 

 

So all you have is a photograph, and it's a busy photo with 22 players on the field, 11 from your team and 11 from the other. And it's kind of hard to figure out what's going on. So to simplify the test for you, the photographer scrubbed the other team's players out of the photos. Now you can't see what your players are responding to, but you can see all 11 of your players' 11 hormones. But you know what? That photo is still too complicated. So the photographer took seven of your players out of the photo as well. So now you're just left with five of them, five hormones, to see if you can figure out what's going on in the game and how to make your team play better. 

 

So you've got this photo and you kind of tilt your head and you fixate on one or two players, and you see the freeze frame and you go, oh, there it is. Those two guys are not balanced. I mean, why would the heck would they be doing that? We have to get those two guys rebalanced so we can play better next week. Do you see the point? You have no context for that judgment. You don't have any idea what your players are responding to. Did they just get shoved? Did they pull a muscle? Are they gassed and out of breath? And remember, my analogy only had 11 players on the field. You have over 50 hormones that are responding to something in real time all the time. 

 

Does it make sense that your doctor could cherry pick a few hormones out of 50 and know how to rebalance a system with external hormones back to the way they should be based on a photograph? You've lost me. That's hubris. And perhaps I'm displaying my own ignorance here, but maybe there is such a test that has 50 hormones tested at the same time and watches them in real time, but I've never heard of it, nor had any of the people at the webinar who have ever had their hormones tested. So I'll ask you guys have you ever had 50 hormones tested at once? My guess is no. 

 

But here's the point or the payoff of what I'm laying out for you. The idea of unbalanced hormones is a narrative construct brought to you by pharma and the drug representatives that went through the indoctrination system called medical school. Medical doctors are trained in the paradigm of a pill for every ill, a pill to mask any symptoms. But here's the important point intervening in the human body with external hormones creates an imbalance. It doesn't correct one. Now, I'll readily admit that taking a hormone can make you feel better, sometimes a lot better. But then again, so can heroin or a painkiller or an antacid. But do those things correct a problem or mask one? I'm sure you know the answer to that by now. 

 

Friends, the idea of correcting a hormone imbalance in your blood is the same flawed logic as correcting a chemical imbalance in your brain. Both are marketing constructs. You cannot intervene in an infinitely complex system and balance it externally. That is God-level, infinitely complicated math. No human could ever compute that, nor could they do any better than the real-time hormonal adjustments your body makes moment by moment. What hormones therapy does is lead to a whole series of risks and side effects that I'll go over in just a few minutes so you can get real informed consent. But before I leave the testing topic, let me give you four questions you can use as a filter to see if you still want the lab test next time it's offered. 

 

So the first question is for you, and the other three are for your doctor. So the first question is what do you hope the test will tell you? It's a sincere question. So what it probably won't tell you is to revisit your lifestyle choices or forgive that person or let go of that grudge. It probably won't prescribe that you get exercise or go to bed on time. You may be surprised to hear this, but I found it's easier to get people to swallow a pill than it is to get them to exercise or go to bed on time. Not that any of you listening to this are guilty of that. It's just a problem other people have. But sincerely, what do you hope the test will tell you that you don't already know? And maybe there's a good answer. It may prove insightful on some level. 

 

So I'm not saying that you're an idiot for getting a test. I'm encouraging you to see if you're using a test as a way to avoid or delay doing something you already know you need to do. Okay, so the next question is the first one for your doctor, and it's this. So, how accurate is the test you're proposing, doctor? It's it's not uncommon for people to experience the, hey, good news, your test came back normal. And maybe some of you are listening have had that happen, and you're like, great, except I don't feel normal, but I'm glad to know the test is normal. Guess what happens in that scenario? Congratulations, you can have another test. 

 

Sometimes this approach just keeps going and you're running tests until the doctors find something they can justify treating and billing your insurance for. But here's the kicker. Tests can also have false positives and false negatives. See mammograms as a great example. If you didn't hear my interview with Dr. Kelly Reese about mammograms, you might check out episode number 39. For what it's worth, my wife and daughter will never get a mammogram because, first, do no harm. Uh, parasite testing is another great example of false negatives. 

 

I had classic symptoms of a parasite infection myself, so I had two stool tests done. Both times they came back negative. Yet after finally figuring out how to cleanse parasites, it turns out I had so many worms and the tests just couldn't find them. So if you want to hear more about parasites, you can check out my interview with Kim Rogers, which is episode number 47. Another great example I have is a friend uh Robin Openshaw, who had three food sensitivity tests in a short amount of time. All three of them came back with completely different foods she was supposedly sensitive to and needed to stay away from. 

 

So the point I'm making is rarely do we question whether the test is even worth its weight. How insightful is it, really? Or would it just be a waste of resources and a source of anxiousness? So that's your first question for the doctor. How accurate is the test you're proposing? And just see what kind of answer your doctor has. Uh the next question, the third one, or second for the doctor, is okay, doc, regardless of what the test tells me, what kind of recommendations would you propose based on the results of the test? So here's the first thing they won't tell you. 

 

Well, the first option is we could do nothing. We call that service monitoring. Essentially, we just don't do anything except let more time go by and we bring you back in for another test. It's part of our recurring revenue model. You know, it's you'll be older each time we test. So eventually there'll be something we can, some sort of symptom you have, something we can treat, and then we can make some money off you. That's not what they're going to tell you. But what's actually happening is you'll they'll they'll give you a, well, you know, depending on what the test says, we could give you this hormone. Maybe your hormones are unbalanced if that, and if that doesn't work, or if your body doesn't like that pill, we could give you a different version of pretty much the same thing from another company. Or, you know, if you happen to be uh talking to a functional medicine doctor, they will likely tell you that, well, after all the tests come back, we can give you a boatload of supplements. 

 

You know, you can swallow a whole bunch of pills that are mostly the same pills, regardless of what the test results are, but you could swallow a bunch of pills. In either case, functional or dysfunctional doctor, the third option is if you really score well on the test, and we can talk about scalpels, maybe even radiate you. Friends, that's that's typically the whole show. That's that's the payoff of testing. And knowing ahead of time what solutions would be after the test is worth knowing before you even bother with the test. That's the magic of asking this question. 

 

It can give you space to think and examine, like fast forward to where is it? Okay, so yeah, I get the test. Where is it going? Ask the question so you can know that. And if that question is answered and the options offered still sound appealing, the next logical question is this. Okay, can you tell me, Doc, uh, what are the risks associated with that medication or that intervention? And what you'll probably get if you ask that question is some sort of word salad about safe and effective, one in a million. I do this all day. It's gonna be a really low dose. We'll monitor it and we can change medication if you have any unwanted side effects. Okay, pause right there. 

 

If you have heard anything like that, that is not informed consent, not even close. That is a mockery of informed consent. The doctor just dodged your question. At this point, most people don't know to or know how to push back and get real informed consent. And so this is the part where they simply just stop thinking and defer to the doctor. Oh, he said it's safe and effective. I mean, he wouldn't lie to me, and I don't know what else to do. So strangely, it often falls to me, an obscure health coach, and to offer people informed consent because it seems to be a relic in the medical system. And frankly, a lot of the alternative world isn't much better sometimes. So, what are the risks? Since this is an episode about hormones, let's talk about informed consent and hormone therapy. 

 

So, during the webinar, I had a slide where I searched for pharma companies being sued by people harmed after taking hormone drugs. I just picked three easy-to-find headlines and put them on a slide. One was a common contraceptive linked to brain tumor risk. Another was a story of pharma paying out$13 million in a settlement for hormone replacement lawsuits related to Premarin, which stands for pregnant mare urine, literally horse pea therapy. The third one was about thousands of men suing for damages due to an androgel testosterone drug. So you can look up such things on your own if you want to see court-level evidence of demonstrated harm from hormones. 

 

But at this point in the presentation, I stopped the slideshare and I just did a real-time search on the internet to show people the risks associated with taking hormones. So please feel free to duplicate what I'm about to tell you and see what you find. So the first place I went was the Cleveland Clinic, which is a reputable medical institution. On the page I showed them, it had a list of potential benefits and risks of taking hormones for menopausal symptoms. 

 

Now, the benefits included things like reducing vaginal dryness and uncomfortable sex and reducing hot flashes. It also said that therapy may reduce the risk of developing osteoporosis. It might improve your sleep, it might lower your risk of colon cancer or reduce your risk of diabetes. Fantastic. Okay, so what about the possible risks of taking hormones for menopausal symptoms? Well, when you scroll down, you see risks might include things like heart disease, blood clots, stroke, gallbladder infections, uterine cancer, and breast cancer. 

 

So, said differently, it might decrease your risk of one type of cancer, but increase your risk of two other types. So, interestingly, below the risks section, they also had an alternative to hormone therapy. What a concept! So, what are some suggested alternatives from the Cleveland Clinic? Well, you could do an over-the-counter lubricant if you have vaginal dryness. That's probably less toxic. Uh, for hot flashes, you could take an antidepressant. I'm not making that up. Or read on, and you could take a nervous system depressant called gabapentin. Antidepressant, depressant, maybe just flip a coin. 

 

Does a psych medication, a medication for your head, sound like a mismatched remedy for a hot flash to anyone besides me? By the way, I'm going to tell you what hot flashes are in just a little bit, but appreciate that the Cleveland Clinic just told you what I told you. I.e., inside their model of health, you are a chemistry equation. Hormone balancing is the same thing as chemical balancing. If the hormone chemical doesn't agree with your body, they can give you a neurotransmitter chemical, which is riskier and has potentially even worse side effects. But besides an over-counter the lubricant, over-the-counter lubricant, yeah, finding a different chemical is their version of an alternative to hormone therapy. 

 

I can think of so many alternatives, but the system doesn't know how to think outside the periodic table. But let's talk about specific hormones and specific risks. So I just picked a few commonly prescribed hormones in this part of the presentation, and I just did a quick search for the risks of blank hormone therapy. So try that yourself. The first one I started with was thyroid hormones. So what you'll find if you do a search for that is things like increased risk of cardiovascular disease, mortality, you know, you could die, adverse skeletal effects, whatever those are, anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment, metabolic slowdown leading to weight gain, irregular menstruation, decreased libido, stroke, and vision problems. 

 

It goes on to say that over-the-counter, or sorry, over-treatment with thyroid hormones increases the risk of bone loss or fracture, especially in postmenopausal women. There's also a risk of myocardial infarction, that's a heart attack, arrhythmias, that's a heart that can't quite find a regular beat. You could also have a coma, and there's also the pesky, or maybe annoying problem that thyroid medications, you have to make sure you don't eat certain foods with them because it might interfere with the chemical profile the medicine is trying to set up in your body. 

 

And so, you know, you have to plan your meals and particular foods around the intake of hormones. Did your doctor tell you about those risks of thyroid hormones for any of you who are on them? Anybody? Okay, moving on. How about the risks of cortisone or prednisone therapy? That's an interesting one. So cortisone therapy is typically given for pain. This crazy crazy. Again, I'm not making it up. Side effects include wait for it, getting a buffalo hump, or truncal obesity due to the way it redistributes your fat. I mean, who doesn't want a good buffalo hump? You might be disfigured, but at least your hip pain will go away for a while. Um, other risks include increased blood sugar leading to hypertension. 

 

That's another way of saying it increases your risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Long-term use of cortisone risk is associated with significant complications such as decreased bone density, tendon ruptures, osteoporosis, and an increased risk of fractures. Oh, okay. But what about prednisone, another steroid hormone? That's a common one if you have rheumatoid arthritis or any sort of chronic inflammation. They often put you on prednisone to suppress your immune system because who doesn't want to suppress the immune system? Prednisone comes with an increased risk of infections, not surprisingly, or cataracts and glaucoma, particularly with daily doses of 10 milligrams over the course of a year. 

 

It can delay wound healing, increase anxiety, skin fragility, bruising, and hear suitism. I actually had to look that one up. That's a fun one. That means prednisone could give you the ability to grow hair in places you don't normally grow it. So, women, you could have chin hair or back hair, or maybe even get lucky and grow hair on the palm. Of your hands or the soles of your feet. Fun. Prednisone also has the common short-term effects, including fluid retention, increased appetite, weight gain, insomnia, mood changes, and elevated blood pressure. They even have a warning that the risks include risks of short-term use, such as three days or less, have been linked to an increased risk of serious adverse events, including gastrointestinal bleeding, sepsis, which is where your blood is toxic and you might die, and heart failure, with quote, risks persisting for weeks or months after you discontinue. Seriously, I did not make that up. If you've been prescribed prednisone, did your doctor tell you about any of that? 

 

Besides maybe saying you're likely to catch a cold, and if you do, we have a different medication for that. On the medical conveyor belt. Okay, probably not. But the next search I did for those in attendance was the risks of a commonly prescribed uh hormone for women, and that is progesterone. So, quote, there are several significant risks, particularly when used in combination with estrogen for menopause. So here they are. Heart attacks, strokes, invasive breast cancer, which I guess is different from regular breast cancer, pulmonary emboli, which means growth in your lungs, deep vein thrombosis, which is, wait for it, the Greek word for clotting. So deep vein clotting. You also risk dementia. 

 

So, you know, you might forget who your family members are, but at least you'll have fewer hot flashes, hopefully. Okay, the last medication I looked up was more of a category, but it is one of the darlings of many in the health of healthcare practitioners, and it is the so-called bioidentical hormones. So that search turned up risks like increased likelihood of blood clots, gallbladder disease, heart disease, cardiovascular events, which could be in a number of things, and breast cancer. There's that cancer one again. So if you keep reading about bioidentical hormones, you'll find that they are basically not regulated. In other words, they're not dependably standardized. 

 

Yet you can get one dose that is different from one pill to the next or one bottle to the next, which could create any number of side effects depending on what bioidentical hormone or hormones they are giving you. So, what I found looking into this topic is there's actually a lot of infighting in the healthcare world between those who want to prescribe bioidentical hormones or those trying to get bioidentical hormones or compounding pharmacies to not be able to make them. 

 

Not surprisingly, Pharma would like a monopoly on hormone products, but what you won't find, what's not happening, is no one is questioning the premise of hormone interventions in the first place. Like painkillers, hormones can make people feel better. And performing that trick is a dependable moneymaker where multiple parties want a piece of the pie. So the idea with bioidentical hormones is it's the exact same thing as your hormones, the ones your body makes, which even if I took that at face value, which would take some convincing, we still have the pickle of using a hubristic intervention and overriding how the body is trying to manage itself. 

 

Here's the bottom line. If you are on or considering taking hormones, I would strongly encourage you to do these searches on your own. Have these conversations with your doctor if they won't dodge the question. Start asking questions, get real informed consent. So at this point in the presentation, I looked around the room and I said, in an effort to get real informed consent, did anyone's doctor ever take the five minutes to do what I just did, to pull out the package answered on the hormone therapy they suggested and look at the risks? Or even more, did they reason through the logic and end game of the medication? Have you ever had that happen with any medication? Not surprisingly, no one raised their hand. 

 

So just on the off chance that your doctor did tell you about the risks and tried to give you an honest informed consent, and for some reason you're still interested in the hormone therapy, there's a bonus question here that you can stump your doctor with every single time. So here it is. Okay, Doc, I I know you wouldn't recommend something that's bad for me. So can I just ask how would you know that my body isn't susceptible to the risks of that medication? 

 

Okay, so if you choose to ask that question, be prepared for an awkward silence, for another word salad, maybe even a condescending tone. But an honest doctor would tell you there's no way to know for sure that your body isn't susceptible to those side effects. Friends, drugs always have side effects. Always. Some side effects show up sooner and some later. I think that's got to be the drug advertising over the last few decades that has desensitized us to the risks. We're in a trance when we see these ads now. 

 

We we see the commercials with people who look like they're living the life we want, this life on permanent vacation. And it's like we don't even hear them list the side effects anymore. Pharmaceuticals are a toxic form of roulette. And if you really want to make your doctor feel the heat, you can ask this one. Okay, I'm I'm just curious, Doc. I saw mortality was listed as one of the side effects. Um, how many people die each year from a properly prescribed drug? Pause. Here's a hint. The answer is at least a six-figure number. Friends, that is roulette, right? So just like the medical approach to other health out health conditions, hormone therapy is a form of chemical-based symptom-focused whack-a-mole. 

 

Hardly anyone questions the practice, and instead, they argue about who has the best mallet or who hits too hard and who doesn't hit hard enough. Your symptoms are not moles to be whacked, they are communication from your body asking you for support. So, unlike some medication, hormone therapy is the path to endless monitoring. There's no finish line. Once you throw a hormone into the system, now your whole body has to respond to that intrusion. Now all your other glands are trying to figure out what in the world is going on? Where did that come from? And so they're adjusting what they do in response to the external substance they didn't make. 

 

They are, you have created a chemical imbalance. And instead of your body having the reins to your endocrine system, now the system has the reins. Do you see that? That scenario creates this pesky and profitable thing called chemical dependency with no path off of it. That is the medical conveyor belt. And it is a diabolically brilliant business model. They get you on the treadmill of endless monitoring and adjusting doses based on side effects. But perhaps here's the more important point hormonal whack-a-mole leads to glandular atrophy. So think of it this way: if you stop using your muscles, what happens to them? Do they get stronger? 

 

If you outsource your muscles' job to something else, maybe an electric bike, what happens to your muscles? Does your cardiovascular system improve? No. Your muscles shrink if they don't have to work. It's no different with our glands. If you outsource the production of a hormone to an external source at some random schedule that is not at the moment-by-moment purview of the body, what happens to the gland? It atrophies. The system doesn't even dispute that. They just hope you don't think to ask that when they tell you that you'll be on hormones for the rest of your life. They manage your health. They manage your hormones. 

 

They accelerate your decline while stitching you together with medical duct tape called hormones. And they tell you that it's just part of aging. Isn't it great? We have these medications. We're all aging, so we should be glad for these potions. Friends, that is how they make you chemically dependent. And it's also how they slowly increase the number of medications you're on. Each new side effect generates another pill, and so on. I'm pausing here for a dramatic effect. Do you see it? 

 

It all starts with the story that your body can't figure it out. It's unbalanced. There's a revolt, a dominance, an insufficiency going on inside you, and you're the victim of your glands, your hormonal shortcomings. Baloney. Interestingly, I've lost track of how many times I've I've broken that medical spell, only to have people take their next lab test and see their next anxiety-inducing headline or a fear-inducing doctor visit, and it puts them right back into that malleable trance where they're told medicine is their only option. Oh, wait, they're bioidentical? It's bioidentical, it's safe and effective. Doctors have their talking points down. They are trained how to handle your objections. Super low dose. We're gonna put it in the name. Low dose now trexone. 

 

That sounds better. People will go for that. We just need to give you just a little bit of poison to help you heal. Do we? That's like saying, I just need you to poop a little bit in the bathtub while you bathe. You know, just a little bit. Well, we can monitor how much poop you use. Ew. No, monitor it. You're gonna monitor that? Everything's gonna be fine. Safe and effective. I do this all day. Friends, that is not informed consent, and it's not health care. If you want to go that route, God bless you, but at least see the wizard behind the curtain for what it is. 

 

If you're hearing this and thinking, oh my gosh, I've been on hormones for a long time, my poor gland, where would I even start to help them? I'll get to that in a little bit, but just know that the longer you've been on a medication, the longer it typically takes to come off of it. You just have to calibrate your mindset to that journey. And that's part of why we have a great doctor on our team to help people safely wean off meds. Okay, so let me summarize what I've covered so far. So during the webinar, I showed a pie chart visual of modern healthcare. And on the chart, 95% of the pie is lab tests, pills, injections, surgery, and radiation. 

 

The other 5% of healthcare is things like, you know, you try not to be so negative, work on your mindset. Uh, maybe don't eat so much sugar, try to stay up too late, and maybe do some hyperbaric oxygen or ozone or any other fancy device the FDA blesses with an approval. That's what we sign up for when we engage the medical system. And unfortunately, if you go to an alternative doctor, the main difference is often just the pills. They give you supplements instead of medications, as I've said before. Okay, so let's just boil it down. If lab tests and pills were the answer, if being stabbed with medicine was the path to a strong immune system, if healthcare spending equated to positive health outcomes, the US would be the healthiest nation in the world. 

 

We test more, we swallow more pills, we allow ourselves to be injected more, and we spend so much money per person on healthcare more than any nation in the world. Yet in most categories, we are the sickest, fattest, and most disabled nation in the world. At some point, we have to say, what is the definition of insanity again? Is this model of intervening and chemically balancing a system what I want to do? For me, I opted out a long time ago once I saw that. So there's two methodological starting points when it comes to your health. Two paradigms, two competing narrative constructs. There's first a treatment paradigm, and there's a healing paradigm.

 

A treatment paradigm is a mindset and it carries this unspoken or subconscious assumption that the body's making mistakes. It doesn't know what to do, and it's not capable of healing without an intervention. A treatment paradigm looks to the intervention to be the solution and attempts to fight the body's battles for it. This paradigm esteems specialization. Every new symptom we can identify represents a special new problem in need of a special solution. 

 

Thus we have specialists for every part of the body. What I encourage you to do when you hear the word specialist is replace it with the word partialist. A specialist is someone who interestingly, intentionally ignores context, looks at a part of the body, usually through a chemistry lens, and attempts to intervene in that part and bring your body back into quote balance. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of so-called hormone partialists out there. They often see themselves as or call themselves endocrinologists or a thyroid specialist or an ovarian specialist. 

 

They look at a tiny part of your physiology and imagine it to be the key to better health. But think about it. If I see myself as a hormone expert, and the main tool I have is hormones, not surprisingly, since hormones regulate so many physiological functions, every problem can in some way be framed as a hormonal problem. If the only tool I have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Welcome to whack-a-mole. I'm a specialist. Therefore, let's use my special mallets. Friends, specialization has ruined healthcare. In this model, every effort is made to find what is burdening the body and what resources it would need to be empowered to heal. 

 

A healing paradigm thinks holistically way beyond just the periodic table, and it knows doing interventionist biological math is impossible. So a healing paradigm looks to the body's innate intelligence to be the solution. I'll sum up the difference between the two paradigms with this. A treatment paradigm operates from a place of hubris, which means endless interventions. And a healing paradigm operates from a place of stewardship. It knows and respects that the body is the healer. Okay, so let me just give you a practical path to healing, to a healthy endocrine system. So I went through all of that complexity so I could contrast it with some elegant simplicity. 

 

So first, we need to get the paradigm right. As I'm sure you can tell by now, I would argue for a healing paradigm. But second, we also need a logical and methodical plan of action. If we have the right principles and we have a plan based on solid principles, we can heal. So your job really is just to create the scenario that fosters healing. That is all you're tasked with doing. You don't need someone to sort through complex math and charts and Greek and Latin and so on. So first, let's get the principles right. 

 

So we have to ask, what is it that makes us sick before we can attempt to say what helps us heal? So the short answer to why we get sick is susceptibility. Not everyone gets sick at the same time. Some people are susceptible and others are not. So the question becomes what makes us susceptible to sickness? Well, the answer is quite simple. There are two main things that make us susceptible. The first thing is poison. Poison can come in various forms, like man-made chemicals or natural substances like venoms or heavy metals. Other sources, other sources of poison is overgrowths or bacteria like yeast, fungi, parasites, or worms. 

 

And the microbiome is an area where the term unbalanced actually fits. You can have an unbalanced soil that doesn't have enough nutrients for your plants to grow. And you can we have our own soil. You can have your own unbalanced microbiome. And other things that poison us are things like toxic thoughts or things like EMFs or unnatural lighting. Those are the categories of the things that poison the human body. The second category of things that make us susceptible is malnourishment. Now, nourishment is more than food. Obviously, that's important, but it's not just food, it's water, it's movement. Movement can be very medicinal. 

 

By the way, you can have unbalanced muscles that create stress on your skeleton or create movement deficiencies, and that can make it harder to heal. Other things that nourish us are sleep and hope and time in nature and communion with God and other people. Those are the things that nourish the body. And without them, we demonstrate the signs of poor health. So those are the two reasons we get sick. We're poisoned, malnourished, or some combination of both. But to be comprehensive here, let me do a hat tip to trauma and aging. So is trauma real? Yes. I had two clients years ago, about 18 years ago, who were in a traumatic car accident. They were the pedestrian that was hit by a car, and that was the straw that broke their back. 

 

Their body had too many fires to put out, and strangely, two people who didn't know each other, not the same accident, both developed multiple sclerosis after they were hit by a car. So that's one example where trauma can be a source of poor health. Another type of trauma is various forms of abuse, which can lead to swirling self-doubt or anxiousness or feelings of inadequacy or unworthiness. Those are real biological toxins. And those types of poisons can be harder to understand because you can't find them on a test. You can just feel the way your thoughts of inadequacy or feeling misunderstood leaves you feeling physically unsettled. The point is trauma can also burden the body. And aging is a real thing. It's funny to me that there is such a thing as an anti-aging movement if it's as if somehow we're going to stop it. We're not going to stop it. 

 

So, in case you didn't know this, none of us gets out of that out of this alive. So sorry to break that to you, but how about if we just became pro-aging gracefully? Let's go that way. So, can aging increase our susceptibility? Yes, it can. And aging, what aging does is it slows down various processes our body has. And in an effort to maintain our health, we will have to expand what we do to take care of our health. And so, since our physiological processes slow down, aging will also dictate that healing will take more time. The older you are, the less likely you are to heal like a five-year-old or an 18-year-old. 

 

But the cleaner your body and the more nourishment it has, the faster you can heal. So, by the way, if we're talking hospice or someone has had their will broken, meaning they just they won't try anymore, that's a totally different animal. But other than that, the body hasn't forgotten how to heal. It hasn't given up. There are just things in the way of it doing so. So those are the two things that make us sick poison and malnourishment with a hat tip to aging and trauma. Okay, but let me drive home this point about the importance of detox with another visual. So during the presentation, I showed a picture of two fish tanks with one fish in each tank. So one tank had dirty water and the other had clean water. 

 

So the question on the slide was how would you treat a sick fish? Pointing to the one in the dirty tank. In theory one, about treating a sick fish, one in a dirty tank, you have a lot of different options. So different ways you could treat this sick fish. You could medicate it, right? I mean, this look at that fish. His hormones are probably not balanced. He probably has low T, right? Poor guy. Let's let's give him some testosterone. Uh, or maybe this uh fish is in need of some supplements, right? He's his his hormones need to be balanced some other way. Maybe we could give him wild yam and a multivitamin. That'll balance his hormones. Or you know what? 

 

This is it's probably his fault. He's probably eating too much sugar. That's why he's sick. That's why his pancreas won't work. We just need to put this fish on a diet. He's probably consuming too much sugar. Or it could just be that it might just be this fish is lazy. Let's get this guy an exercise routine. Make the guy swim laps. I mean, look at him. He's just sitting there. Time to get in shape, buddy. Or you know what? We could biohack this fish, right? Let's put some red light on the tank. Maybe put a penth mat under it, give him a new electrical current, maybe a resonance machine, that'll perk him right up, right? Or you know what? This can't be this poor guy's depressed. 

 

Look at him. He's just moping around in the tank. Let's get this fish a therapist. He just needs a few sessions with the shrinks, but it's probably all in his head anyway. Do you see the insanity of that? Or or here's the other option. We could clean the tank. Option two. In case you didn't catch it, you are the fish. The system prefers that you never address the source of your health challenges and instead endlessly chase your symptoms of being poisoned and malnourished. With poisons just resulting in more malnourishment. Do you see it? That's the game. 

 

But if you clean the tank, this is where it gets fun. Guess what your endocrine system does? Thank you. I can breathe. Which hormones do you need more of? Okay, I can help with that. I can do that. That's what happens. Guess how much more beautiful your endocrine symphony becomes with a clean tank. Am I making sense now? Okay, so let's summarize our first principles here. Let me state it this way: you can't dry off while you are in the shower. So translated. 

 

You can't heal yourself while you are still poisoning yourself. You have to figure out where the poisons are getting in you. And one of the ways they get in you is the is the form of chemical monkey wrenches called hormone therapy. So you have to get, you have to turn off the flow so you can heal. And you also have to, while turning off the influx of poisons, you can also heal, you also can't heal rather, while your body is still full of poisons. Meaning we all have to deal with the poisons that are already inside us, tucked away in our tissues. 

 

So I'll circle back to that concept in just a little bit. But think of it this way: if your exits are clogged and the public works department has been gummed up, you can change your diet, you can swallow all the pills, and you can try all the hacks. You can put good food in a dirty system, or you can clean your inside so your food can finally nourish you. How's that for simple? Okay, a little sidebar here. So I want to talk to healthcare professionals for a second, or at least help you talk to them. 

 

So interestingly to me, I found more than once, I've never really lost this argument. No one has ever said to me, Christian, that doesn't make any sense. Yet I'll hear some doctors, for whatever reason, especially hormone specialists, and they'll readily admit that endocrine disruptors are real. When asked about causal factors, sometimes they can point them out better than I can. They know about the chemicals, the heavy metals, the PFAS, and preservatives and plastics and estrogen mimicking chemicals in our environments. 

 

But very few of them will ever talk about detoxification. And often they kind of poo-poo the idea as if it's somehow riskier than all the medications they're prescribing. So I'm only left to speculate about why that happens. But I think the reason is they avoid the topic is largely because they're in such tight professional handcuffs and they're not trained in detox. They're trained in pharmacology, they're trained in pathophysiology, they're trained in spotting clusters of disease symptoms, naming them with Greek or Latin, and intervening with a drug. 

 

They weren't trained in healing or nutrition for that matter. They were trained to appeal to authority. They were trained to wait for science, whatever that means, to expect double-blind placebos on things that pharma would never pay to study. And so detox and healing are outside their scope of practice. So they either wait for the oracles at pharma and the regulatory agencies and the testing laboratories to tell them what to do, what standard of care is. Thinking is strangely not something doctors are trained to do. And as soon as something gets outside their scope, it seems like they become nervous or scared to think. I guess that's why so many of them just roll over during COVID. 

 

They either tend to stay silent, or since they are conventional, they just throw shade at the idea that maybe we should learn how to clean the body out of all these heavy metals and hormone-disrupting chemicals. So I've seen doctors and nurses do that enough time. I genuinely don't know whether to give them a tongue-lashing or feel bad for them. So if you are a doctor listening to this, please learn how to help people safely detox. Get creative if you have to. Find a way to make healing part of your scope. Make it a niche if you want. Yes, there are a lot of gimmicks out there. 

 

Boy would I know that. But you didn't survive medical school because you're stupid. Use your intelligence to learn this practice. If you want to have a conversation about it, reach out. I'm happy to talk. I don't know everything, but I'm doing my best to turn healthcare on its head, and I'd love to learn from you and teach you what I know too. We can compare notes. So hopefully by now you know I don't bite. Okay. Sidebar over. 

 

Back to the reality that the path to healing is to undo toxicity and nourish the body deeply. We all have a boatload of toxins in us, as I have covered in other episodes. Most of us have worms in us and don't know it. So how do you clean the tank? How does a fruitful healing journey start? Okay, this is the part where it's hard to do justice in an audio format. So I'm going to give you an abridged version of what I covered in the webinar so you can see, and but you can go see, look for that presentation in the show notes if you want to see it. So let's get a little more tactical here because I want to inspire you with how this works. 

 

Health begins or ends in your gut. Detoxing and healing first starts with optimizing your digestion. If you're trying to go after your hormones first and you haven't addressed your digestion, you're going to be chasing your tail. If your gut is distended and leaky, if you can't disassemble your food and absorb your food, everything else is secondary or tertiary, i.e., downstream from that, especially including your hormones. So the first thing you have to do to heal is clean out and optimize your digestive tract. You have to get the tube rebalanced, to get the tube humming. 

 

To do that, we remove layers of impacted feces. If you're overweight, you're impacted. Even if you're not overweight, there's a good chance you're impacted. We can start, after that, we just start to gently beat back overgrowth. We dislodge plaques and biofilms. We bring in a deeply nourishing diet, which usually involves a mix of good quality plant and animal foods. We diligently work to repopulate the gut. That doesn't mean just swallowing a bunch of probiotic pills either. 

 

We help you diversify your microbiome so they can do their thing and reduce your susceptibility. As their communication gets better, you heal even more. So after we heal the gut, then we focus on your liver and gallbladder. And there's a lot I could say here, but let me give you two fascinating physiological nuggets. Your liver is your body's major detoxification organ. It helps you filter so much trash out of your body. One of the ways it filters toxins is by building a stone around anything it can't break down. So normally all the time we just pass these little gravel-like things through our gallbladder into the digestive tract for elimination, and that happens without our conscious awareness. 

 

But in an impacted system, especially if you're constipated or if you're eating a low-fat diet, these stones can get backed up and can eventually clog the gallbladder, which, if you've had gallstones, you know how uncomfortable that can be. So, though there are different methods for cleansing the liver, but the short version is you clean it and you rest it and you repeat that. And with each time, healing gets faster and easier because your GI tube is efficient, your liver function is improved, and then fasting is another great example of a detoxification process your body can run. 

 

And there are a lot of different ways to fast, but in the right scenario, fasting is one of the deepest forms of cellular cleaning you can do. So relevant to this episode, fasting also resensitizes your hormone signaling. So if you I have a whole episode about fasting, if you want to check it out, it is episode number nine. 

 

Okay, so that's the short version of what I covered in more detail in the webinar. If you want to heal your body, fix your food, heal your gut, cleanse your liver and your gallbladder. Do those things, give it time, and focus on lifestyle rhythms that keep you clean. Once you understand this basic physiology of what's actually going on in your body, once you get familiar with a handful of basic tools, you can completely change your health profile in a relatively short period of time. 

 

Okay, so with what I've covered so far, I want to help you see seven other ways your doctor likely misinterprets your symptoms. And you'll see how this repeatedly ties back into the topics of hormone or why so-called hormone experts think everything is a hormone problem. So to set the table for this section, I just want to step back for a second and ask, what are symptoms? Again, we have to work from the right principles. Well, symptoms are your body communicating a need. Your body does not present symptoms because it's bored. It's like I don't have anything else to do. Oh, I'll give her a backache. Maybe let's, I don't know, just give her a hot flash just for kicks. No. 

 

Symptoms are your body communicating, letting you know that it has a need and it is on us to figure out what it needs. If you don't listen to your symptoms, if you ignore them or suppress them with a hormone or any other drug, your body is going to communicate to you and present you more symptoms until you listen. Eventually the bill comes due and your body will force you to pay attention if you wait too long. So, side note, there's probably somebody on here who needs to hear this. Your body is not your nemesis. It is your ally. It is actually fighting for you. It is not fighting you. Despite everything you've ever done to it, all the late nights and abuses, perhaps, it's still showing up for you. It's doing the best it can with the scenario you are in. 

 

And sickness is your body's feedback that it's overburdened and it needs to detoxify. So remember the fundamental principle everything your body does is directed toward healing. Okay, with that said, here are seven other ways medicine misinterprets your symptoms. The first one is tumors. You may have heard of lipomas, those are little fatty deposits. Or little bumps that are just under the skin. Most commonly they're found on your midsection. They're like a little hard ball and they're often tender to the touch. Another example of tumors would also be cysts. They could be visible on your wrists or other places. More for ladies, you could have cysts or fibroids in your ovaries. And of course, there are cancerous tumors. 

 

So let me give you a contrarian theory alert here. Dr. Tom Cowan is where I learned this one, but it makes a lot of sense to me. He sees tumors not as a disease, but as the body's attempt to contain and isolate harmful material it can't otherwise eliminate. Think about what I just talked about regarding the liver. It builds stones around things that can't break down. Could it be that things like parasite eggs and parasite parts and heavy metals that are in liver stones could also be something your body is building a stone around or a tumor around. 

 

What if tumors represent an intelligent response of the body to prevent greater systemic damage? Now, Dr. Tom Cowan actually uses the analogy of a lily pad and or lily pads in a lake. He says if you have lily pads in a lake, it's not a clean lake, it's dirty water. And lily pads are nature's way of scooping up toxicity into pads so it can encapsulate the toxins and break them down and keep the water from becoming so full of filth that nothing can live there. Different plants, as many botanists know, absorb different types of toxins. Nature, like our bodies, is built around cleaning and repairing itself and promoting life. So, as you can imagine, that understanding of tumor, tumors certainly reframes cancer from a disease attacking the body to the body's attempt to protect itself from an overwhelming toxic burden. 

 

That is a different way to look at it. So Tom Cowan goes on to say, I'm quoting him here, physical toxins are obvious, but toxic thoughts, toxic emotions, and unprocessed trauma from childhood or adulthood are equally real burdens on the system. And these non-physical toxins can be as damaging as physical ones, disrupting the body's energy pathways and normal functioning. Fascinating, right? That's a very different way to look at something like tumors or cancers or cysts. Okay, so think back a few minutes ago when I talked about the risks of blank hormone therapy. Cancer was mentioned several times as a possible risk of taking hormones, and I only mentioned a few of the hormones. 

 

Hormones and cancer are not separate topics. Your body uses hormones to, among many other things, help regulate your detoxification process. Maybe throwing a hormonal monkey wrench into your system to suppress a symptom is more than a bit short-sighted. Maybe shifting your body's delicate endocrine balance could cause other processes to not run as smoothly, and maybe having free-floating toxins in your system could force your body to try to encapsulate toxins with tumors. Maybe that's why cancer is one of the risks of taking hormones. Maybe tumors are your body's last-ditch effort to save you. Food for thought. Okay. Second contrarian alert here, another minority opinion. I'll start this one with a question. Does an intelligent system attack itself? Maybe, but not likely. It wouldn't be very intelligent. So the second way your doctor may be misinterpreting your symptoms is the entire category called autoimmunity. 

 

There's this notion that the body's confused and that the immune system has started attacking various types of otherwise healthy tissue. And we've been told that your immune system misfires, it got its wires crossed, it doesn't know what it's doing. And depending on which tissue it attacks, we have a different name for the disease, but it's always the same problem. But what if that perspective misunderstands what the body is doing? Maybe the immune system knows exactly what it's doing. Maybe it's actually performing surgery at a cellular level. 

 

Maybe it knows with surgical precision where the toxins are and where the body needs support to clean out the cells. So here's a question. Does surgery feel good? Especially without anesthesia? Okay, let me try to reframe that. If you roll your ankle and it swells up, is your immune system active? Yes. 

 

It cordons off the area and the immune system goes in to clean up all the cellular debris that just spilled out into your interstitial fluid. Does the ankle feel tender to the touch while that's happening? Yes, it does. Does it like pressure? No. Would it appreciate it if you started doing jumping jacks? No. Obviously. So when the immune system is busy cleaning up a mess, that part of the body tends to be tender. Same thing happens in your lymph nodes and your neck. They're tender when you're fighting a cold. Your body uses pain to let you know to slow down because the immune system cells are at work. Now, would that be a good time to take a hormone like prednisone to manage an autoimmune condition and tell your immune system to knock it off? 

 

If your body needs inflammation to heal, do we want to take anti-inflammatories? By the way, the giveaway is in the name when it comes to medication. So look past the weird names they come up with for their potions and look at the classes of medication. They're suppressors, they're antis, they're blockers, they're inhibitors, they're monkey wrenches in our physiology intervening, saying your body doesn't know what it's doing and we need to fight its battles for it. This paradigm of autoimmunity makes way more sense to me. And I mentioned this one with a degree of confidence because I've helped people reverse autoimmune conditions. 

 

I didn't do it by talking to them about their immunoglobulins or by hacking their DNA and forcing it to make a different antibody or run a different antibody program. I didn't treat or cure anything. I didn't even attempt that. No, I just helped them clean their body out and rheumatoid arthritis and grave disease and MS symptoms slowly fade. I just helped people learn how to not have their blood be so sticky or how to make their water wetter or learn what foods bring healing and teach them how to use movement medicinally. 

 

If we help people get back to the basics, any number of autoimmune conditions can just slowly fade away because the body starts cleaning itself and the immune system can focus on other matters. So maybe so-called autoimmunity is more about clusters of various toxins that have an affinity for particular types of tissue, and maybe helping the body clean itself and give the immune system the tools it needs to perform the surgery would be what heals the body. It's a different way to look at autoimmunity, isn't it? Okay, the third way the medical system misinterprets your symptoms. What if excess weight and obesity is the cure for your health condition? 

 

What are you talking about, crazy man? How is weight, gain, and obesity the cure for anything? Good question. Okay, here's a question in return. Does your body want to store excess toxins and excess food? No, it doesn't. So why would it do that? The short answer is because it has to. It is protecting you. What is the primary place your body stores toxins? You may remember me saying this. The primary places your body stores toxins are your fat cells, your connective tissue, and your liver. That's where most of the toxins go because your body can't have them gunking up the blood. So let me ask you this. Have you ever been frustrated with low calorie dieting? 

 

Okay, weight loss is calories in, calories out, right? No, it's not. If that worked, there would be very few people who wouldn't have figured out how to do that. Why doesn't low calorie dieting work? Or why doesn't it work sustainably? Hello to the biggest loser. Have you seen the contestants a year after the show? You may have noticed that with each successive time you try low calorie dieting, it's less and less effective. It's my thyroid, it's not functioning well, my T3 and T4 are insufficient, my body's fighting me. No, it's not. 

 

Why does low calorie dieting not work? Well, for one, your brilliant endocrine system knows how many resources are available and how fast it can go through them before you have a much bigger problem. And you might be thinking, look at me, I'm overweight, I've got plenty of resources right here in my midsection. Why doesn't it use those resources? Great question. Beyond resource management, the second and possibly bigger reason you don't lose the weight is because your body knows the exits are clogged. Your purging systems are backed up. If you're a man and you look pregnant, your body knows it would be too dangerous to let the contents of your fat cells back into the blood. That's the reason you've been storing the toxins in the first place. If it emptied the fat cells when your exits aren't working well, it would poison you. 

 

You would become septic. So your body holds on to excess weight to protect you. And in that scenario, it doesn't matter what the calorie count is. That's an irrelevant data point. Keeping you alive is more important. So you can take all the thyroid hormones you want, or you can try to take your hypounderperforming thyroid and make it run faster. You can blame your ovaries for not having the right estrogen balance. But in reality, low calorie dieting, especially repeated low-calorie dieting, is a trauma state for your endocrine system. It's not fasting and it's not healthy eating. It's this confused middle state. 

 

Now, on top of your toxic load that you have, the body also has the stress of working with starvation-level resources. Does that make sense now? Okay, so here's a tip. One reason you probably don't want a medically supervised diet is because they think of you as a caloric chemistry equation. And after that doesn't work, they bring out the scalpels, but I digress. Okay, the point here is that your body will do everything it has to to keep the toxins out of your blood. 

 

It will engorge your fat cells to overcome a toxicity problem if it has to. And until you get your digestion optimized and your liver can clean house, your body will keep the weight on. Excess weight and obesity are your body protecting you from your own choices. Your thyroid, tired as it may be, is not your problem. Okay, the fourth way the medical system misinterprets your symptoms. Here's one of the sacred cows of medicine, actually. What if high cholesterol is also your body's way of curing you? What? Okay, let's just let's step back again and look for the first principle. 

 

Why does your body, your liver in particular, make cholesterol? You can't eat enough from your food, so your body has to make it. So there's several reasons it does that, actually. So it first is it does it to repair tissue. You can't make a new cell anywhere in your body without cholesterol. Cholesterol is like a waxy substance. It's about the consistency of a soft candle, and it gives your cells rigidity so they can resist pressure and not collapse on themselves. 

 

So when your cholesterol is high, guess what? That's also a sign of. So if you're taking a statin to interrupt your body's production of cholesterol, what else are you also interrupting? Answer your body's ability to properly synthesize your hormones. Let me let me say that again. By blunting your body's cholesterol production, you're diminishing your endocrine system's ability to regulate your functions. Your endocrine system needs cholesterol. Do you want to stop your body from making it? Your body also uses cholesterol to synthesize vitamin D, and you can't do it without it. 

 

So some people believe vitamin D is actually a hormone, but that's a different conversation. Many believe people also believe that everyone is low in vitamin D, and so do you want to stop your body from making the raw material your body uses to make vitamin D? Once you start interpreting high cholesterol as a sign that of your body's attempt to heal you, instead of shooting the messenger like statins do and assuming your liver is just dumb and it's out to ruin your day, it's bored, and it's just making cholesterol to clog your arteries. Once you realize that's not the case, what you can say is, wow. 

 

Thank you for my wonderful liver, for protecting me, for helping me heal. Let me see what I can do to reduce the amount of cholesterol I need to make. By the way, statins are a double insult. Like all drugs, statins poison you and they rob you of nutrition. Statins deplete CoQ10, which is intimately important for wait for it, heart health. But I'm not a doctor, so maybe you can ask your doctor to make it make sense. 

 

Okay, the fifth way the medical system misinterprets your symptoms. Have you ever wondered why is there no cure for the common cold? I mean, think about it. All these different interventions the system has, and we can't even cure the basics. I got the sniffles, a sore throat, a cough. Why can't we make it so the body doesn't do that? There's no cure for the common cold because the cold is the cure. By the way, this applies whether we're talking germ theory or terrain theory. So if you have no idea what that means, that's fine too. Because the point here is the same. Whether you believe a microbe has invaded you or that your insides have just hit a tipping point of needing to be aggressively cleaned, the outcome is the same. 

 

Your immune system knows you hit a susceptibility tipping point, and it needs to turn on the public works department so it can cordon off the area and clean up the parts of your body that need cleaning. And so we keep this top, this uh webinar episode on topic. Your thymus gland in particular is part of the cleanup crew, right? It's part of your endocrine system. Friends, the cold is the cure. Why would your body use a fever? Why make your nose run? Why expel things through your lungs? Why sweat? Why would your body create sticky sinus congestion to cordon off an area? Maybe it's protecting you and cleaning house. Maybe it's trapping microbes and debris to munch them out and get or munch them up and get them out of the body. 

 

You could think of catching a cold more like an unscheduled detox. That's how you know your body burden bucket is full. Your stress burden bucket is full. And your body is telling you that all the normal pathways are backed up, and I can't keep up via normal means, so we're gonna have to borrow resources and energy from other processes so I can clean you out and keep you alive. In reality, you didn't catch anything. You exceeded your toxin storage capacity. So your body turns on fever and mucus and rash and nausea and diarrhea to clean house. That's what it's doing. It's emptying you out of the things that are poisoning you. 

 

And if you if your body didn't give you a cold, if it didn't start a cleansing response and turn on the immune system bells and whistles and clean up the mess, you would become septic. So thank you to my wonderful immune system. Or, you know, you could take a hormone to suppress your immune system. You could take something that suppresses your ability to create congestion, or take something that blunts your ability to produce a fever. But your body's not turning on those processes for no reason. Take good care of it, and it will take good care of you. 

 

Okay, misinterpreted symptom number six. Some of you have been patiently waiting the whole time for this one. Hot flashes. What in the world is going on? Again, you may have spotted a pattern here. Let me ask you a question. What happens at menopause? Something changes. By the way, I learned this one from Dr. Jennifer Daniels. If you want to check out her book, The Lethal Dose, you can find this nugget in there. I'm just passing on her insight here. So, what changes at menopause? Ladies, you know this, you stop bleeding every month, right? Women have the advantage of a built-in rhythm of a special detox they do every month. 

 

At menopause, you discontinue that natural rhythm of detoxification. And so your body finds a different way to offload the toxins. It was used to being able to just eliminate them in your monthly flow. Now it doesn't have that. So it turns on a different pathway and gives you a whoosh of heat to sweat out some of the toxins. That's why some women sail through menopause and other women don't. The more toxic you are, the more likely you are to get hot flashes. By the way, male or female, you can lose a lot of toxins, including heavy metals, via your sweat. Okay, so let's review. You could take some sort of hormone concoction to try to stop your hot flashes, but we already looked at where that goes. You could just assume it's your dumb hormones or not balanced, you need some sort of cream or potion. 

 

You got to find the right mix of DHEA or pregnanolone or progesterone or estrogen. But if you do that, you're right back to playing whack-a-mole and hoping you can get the right the amounts right to make the hot flashes stop and not give yourself some sort of awful cancer or other disease in replacement of that. Or so, as the cure for hot flashes, you could level up your detox game. So think of it this way: you can put your body through a detox and sweat on your own terms, or like getting a cold, you can have your body dictate hot flashes to you and turn on the oven when it needs to open a detox pathway to keep you alive. Okay, that's number six. 

 

Last one misinterpreted symptom number seven, erectile dysfunction, another brilliant marketing scam. This one originated when Pharma was testing a heartburn medication, and it turned out that one of the side effects was erection, and they were like, yeah, we gotta figure out a way to market this. But first, they had to make up a disease before they could launch a whole new category of medications. 

 

Well, we all know what an erection is, but the question here is are erections a vital function? No. Similar to a woman having a period, an erection is not a vital function. Most women know if her body fat gets too low or if she starts doing way too much cardiovascular exercise, her period will just stop. She won't be able to have one. Or at the other extreme, instead of not bleeding regularly, a woman might have an experience of heavy bleeding, which is how you, which, as you now know, is one of the ways your body can leverage the ability to detox via the blood. 

 

Okay, but back to the men. We also have a built-in barometer of our health and it hangs between our legs. Guys, if you can't get it up, you don't have erectile dysfunction. You're simply not in good health. Erections are a luxury, not a vital function. They are far down the list of vital function. And if other processes take precedent, your body won't do it. If you can't get it up, you have a symptom of poor health. And that your symptom might be that you're just overweight and out of shape, but it also might be that you're stressed, or maybe you're even feeling emasculated. 

 

Any one of those things could do it, but what you're experiencing isn't a sign that we need to externally balance your testosterone for the rest of your life and play roulette with side effects. You can do that. Does it work? Yeah, you'll probably be able to get it up, but at what cost? That's the question we don't often ask. So, guys, you can take a hormone for a made-up disease or you can work on your health. Detoxing is important, but let me do one better for you, gentlemen. In addition to auditing what might be blunting your testosterone, here's how you can get your testosterone back up. Go do manly things. Create the stimulus your body uses to produce the hormones you want. If you want to feel like a man, act like one. 

 

Pick up some heavy things repeatedly. Go kiss your wife aggressively. Make a big decision. Go buy a gun, hunt something, get a punching bag and hit it. Study martial arts, or at the very least, don't be a whiner. Nothing about whining is manly. It's playing the victim. And if that's you, stop it. Don't do it. If you want to feel like a man and get your man parts working, then act like a man. Eat fatty meats and don't drink soy lattes, by the way. Okay, so there you have it. 

 

There are seven ways that, in my opinion, medicine misinterprets your symptoms and thereby mismanages your health. Again, those are a lot of contrarian opinions, but at least they're logical ones. What I'm teaching you won't sell a lot of drugs, but it does have a much higher chance of helping you correct a problem instead of masking it. Okay, I figured out maybe as I was wrapping up, or like, think, how do I end this? I thought maybe the best way to wrap up an episode like this is just to tell you a story and try to make it personal. 

 

So during the webinar, I showed a picture of one of my favorite stories of 2025, or at least favorite stories so far. It's about a woman named Carrie, and some of you may have seen her before and after photos on our website. So I met Carrie right before Thanksgiving of last year. She was experiencing very heavy menstrual bleeding daily. She had been through the medical escalation ladder. She had a surgery scheduled for March. That was the earliest they could get her in. So they were going to mutilate her ovaries so she couldn't bleed anymore. And as you might imagine, she was desperate. 

 

So her dad had actually been a customer of ours for a while, and he said, you know what? I've got something I think might help you. So I met with Carrie. And in addition to heavy bleeding, Carrie also had a raging lifelong eczema. She had terrible energy. She was overweight. And she's a mom and a teacher. And she was barely able to function or make dinner for her family. So she would crawl to the finish line of pretty much every day. And so if you go to our homepage at healingunited.today, you can see the two photos of her taken uh three months apart. 

 

And I didn't even ask her for the photo. She was just so delighted with what we did for her that she sent me the photo. So in three months, Carrie lost 36 pounds. Her surgery was canceled. Her eczema was gone, except for just a little bit left on her forearms. Her energy came back. She even told me, I don't know what to do with myself after eight o'clock in the evening anymore. I'm not used to being awake at this part of the day. All we did for her was three things. We changed how she ate. We put her through a personalized cleanse, and we taught her how to fast. That's it. She had good support from her family, but three months was all it took. Were her hormones unbalanced? No. That's what her doctors told her. 

 

Were her ovaries in need of mutilation in order to stop the bleeding? No. She was toxic and malnourished, and we taught her how to fix those two things. And her story is really it's a testament to what's possible when you create a plan based on first principles. And remember the timeline. She pulled off her transformation during the holidays. So if her body is capable of that, friends, what are you capable of? I call this podcast deconstructing conventional because I feel like we need a sane way to audit what we've come to call conventional. 

 

Somehow, the tools of cut, burn, and poison, and in this episode we've largely focused on poison, somehow those tools have wrestled control of the term conventional. But once you see the system for what it is, you can't unsee it. Which brings up a philosophical question. Do you want to participate in a system that systematically extracts your life force? That is the system's plan. It's to get you to become a quest a customer for life on one of their favorite tools, and or one of their favorite tools to do that is hormones. 

 

Now, there's nothing wrong with creating lifelong customers, but there's something morally bankrupt about making people chemically dependent while you accelerate their decline for profit and trade the original set of symptoms they had for another and another and another. In its current form, the healthcare system is a model that operates by slowly weakening the human body. 

 

They want you sick but stable. They want you tired but functional and alive enough to just keep showing up for the next round of symptom suppression in their recurring revenue model. If the system worked in our favor, it would look for root causes, not symptoms to suppress. If it worked in our favor, the system would teach us how to manage our health and we wouldn't be customers for life. If a prescription worked, you wouldn't need to refill it every month for the rest of your life. 

 

Do you want to participate in that business model? Okay, I'll wrap up this episode with one more example of linguistic sleight of hand that the system uses to obfuscate who they really are and what they do. So my suggestion is we stop using the term medical doctor. That is redundant. Medical is the Latin word for doctor. So instead of calling MDs doctor doctor, let's refer to them as they really are, allopathic doctors, ADs. I imagine the system prefers medical because they'd rather we not get curious about the origins of the word allopathy. Allopathy comes from two Greek words, alos and pathia, which mean other suffering. 

 

The method behind conventional medicine today is that it adds a different form of suffering to the suffering you already have. That is the business model. Because their potions can precisely and temporarily interrupt our body's ability to communicate symptoms, they've hoodwinked us into believing that their potions heal us. They've cast a spell over our culture and fear of the unknown and deference for the pronouncements of experts is how they keep the trance going. 

 

From one symptom to more symptoms, from one pill to many, from pills to injections, from injections to surgeries, and from surgeries to the burning and removal of our body parts. It is an anti-health pro-revenue model of its extraction. And all it takes is an honest look at our health statistics to see the beast for what it is. In my opinion, outside of trauma and emergency care, the system needs to be scrapped. The business model is anti-flourishing. It is an ethically constipated profession that uses repurposed poisons. It mocks informed consent, and nearly every intervention violates the oath to do no harm. It is by definition harmful. 

 

Again, the word allopathy means you inflict other suffering. If you've really been paying attention, you may have noticed that the word allopathic was recently redefined on Wikipedia. Don't look at the definition, which those in power love to tinker with to suit their agendas. Look at the root meaning of the word. Look at the fruit the system has. Look at the disempowered mindset in this system produces. You will know the system by its fruit. So my question to you is: do you want to choose a different way? Do you see the man behind the curtain now?

 

 Do you want to learn how to clean your body and heal your body? Do you want to stop wasting time and money feeding the system? Friends, the average American goes to the doctor between 280 and 300 times in their life. Think of all the time you can get back and the stress you could skip when you opt out. Yes, you will have things to learn, things we should have learned in high school health class. But do you want to become so confident with natural remedies that you can cut the cord and never look back? If so, maybe we should talk. We teach people how to heal and stay healthy and we bless them to go live the life they're called to live. 

 

So for transparency, I do promote things I believe in, but I don't sell any lab tests or any supplements. People pay me for my expertise. And let's just say I don't have the hammer nail problem. My toolkit, our toolkit, is wide and deep. And it is our delight to help people see a wildly different model for health care. Your body is the healer. No doctor is coming to save you. 

 

Your hormones are not unbalanced. You can learn how to earn good health and how to keep it, or you can let the system manage your accelerated decline for you. The choice really is yours. You do not have to obey a doctor. Doctors and to be fair, coaches are fallible people too. But very few people in healthcare are teachers. So if our approach resonates with you, I'll put a link in the notes where you can see and compare our programs, and you can even book a call to chat if you want to. 

 

So in the meantime, if you want to under better understand our method, I'll put a link in the show notes where you can see a 36-minute presentation I did a few months ago called How to Reverse Any Chronic Illness in Three Steps. In that video, I get into much more detail about both the method and tools we use to help people take back the reins of their health. And as you can imagine, it's an approach that works from first principles. It's also a high-touch approach where we personalize your path to healing based on your health history, your budget, and your lifestyle. 

 

Good luck getting that from the Allopathic Systems. Okay, friends, that's all I have for you today. I told you it was going to be a little punchy. If you like this kind of content, it's a fraction of what I'm going to cover in the new book I'm writing. So if you want to stay up to date on the progress of the book and join me on future webinars where I tease out some of the content, then you can join the mailing list. You can find that in the footer of our website at healingunited.today. Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.