Episode 109: Aging Gracefully with Dr. Flora Whaple

Speaker: This is episode 109.

Speaker 3: Welcome to Wellness in Every Season, the podcast where we explore the rich tapestry of wellness in all of its forms. I'm your host Autumn Carter, a certified life coach turned wellness coach, as well as a certified parenting coach dedicated to empowering others to rediscover their identity in their current season of life.

My goal is to help you thrive both as an individual and as a parent.

Speaker: I have with me, Dr. Flora Whaple, and I am super excited for this conversation. She has a Medi spa and she has quite a journey Got her here. Like I said, she is a doctor MD, doctor. She worked in the ER.

She was starting to see signs of aging. She did not like where she was going and what really resonates for me because this is a wellness podcast. She does work with injectables like the normals, but she does work with ones that are non toxic.

And that's what's exciting for me. Welcome, first of all.

Thank you for having me.

Please tell us about your journey, and then we'll dive into the things that I'm excited for that sets you apart. You also do hormone replacement. Like you do things that so many of us are searching for, and we don't want to be putting toxins in our body.

So tell us your journey,

Speaker 2: all right. Okay I'll try to give you like the 10, 000 foot overview of what led me to the type of medicine I do now. And then we'll just dive into whatever seems fun.

So like you said I am a physician. I did emergency medicine trauma for 15 years and absolutely loved it. It was a wonderful career. I was so blessed to have it. But I started to notice as time was going on that all of the medicine that we do in what I call traditional medicine and I have tremendous respect for my traditional medicine colleagues.

They save thousands of lives every day. But traditional medicine is all very reactive, right? It's disease focused. You wait for something horrible to happen, and then you try to fix it. And then something horrible happens, and you try to fix it. But every time you make that, Cycle with your patient, you lose a little bit of ground, right?

You almost never can get someone back to where they were. Hopefully something bad happens, you try to get them back to here, as close as you can to where they were, but almost never can you truly get them back to where they were. And so it's, you're fighting this losing battle with your, side by side with your patient.

You're just, you're losing ground all the time, right? Because everything you're doing is a reaction to something else. Over the course of my 15 year, hospital medicine career, I started to feel really frustrated by that and that I was not really serving my patient, just slapping a bandaid on and sending him out the door was not what I wanted to do.

And so about 15 years ago was when I first started to get interested in regenerative medicine. The words I would choose to use is synthetic versus regenerative. So the idea of putting something into the body, that's not necessarily native to the body in order to get a response versus telling the body how to regenerate and repair itself so that you get what you want, but you get it from the body's own tissue and it just makes more sense to the body.

It tends to look much more natural and it tends to be much safer as well. So that's the field that I have gotten into and so the wonderful thing about aesthetic and regenerative medicine, which is really my field now, is that when someone comes in, they leave better than they were.

Each time they come in, they can leave a little bit better than they were, fresher, stronger, revitalized, whatever it is that their goal is. They can be better when they leave than they were when they walked in the door. And that's not something you can do in any other branch of medicine.

I'm just so happy to be, sharing this with my patients. It makes medicine fun again.

Speaker: I didn't realize that you worked in this for this long. I'm much older than I look. It's the same amount of time.

But no, no way.

Speaker 2: Yeah again, I'm almost 50. I've had time for two careers, so it's,

Speaker: yeah, it's been a while. And you have two kids, if I remember right, from our conversation before this.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: From a couple weeks ago. And. You were having a hard time actually being able to be there, and having your schedule, and Oh.

How far in advance, and your husband is also a doctor,

Speaker 2: yeah. It's, I think every woman who has a career can relate to this, I think that all of us in our generation were raised on this idea of you can have it all. You can have a career, you can have a family, and then you have a career, and you have a family, and you realize, no.

The way our society is set up, you cannot have it.

Speaker: You can for a very short time

Speaker 2: or you just burn yourself, at both ends. I remember the day that I knew I had to leave clinical medicine and start my own practice.

The day I was working these 72 hour shifts in the hospital, which were, there's all kinds of things you can say about 72 hour shifts, but they're not a good idea. But anyway, that's the way it was done. Back in those days, and I came home from the 72 hour shift. And of course, the house is a mess.

The kids are crying. My husband's crying. Everything's a disaster, right? And I'm putting my daughter to bed. She was six or seven at this time. And she says, Mama, when I grow up, do I need to be a doctor? Because both of us are doctors,

and so that was the only thing that she really seen, and I said, No, baby, you don't need to be a doctor, you can be whatever you want. Tell me why you ask. And she's Oh, She said, Mommy, I don't want to be a doctor. I'm like, okay, tell me more about that.

She says, Oh, I don't want my kids to be sad when I leave all the time. And it was one of those moments where I'm just like, that was really honest, and that was the moment where I was like, I can choose one thing that's most important. There can only be one thing that's most important and that can either be your career or it can be your family or it can be your own wellness, but every person chooses one thing.

And I was like, That's it. It's my kid, and so that was when I knew I had to leave the hospital. And, luckily I was able to find this branch of medicine that I really enjoy that, I don't work 72 hour shifts anymore and I'm able to be there for my family and I'm also able to be healthy because it's not healthy to work those hours.

Speaker: Let's just start with sleep. You're getting more sleep and already that helps and then everything else is a huge bonus.

It sounds like you put your wellness first once you were able to transition out. I know it was a bit of a slow transition. It had to be. Took a bit, but we

Speaker 2: got there.

Speaker: Yeah. And I had some questions. So how does this work for those who want a natural look?

How does it work for those who want more of a natural look?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Generally speaking, when I talk to my patients about the aging process, there's lots of ways you can define it, there's lots of ways you can talk about it. The way that I personally define it for myself is I say, the aging process has four pieces.

It's your skin aging. You're muscular aging, so structural and volume aging, and then you're metabolic kind of hormonal aging, aging on the inside, when, we're talking about aesthetic treatments, the treatments get broken up into which one of those causes they treat. So your skin is a remarkably regenerative organ, and we take this totally for granted.

Like your skin is the only organ in your body that can regenerate, like that has a hundred percent ability to regenerate. And we just take it for granted, right? You cut your arm, new skin grows, right? And you're just like, eh. But if you cut off someone's leg or you took out a kidney and they grew a new one, that would be like the most astounding thing, right?

But skin has this ability to regenerate, and from that kind of flows everything that we do in regenerative medicine. It's the idea that if the skin has the ability to regenerate, but it's lazy. Like your muscle, your skin is lazy. Your muscle has the ability to regenerate, but unless you put it under some kind of stress and convince it that regeneration is necessary, you won't do it, right?

You won't build a six pack lying on the couch. You gotta go to the gym, put the muscle under stress, convince the muscle that you need this, you need it to turn on this ability, and it will. Skin is the exact same way. When we talk about regenerative medicine for aesthetics, part of what we do is we put the skin under stress, small repeated stresses over time, like going to the gym only for your skin.

And when we do that, we can convince the skin, Hey, we need to regenerate now and the skin will do it. So the regenerative medicine of the skin, we can do that with lasers, with microneedling, with skin boosters. There's so many different ways we can do it, but we never need to put anything artificial into the skin.

The skin has the ability to regenerate fully on its own. The same thing is true when it comes to structural aging. Structural aging is loss of volume in our face, right? So when we're young, when we're, teens and, Don't appreciate how gorgeous we are. We have all this volume that sits like a Nike swoosh across our cheekbones and it holds our whole face up and back.

And that structure is what gives us that triangle of youth and that tissue starts to break down, doesn't regenerate very well over time. And so over time, as we lose that volume, we get this hollow, fold. Universal sign of aging, right? The traditional way to deal with that is to use fillers, right?

You go in, you inject a filler in there, it recreates the tissue that you've lost, and it pins everything back up, right? And it works pretty well, but it's not, it doesn't move exactly like your tissue normally moves. When it's not done well, it can be visible. There's some problems with it.

What we're starting to be able to do now in the regenerative sphere is to do what's called bio fillers. So it's this idea that we can draw your own blood, take your own plasma, and basically create a designer filler that's unique to your own body, that's your own tissue, that's your own plasma that has all these wonderful growth factors in it.

We inject it across there like we would inject filler, but it's your own body's. Growth signals, and it does the same job, and it lifts everything back up and it brightens the skin and everything is beautiful without there having to be a foreign substance in there. So if someone is interested in what I would call regenerative aesthetics, the sort of keywords you want to look for.

You want to look for lasers, you want to look for microneedling, you want to look for skin boosters, you want to look for biofillers. Those are going to be the things that are going to be able to get you a lot of those effects without using anything except for your body's natural abilities. Thanks.

Speaker: That is amazing,

Speaker 2: I talk so long,

Speaker: No, it was towards the middle end, oh, how long does this last compared to the typical fillers?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. And not quite as long, because again, the reason why fillers last is because your body doesn't know how to break them down. And so the last thing is both a plus and a minus, right?

Last thing can be good because you can get that look you want for longer. But if it doesn't look great, you also have to

Speaker: wait longer.

Speaker 2: It's always, I always tell my patients duration can be a double edged sword. Think about it for you. So generally speaking, biofilters are going to last more like six to nine months as opposed to a year.

So it's a slightly, not quite as long, but because the tissue they regenerate is, tends to be a little healthier and stronger, each time you get it, your tissue gets this little sort of growth factor boost that makes it a little healthier and stronger. So in my mind, I feel like even though you might have to come in a little bit more frequently, the benefits outweigh that, in my opinion, there are other people who have other opinions and that's wonderful too but yeah, a little, not quite as long as a filler.

Speaker: I think it also it's the whole every body is different as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah,

Speaker: but we all can think of people who it's obvious they've had fillers done and don't look so great.

Speaker 2: When you have too much room, it doesn't always look exactly like it should. And that's the thing, that's a problem in our industry.

Speaker: And one thing that I want to talk about for those who are listening, who are there like the fillers, that type of stuff, regenerative, that's not quite my thing. You also do hormone.

Speaker 2: Talk

Speaker: to us about hormone and tell us your journey, your personal journey, and then what you do with this, because this is really cool.

Speaker 2: A hundred percent. One thing that I've always really felt about aesthetics, is the goal should never to be to drape beautiful skin on a sick body, right? That's not, if you're doing that, you're missing the point. The point is what you said earlier. I want my patients to look as good as they feel and feel as good as they look.

Healthy skin, healthy body, beauty, vitality. All of that should go together, right? It should never be just one or the other. And so frequently, because our medical system is so fragmented, you get one, but you don't get those things together, and you really need them both. So I, had this experience I think is very common.

I think that many women in their 40s have this experience. I was 42 or 43, early 40s, and I was gaining weight. I was about 35 pounds overweight. Every night I was waking up at between midnight and two. I'd be awake for a couple of hours. Zero desire for my husband and he's a wonderful man, but just I was like, get away from me.

I'm tired all the time. I would wake up tired, and I lay in bed and I remember this so clearly like laying in bed, just woken up and Oh my God, I have to get out of bed for 18 hours before I can back into bed. Like I have to go through this whole day before I can get back.

And all I wanted was to stay in bed. I felt rundown and exhausted and brain fog, just all the things that go along with perimenopause. And, looking back on now, it's so clear that I was hitting perimenopause, but the time I was just like, I'm just falling apart. What is happening to me?

So I went to see my primary care doc, who's a smart doc. I know her personally. She cares. She tries hard. We trained at the same program, And, I went to go see her and she did a lab panel. She's no, all your labs are normal. I was like, okay, I'm gaining weight. I can't sleep.

I'm tired all the time. I feel like crap. My hair is falling out. There's something I don't feel like myself. This is not me. And she's Flora. She's you're a woman in your 40s with kids. This is just how it is. You're just getting old and this is just how it feels.

And I was like, I love you and I respect you. And I know why you're saying that because we trained in the same way. And that's what we're trained in traditional medicine is that we don't treat until there's a disease. But I was like, I can't accept that.

It's just downhill from here. I can't accept that the rest of my life is just gonna be horizons closing in like this, and I'm just gonna be getting more diminished and smaller every year. I was like, I just, I can't accept that. So that was what led me to to doing a hormone replacement fellowship, because what I learned through the course of that fellowship is that, as we get older, what happens is not that our bodies lose capacity.

Our bodies lose their instruction. If you think of the body like a factory. And so you take food in, right? That's the raw material. And there's all these machines inside the factory. That's your DNA and your genes. And it does all the different things with the food.

And the output is that your body is able to do all these different things, right? As we get older, it's not that the machines are disappearing. You have all the same genes you used to have. Your DNA has not changed. Your DNA does not change over the course of your life. You have all the machines are in that factory.

It's that our hormones tell those machines what to do. They turn them on and they turn them off when they need to be turned on and off. And as we start losing our hormones in midlife, and women's just like coming off a cliff, like men is this gradual decline, but women's just like boom, right? As we lose our hormones, it's like someone's walking into this beautiful factory that can make all these amazing things, right?

And just tearing pages out of the instruction man. Just one at a time, just tearing them out. And as that happens one machine will stop working right, and then another machine starts working right. And I have this picture in my mind of just these gears slowly grinding, and becoming unable to function correctly, and just grinding to a halt.

And the thing about hormone replacement and hormone optimization is, when you give the body back its instruction manual, It starts working again, and that's astounding. So I went from being, 42, 35 pounds overweight, joints hurt all the time, couldn't sleep, brain fog, exhausted, to now I'm almost 50.

I'm no longer diabetic. Lost the weight. I'm training for an ultra marathon this summer. I am Stronger and more fit than I've ever been in my life. My partner is very happy. I have energy to get through the day.

My hair came back, it just, it felt like turning the lights back on. And so that it's been an incredible journey and so happy to be able to give that to my patients because it's so rare, in midlife, 40s and beyond that your horizons can open, so much of life is like this closing down and to be able to give my patients back this ability to open the horizon back up and say, look, your body is capable of whatever you want it to be like we can build whatever it is that you want.

We can build it together. Medicine. So that was my journey. And I just. I love sharing that with people. I do.

Speaker: That's amazing. You were a diabetic or?

Speaker 2: I was almost diabetic, wasn't quite there, but everyone in my family becomes diabetic.

Everyone in my family gets diabetes in their forties. The thing with women especially is diabetes. Estrogen is one of the most important molecules that helps us metabolize sugar. And when we start to lose our estrogen, we start to become what we call insulin resistance.

Our blood sugar starts going up. We start gaining weight. This is why women start putting on weight like in their mid forties. My patients come in, they're like, I do all the same things. I go to the gym. I eat well. I do everything that I did in my 30s, but I've gained 15 pounds.

Why? And the answer is usually people say just they just throw it out to be, oh, your metabolism is slowing down. True. That's true. But why? The reason your metabolism slows down is because your hormones are the drivers of your metabolism. Both estrogen, thyroid, testosterone, you can get way into the weeds with the science here.

But generally speaking, your hormones tell your body, every time a calorie comes into your mouth, your hormones tell your body, should we store that calorie, or should we burn that calorie? Should we make that fat, or should we make that energy? Unfortunately, when we have high hormone states, like when we're in our teens, 20s, early 30s, we know what happens to those calories, right?

They turn to energy. Like we were partying all night. We can eat a pizza. We can do it again, right? We don't need

Speaker: sleep. Who cares? We don't need to ever

Speaker 2: sleep, right? And, but when we lose those hormones, the default setting is to turn those calories into storage, to turn them into fat. So when we say your metabolism is slowing down, what we mean is you're losing your hormonal support.

It's not inevitable, and it can be corrected, and it can be treated. First I went on GLP 1s, lost 20 pounds. Then I stopped the GLP 1s, got my hormones together, and I don't need the GLP 1s anymore because now my metabolism just burns at the correct rate. So I can eat what I want, and do what I want, the same as I could when I was, in my late 20s and didn't know how good I had it.

Speaker: Here's my question, because that is something that my husband is looking into, I've always had a faster metabolism, I eat healthier too. So he is looking into the GLP 1 and I'd never heard of it until I mentioned it and we were talking about it right now because we had a date right before this.

And my question is, do you also work with men and what does that look like?

Speaker 2: 100%. Yeah. You may have noticed that I truly believe in what I'm doing. So yes, I treat everybody because I think everybody should get the benefit. But yeah, typically, what happens to women is happening to men too.

It just tends to be more gradual. Testosterone is the main driver, for men. And it goes down gradually over time. Whereas women, it's like this. But the same thing happens with women. And so I do, incorporate the GLP ones into my practice. I think they are the drug of the century.

I think they're absolutely wonderful. I like to put people on GLP ones first, and let's take off 20, 30, 40 pounds. Great. Now it's time to work on your metabolism. Now let's get your muscle back up. Now let's get your energy back up. We think of fat as this thing that we carry around, right?

But fat is an inflammatory organ. It's an inflammatory endocrine organ. Fat sends out signals to your body that create disease for a variety of reasons. Again, we can dive into the weeds on that, but especially visceral fat on our tummies, our bellies. It's not just a thing we carry. It's not just a backpack.

It is causing disease. As a physician, my first responsibility is to take away the threat to my patients. Yeah, I use the GLP 1s all the time. They're wonderful medications. We have tremendous success with them. And then, after we do the GLP 1s, after we get rid of that stuff that's causing all that inflammation, and all that damage, to the vasculature and such, then, yeah, hormones, absolutely.

So yes, short answer. Yes, I treat men. Yes, I do GLP ones. I think they're wonderful. I give them to my family. They're great. No, I'm kidding. Like here it is for everyone. Put it in the water.

Speaker: Especially because your family is diabetic. Totally makes sense. And my thing that I visualize my degrees in applied health, so not as much schooling as you.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: Of visceral fat is it's the fat that is deep in there in between the organs. It's in the way and it's making it harder. Your organs have to enlarge to work properly. Just think you have extra stuffing in the way of your organs moving and functioning properly.

Speaker 2: And it's angry stuffing. That's the thing. It's not it's also stuffing that's trying to kill you. So yeah, no, visceral fat is I have a personal I get angry about this real fast, like I view it as it is the enemy, and so I think a lot of people there's this idea, I think, in, in sort of popular culture and you go online and stuff that like Ozempic and Wegovy, these GLP 1 medicines, that they're for vanity, and it's I tell my patients this all the time, I'm like, listen, my patients come to me because they want to look good in a swimsuit and have more sex, and that's great, everyone should look good in a swimsuit, everyone should have as much sex as they want.

But the reason why I do GLP 1s, that's why they come in, but what I get from it as a physician is when they leave, they're healthier. Even if someone's only 20 pounds overweight or 30 pounds overweight, that's still inflammation that's stacking up inside their blood vessels inside their liver.

And, someone does not need to be obese to benefit from these drugs. Someone does not need to be diabetic to benefit from these drugs. Anytime we can reduce that inflammatory fat load, that patient's going to be healthier over time. And I think that's a wonderful gift, to be able to, and they also, you can join

Speaker: And wait we lived through the nineties and the fat shaming. It's still there, but Oh my goodness. Have you ever watched old interviews? It's cringeworthy. I don't recommend it trigger warning, but another way to think about this is we're talking about this from more of the medicine side.

You have an increase of cancer. You have an increase of different things because it's the storage. You're storing bad things along with good.

Normally I try To have a very small meeting before we have an interview, but we just wanted to meet separately. So you missed out on that conversation, but she talked about how for this It's the hormone replacement that you can do mostly virtual, but once a year you have to be in person, correct?

Speaker 2: For my practice specifically I'm licensed in Colorado. So the law is I have to see everybody in person once a year in order to be able to prescribe. So if there's anybody out there who wants to be a part of our hormone replacement program,

We're in Colorado.

Speaker: Start there.

Speaker 2: We have a couple of locations. We have two in Denver, one in Boulder. We're in the process of opening up our fourth location. And restore medical spas is our practice. But it's our people in Denver who want to come to us.

Just come on in. If there's people who are in different states, we can do a consult online and then if there's something you decide you do want to move forward with, then you come out to Colorado for your first intake appointment. It's a two hour long appointment. We draw all the blood in the universe.

We test every lab because I'm a huge nerd and I love testing things. And then, we sit down and we do this deep dive into your history, your lab work, and we come up with a plan. And the is not. to treat disease. The goal is to optimize your health. And those are, those are slightly different things, right?

The goal is to say, okay, what are you at risk for? And how do you want to feel? And what do you want to be able to do five years from now?

Speaker: After the accident.

Speaker 2: Exactly. It's precision prevention. It's not just prevention, but it's precision prevention for you.

Speaker: Still have the scalpel.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess so. Mentally, I always have it mentally. But then we develop a care plan for it. And then, send the medications in, and then we check in every sort of couple of months and just see how you're doing, what's going on, tweak this medicine, tweak that medicine.

And it's very cool medicine. I find it takes a little while to work because, If you think about it, replacing something is much faster than rebuilding something, right? If you have arthritis in your knee, a surgeon can go in, they can replace that knee in two, three hours, right?

But if you want to rebuild that knee with, physical therapy, exercise, nutrition, all of these things, it takes six months to a year, but it's your knee. And it will last a lot longer. And it's more native to your body. And the same is true with hormones. Like you're not going to feel better immediately.

You're going to start to feel better within a month, three months, you're going to be like, Oh, I know where this is going, and then by six months is where you're like, yeah, okay Now i'm starting to feel really good. It's a slow gradual thing because we're inducing the body to regenerate and that's It takes time, but man, it's worth it though

Speaker: you said you had your own vitamin line

Speaker 2: Yeah, we do.

You know it's both. Definitely prescription medicines are a big piece of it because I'm a physician. So I love that. But nutrition is also a big piece of it. Because, if you got this beautiful factory and every machine is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing and you're putting crap in the factory, it's gonna be hard to.

Get a good output, right? We test, we do a metabolic panel on our patients. We test for all, vitamin deficiencies, all those kinds of things. We have supplements that we both carry at house. And then if, someone needs something that we don't carry, we have lines that we recommend. So yeah, nutrition is a huge piece.

Always. It astounds me how frequently I find nutritional deficits in people in the U S like in med school, I was trained. And this, of course, 100 years ago, but I was trained that in the developed world where people have access to, all the food they want, that there was no such thing as nutritional deficits, like in the developed world, and that was what we're taught.

And now that I'm actually in this, branch of medicine, I'm testing people for nutritional deficits all the time. It's amazing how we can eat a calorie rich, but nutrient. deficient diet. We're all getting all the calories we need, but a lot of us are not getting very good nutrition.

And I did not know that. So yes, nutrition, huge. We check that we treat that a hundred percent.

Speaker: In school, it was called a nutrient poor. And then there was, I still can't remember the word. I should've looked it up when we were talking, but basically that we have an excess of calories, but it was like in a nutrient way.

I can't think of the wording, but it didn't make sense to me. Then it finally clicked.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this interesting idea that you can be starving in the presence of excess, that your body is not getting what it needs, even though it, like we eat food and our body feels full, but it doesn't mean that our body is actually getting the nutrition it needs.

And that is exceptionally common. I was astounded how common that is.

Speaker: I love that you can do virtual.

And you do a lot of in person as well, especially because you are in an area that people want to visit. You are so known for hiking, for skiing, for hot air ballooning, anything outdoors.

Speaker 2: Anything outdoors. Yeah, come see us go skiing.

Speaker: It works.

Speaker 2: As well.

Speaker: The extreme things. She's doing an ultramarathon, so obviously she lives in Colorado, right?

I'm kidding. Is there anything else that you want to tell us that you do or that you want to leave with us?

Speaker 2: I think it just comes back to feel as good as you look and look as good as you feel. I think that everybody should have the ability to unlock all the vitality that their body has to offer.

Whether that's aesthetic or whether that's metabolic or whether it's all of it, everybody should look as good as they feel and feel as good as they look. Unfortunately, our traditional medicine system is not really great at that. It's really great. If you got appendicitis.

We've got you, but when it comes to optimizing your health, sometimes you have to look outside the traditional system for that. And that's what people like me are there for.

Speaker: That's where I've been since my car accident

Speaker 2: all about.

Speaker: Love that. What do they call it? My brain. Anyway, the flare ups are very frustrating, so I totally understand. And when we are desperate. We're going to look everywhere. So we might as well be looking in the right places. So I love this conversation. There was one more question that I had that I just remembered.

So when you are looking at panels, there are certain when I get my blood work done, there are certain things that come back where it's I'm in that range, but I'm just, on either side of the range. And they're like, Oh, it's still fine. After the doctor looks at it, it looks like you are a lot more meticulous about it because you are, you said that you are finding deficiencies that others have caught.

Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. You have just put me on my soap box because this is one of my pet peeves. All right. So now you're going to get a lecture.

Speaker: Now another hour.

Speaker 2: Do you know how they generate the normal range on lab panels?

Speaker: Something I actually don't know.

Speaker 2: The way you generate a normal range is whatever hospital system, or if it's Quest or LabCorp, whoever it is, what they'll do is they'll take a couple thousand people, all ages, all health statuses, and they'll draw that lab. And they'll get a bell curve distribution, and they draw lines and they say, Okay.

If you're within, 95%, so 5 percent above, 5 percent below. If you're within 95 percent of that's considered normal, okay? Now, you gotta remember, that has nothing to do with what's optimal.

Speaker: And I know that for different races, different races are more susceptible to different things and their levels will be different.

And same with genders. Yeah. I

Speaker 2: mean, genetics plays a huge role. Exactly. And the thing that bugs me though, is if you've got, so let's take testosterone, for example, because that's a well known molecule. The normal range for testosterone is anywhere from 250 to about 1200. That's a huge range, right?

So the question is not, are you inside the range? The question is, where do people feel and function the best, right? The lab ranges are set up to catch horrible disease. They're not set up to say what is optimal inside this range. So for example, men feel and function the best when they're between about 900 to 1200, right?

They feel and function the best in the top quintile of that range. The lower you get, the sicker they get, the worse they feel, right? And the same is true for a lot of labs. When I went to my primary care doc, all my labs were in the normal range. However, normal is not optimal.

Normal and optimal are not the same thing. My thyroid was in the normal range, which is from about 1 to about 4, but people feel best between 1 and 2. Mine was about 3. Again, that's normal, but that's not optimal. So there's a lot of nuance you can get inside those labs. Just because someone says your lab work is normal does not mean that there is not something that can be done to make you feel better.

It just means you don't have disease,

Speaker: that's amazing. So tell us,

Speaker 2: Oh, it bugs me.

Speaker: Tell us your website because at this point I want people to be able to click.

Speaker 2: I do. Just the GLP ones and testosterone makes such a difference for men. I think men accept this slide, they won't reach out necessarily for themselves. And so they just become grumpier and heavier and just sink into the couch, a lot of times men won't reach out like women, a lot more times they'll try to get help, but men just hunker down and take it,

Speaker: it's embarrassing to talk about. We have a friend who struggled through that and he's now getting the shots and a cream and all of that. And insurance only covers one of them because it's been a nightmare. Did you know that married men live longer because of that?

Because we nag.

Speaker 2: Because they're wives.

Speaker: Remind your spouse that,

Speaker 2: Most of the men in my practice, I see the wives and then once the wives start feeling good, they're like, oh, honey, you're going, I don't want it, you're going.

That's how I get, 90 percent of my men married to, patients, female patients, which is, why they live longer. There you go. So our website is www.restoremedicalspa.com, which is R-E-S-T-O-R no E because we're very hip medical

if you're interested in aesthetics, there's a whole area on that. If you're interested in hormonal placement, if you go to wellness and the functional medicine tabs, you'll find all kinds of videos and stuff there. We got FAQs, you can watch so many videos of me talking, it'll make you just.

Sick, but yeah,

Speaker: and you also have vitamins that you have tested. We had a whole vitamin discussion before this. I have my own very strong opinions about vitamins. How They should be regulated because we can find lead in them, arsenic, all kinds of things that we are not signing up for. Sometimes the vitamin that we think we're buying, it's not even actually in there.

So you have made sure that your vitamins stand the test of time. They are the right things.

Speaker 2: So what you

Speaker: recommend

Speaker 2: Yeah, we third party test all of our stuff because you're absolutely right. Like the supplement market right now is just absolutely the wild west. Because there's no external body that regulates it.

So if you're going to buy a supplement, you have to make sure that whoever manufactures that or whoever is selling you, that has taken those steps to make sure it is what they say it is. And so third party testing, usually you can look on the bottle and it'll say if it's third party tested or not.

And third party testing is where you agree, you make a contract and you say, I'm going to send, one bottle out of every third batch or, whatever it is to this independent lab. And the independent lab is going to verify, yes, I have what I say. I have purity, concentration, all of those things.

And that allows you to say that you've been third party confirmed as somebody who's not affiliated with you, who's not your employee, it's a verifiable third party lab that tests for purity and concentration of all your stuff. I would not take a supplement that wasn't third party tested because good lord, who the hell knows?

Literally, you just don't know what you're taking.

Speaker: No, it's crazy.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: Thank you so much. And if you are looking for her information, it's in the show description. Just the link, the hyperlink is right there. You can just easily click it. Save this, share this with other people, because there are so many people who are in my shoes where I want to look younger.

I don't like that I'm aging. But I want to do it in as natural a way as possible, or at least natural looking. I don't want to fill my body up with a bunch of toxins, but I don't know where to go. So you just fell into my lap and it's amazing. Thank you. I'm glad I could. And I know.

I had Vaginal ablation done tmi for some of you, but I no longer have periods This is best thing ever and I feel like I have so much more life back because I had really heavy really long periods So I am dreading the perimenopause and the menopause And I'm already starting to get hot flashes. I hope that it's still from the stomach bug a couple weeks ago and not from perimenopause.

Speaker 2: Right?

Speaker: Thumbs crossed all over the cross. This is really huge. I know people that have struggled through this. I watched my mom struggle through this and taking different vitamins and trying to figure out what was what. Medicine failed her so she was trying just do it on her own and my stepdad was helping her through a lot of it and she was taking whatever he told her to for a while because she just couldn't anymore so I love that there is somebody who has practiced medicine, she knows what she's talking about. She's researched it. She's trialed it on herself. She's been doing this for 15 years. She didn't start this yesterday. She's opening her fourth practice, which says something, and she can start by, do you start with even doing a virtual before somebody?

Speaker 2: Usually, if someone's local to Denver, then they just come on in. but if we were going to be treating someone virtually for hormone placement We would do an online consult first and then if they feel like this is, our practice is a good fit for them and then we'd have them come out for the full evaluation.

Speaker: Perfect. Check out her website. I'm going to be going there, so you should join me. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this episode and I hope everybody else did. If any of you have questions after the fact, you can reach out to her or reach out to me and I can forward them to her.

Let's get your questions answered. This was an amazing opportunity and thank you so much.

Speaker 2: It was absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.

Speaker 4: Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode. I am your host Autumn Carter, a certified life coach dedicated to empowering individuals to rediscover their identity, find balance, miss chaos, strengthen relationships and pursue their dreams. My goal is to help people thrive in every aspect of their lives.

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By visiting wellness in every season dot com slash programs one last thing to cover the show legally I am a certified life coach giving general advice So think of this this more as a self help book. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only I am not a licensed therapist So this podcast shouldn't be taken as a replacement for professional guidance from a doctor or therapist If you want personal one on one coaching from a certified life and parenting coach, go to my website, wellnessineveryseason.

com. That's where you can get personalized coaching from me for you. See you in next week's episode.