Halle Berry: Why Women Are Being Failed at Menopause

I'm sitting there and I just can't go. It's like, it's the most excruciating pain I've ever felt.

So the first thing, of course, you do, you go to the doctor.

He said, well, this is the worst case of herpes. I think I've seen. So my guy, Van, is downstairs in the car because he had driven me to the doctor's office.

“I get in the car and I'm looking at him and I'm like, hey, so you got herpes?”

So then an hour later my doctor calls me and says, no, you do not have herpes. I said, then what is it? And he said, I don't know. And he hung up the phone. I realized that what I was suffering from was drive a giant syndrome because in

Perry menopause over 50% of women get dry everything. Dry eyes, dry mouth, and drive a giant. And all of those were dry on me. Nobody had ever mentioned the word menopause. I was so ignorant, Mark, I thought I would skip it.

As a physician, I learned almost nothing about menopause in medical school, except that it happens. There's 60 million women in America who are in menopause. And they're not being well taken care of by the healthcare system. I had to be loud.

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You can try it for yourself at bioptimizers.com/hime and use promo code hime and to check out to say 15%. Welcome to a special episode of The Doctor Hime and Show of Recorded, Live. At the Udomonia Summit, Udomonia is a three day gathering designed to elevate human health and potential.

Here, over 100 leading scientists, clinicians, and wellness innovators come together to share the most advanced evidence-based strategies for longevity and well-being, and I'm thrilled to bring you a conversation from the heart of this transformative event. Feel to be here, feel to have Hallie here, feel to talk about something that is kind of a taboo subject and mostly ignored by medicine menopause.

As a doctor, I've come to learn that most of women's health problems and most of women's problems in general start with men. Menopause, menstrual cramps, mental anxiety, so, why is that?

“Men in general, but the truth is that as a physician, I learned almost nothing about menopause”

in medical school, except that it happens, and that we should give premen and provera, which, unfortunately, have a lot of side effects, and are not the best hormone replacement therapy. In physician, I had the privilege of working in a place called Canyon Ranch, where for almost 10 years, I treated a population of women between late 30s and late 50s, so I really got

to see what was going on in the whole continuum from reproductive life to perimenopause to menopause and after, and I just realized how much suffering there was, how much unnecessary suffering there was, and how neglected it was.

There's 60 million women in America who are in menopause, and they're not being well

taken care of by the healthcare system, and it also realized that it's sort of accepted that women have to suffer, but they have to have PMS, you know what that stands for? Punish my spouse.

form called PMDD, which is, PMS does work disorder, bad, menstrual cramps, or dysmenoria, heavy bleeding, irregular cycles, infertility, dysfunctional uterm bleeding, endometriosis, so many different problems that have come to me as just a normal part of being a woman. They're not. There are a result of things that are eminently treatable if you understand how to get

to the root cause, and, you know, why I'm thrilled to be here with Halle as because she's had an epiphany that this was an area of health and healthcare and medicine that was neglected, that she was a victim of, I would say, and made her life and her second act of life about addressing this on a cultural level, on a healthcare level, on an empowerment level for women,

which I think is amazing.

So let's give it up for Halle. So with that, with that prelude, tell us about your origin story with this because your America's sex symbol, right, and menopause is not thought of something that's sexy. So, you know, you were going through a lot of healthcare change, and you got misdiagnosed, you were told you had a very embarrassing condition that ended up being not actually true,

and it was something else, and you began to realize how much you were failed by medicine. So tell us about that story and how y'all got started in this. But when I was 54, I was like, "What did you look great?" Not when I was 54, nobody had ever mentioned the word menopause. I was so ignorant, Mark, I thought I would skip it.

“I thought whatever that thing is, I'm going to skip it, right?”

I got myself off insulin, I knew that food was medicine, and I thought, "I'm going to sail through whatever the hell that is." Well, no, we all are going to face it if we're lucky enough to get there.

But finally, I met, you know, I've been like you married and divorced a few times.

I'm a relationship expert, I've been married three times. Me too, in divorce three times. There you go. So I finally met my man, right, and I knew that this was my man. After three divorces, you kind of know when you meet your person, I met my person, and

we were having the best sex two people could have. Everything was functioning the way it should. We were on fire, and I thought, "Wow, this is the best time of my life. We have a year of great sex, all of a sudden at the end of that year, we're having great sex.

I wake up in the morning, and I cannot go to the bathroom. I'm sitting there, and I just can't go." It's like, "Oh, it's the most excruciating pain.

“I've ever felt, and I thought, what the heck is going on?”

I looked down there, it's blown up, it looks like something.

It's never looked like before, and I thought, "My God, what has happened to me?"

So the first thing, of course, you do, you go to the doctor, go to the doctor that I've known a long time, and I say, "What is happening here?" And he's like, "Well, he looks up there," and he says, "Well, I know what this is." And I'm like, "You do, what is it?" He said, "Well, this is the worst case of herpes.

I think I've seen." And I'm like, "Herpes!" What do you mean herpes? And not that herpes is a bad thing, but you think that's something you want to tell a girl, like, you got herpes.

I said, "Oh my God," he said, "Yeah, it's herpes. I'll do the test. It'll come back in 72 hours, but yeah, I'm pretty sure this is herpes." So my guy, Van, is downstairs in the car, because he had driven me to the doctor's office. He's down there in the car, I get in the car, I'm looking at him, and I'm like, "Hey, so, you

got herpes?" Oh God. And he's like, "I don't have herpes, I'm like, "No, you do have herpes." Because I have herpes now, and I don't have herpes before I knew you, so you have herpes." And he's like, "That's a fun conversation."

It's a fun, a very fun conversation with the love of your life over a year. And I said, "No, you do," and he said, "No, but he's ever told me that." So I'm like, "Well, let me be the first to tell you, man, you have herpes." And now you've given it to me. And so we're in the car, we're driving, and we're just mad, and we don't know what to say

to each other.

“So I say to him, "Look, you need to go get a test.”

We need to see what's going on here." So he runs right to the doctor. He gets a test. So for 72 hours, as a new couple, we are just not that herpes is the end of the world, because it's not.

But you should tell each other that. So we had issues with trust. We didn't know who had the herpes, who gave the herpes. So 72 hours, he gets his results back first. He doesn't have herpes.

So he's looking at me like, "Well, looks like you gave me herpes." And I'm like, "Tah, I think I gave him herpes, but how did that happen?" So then an hour later, my doctor calls me and says, "I said, "I know, I know I got herpes."

And I said, "I don't," he said, "No."

“And this was my aha moment that changed the second act of my life, because he said,”

"Then what is it?" And he said, "I don't know." And I thought, "How can you not know? You're the doctor." You don't know what this is, and he said, "I truly don't."

And that's all he said, and he hung up the phone. And I sat there with myself, and with my new man, and I thought, "This is not okay. I have to go on my own mission to figure out what this is and educate myself." And that's when I realized that what I was suffering from was drive a giant a syndrome, because in Perry Menopause, over 50% of women get dry everything.

Dry eyes, dry mouth, and drive a giant. And all of those were dry on me. And that's when I realized, if I had this little information, and I argue, I've had one of the best doctors, and he is one of the best doctors in California, but it's not as fault.

It's been educated. He had a chapter of studying the Metapausal Body and Medical School, one chapter, half a day, right? So he didn't know not his fault really at the time, but that's when I realized I had to use my platform, use my voice, I had to not only educate myself, but I had to start

to be able to help other women understand, and I had to break open this conversation. I had to start talking about it. I had to be loud, right? I had to be unafraid to tell this very kind of embarrassing story, because we had to start the conversation, and I had to make women okay to talk about it as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Kelly. What's your name? And by the way, when I said I was going to have this conversation, all the people in my

life that helped me manage my career, they all were like, oh, I don't know if you want to go talking about menopause, that's going to like just end your whole shit. And I thought, well, then my whole shit will end. But I'm going to talk about what's important to me as a woman, and I'm going to talk about this time of my life, and if my movie career ends, I'm not a good one.

It's okay. It's okay.

I think people always appreciate people who are authentic and tell the truth, and that's

what matters. One of the things that happened to my career as a doctor is that there was a big study called the Nurses Health Study, which was an observational study that showed that women who took hormones did better, and it was not proving cause and effect of correlation. And turn out the women who were doing better were just healthy and generally went to their

doctor. They exercised they ate better. They took their vitamins. They didn't smoke.

“And that's why they had better health outcomes, not necessarily because they took”

the hormones. When they did a big study, it was a billion-dollar study commissioned by Bernie Healy was the first head of the NIH as a woman, called the Women's Health Initiative, and that study showed. But that's that he showed that there were some adverse outcomes for women who took hormones,

like heart attacks and strokes and increased cancer risk. And all of a sudden, boom, overnight, it was, I remember, I was thinking it was 2002, the study came out, and overnight, there were 50 million women in the stock hormones, which was a disaster. The single worst thing I think to happen for women, it was a disaster, just last week, there

was a big change. You want to share about it? FDA lifted that black box warning, and I think that's one of the best things to happen in women's health.

But the truth is, they're still going to be those women that are still going to be afraid,

because that stigma is still alive and well, and women are holding onto that. It's still, I feel, going to be very hard to get women to have faith that these bio-identical hormones will not cause them cancer, really.

“I think it is, and I know this, because since that happened, I still talk to women and”

they still say, "Oh, but I don't know." So my question is, what will it take for us to really start doing our own investigation and advocating for ourselves and deciding for ourselves what's right for us that do understand the mental-posal body that can give us real information, so that we can make those educated decisions, not just what our friends tell us that their mothers have told them, but how

do we come into 2025 and really start investigating for ourselves? That's what we have to study. It's really important. I think the thing that has to happen and probably won't happen at scale is because the way to go coming to make money is they modify a substance and make it proprietary and then

they can pat it and then they can make money from it. What you said was bio-identical, I mean it's what nature made. You can't pat what nature made like a vitamin or a hormone and so it's cheap and it's not going to make the money and so they're not going to do big studies on this and that's a fundamental problem.

This the government takes a hold of this and does this and they have very different

of inflammation and cause high-track list rides, increased cancer risk, it's pregnant

“and that's what it stands for, pregnant, marriage or in-prem or in.”

That's how they get it and provera is the other hormone they use which is a form of synthetic progesterone that actually makes women gain weight, have facial hair, and be depressed. So it's not a lot of fun but the bio-identical ones don't do that. Can you talk about the kinds of symptoms that women suffer from you mentioned, natural dryness, you mentioned dry eyes, dry mouth, but there's a whole host of things that

happen or can happen, not at everybody but what did you experience and what are you seeing in your company respin, which is really designed to help women through this process. It's a whole platform of education and support and coaching and hormone access to hormone therapy and doctors that provides a pathway where there's been none for women.

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skin from the inside out. Try today at bondcharged.com/highman and use code D are Mark for 15% off. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com/highman-Code-R-Mark. Exactly. What blew my mind when I started to do my research, they're over 100 symptoms that are now attributed to perimenopause and menopause.

“And I think the most common ones in many of you in this room are probably experiencing them”

the worst ones I have, of course, is dry everything. I have dry mouth and dry eyes. Doctors don't know. My rheumatologist tried to tell me that my drought dry mouth was show-grins disease. Why?

Because you had only studied the research that came back to him from men. And if I were a man, and I was complaining about the things that I was complaining about, probably would be show-grins disease. And he would put me on steroids for probably the rest of my life. I said no. And I said no. I do not accept this.

I do not have show-grins disease. I just didn't believe it. Another one of my doctors is I have dry eyes, which I suffer from. He has been my doctor for a while. My glands and my eyes almost dried up, because he could not say the word menopause to me. He said, "I can't tell Halle Berry. She's in menopause."

And I thought, "Then who's going to tell me you're my doctor?" We have to talk about this. So you see doctors can't even talk about it. So those are my major symptoms. I also had brain fog. You know, nothing's worse than sitting in a meeting or on a phone call or on the set. And I can't remember. I can't have word recall.

Right in the middle of a sentence, I just lose my whole train of thought. Night sweats up all night. You know, sleep deprivation is a form of torture. And we know this lady's wake up at three in the morning. We try to solve all the world's problems. We can't go back to sleep. But when we finally get to sleep, it's morning.

We have to get our kids off to school that we go into work. And we're like, "A bear!" And we're so angry and everybody's like, "Well, what the fuck is wrong with you?" "I've been up on that! You'd be this way too!"

You know, it just never stops. And I felt like I was all alone.

I felt afraid. And I thought, "I'm just getting old." And now I'm going to just shrivel up and I'm going to go off to pasture.

“And nobody's going to care. That's how I felt very depressed.”

I felt that alone. And like, that nobody heard my feelings. And when I tried to talk to healthcare professionals, I was just told, "You know what? This is a part of getting old." That's all it is. You're in your late 50s. And this is what this is. And you just have to suck it up and deal with it. And that was not okay.

"No, no, we don't have to just suck it up. We deserve support. We deserve scientific information about what's happening with our body. We deserve a community of like-minded women. Because I've learned most of the things about what I'm going through through other women. Through the things that they've tried and what is worked for them and what hasn't worked for them. I've learned about all the symptoms based on

what other women tell me they're experiencing. I'm not experiencing these things. But I learned about frozen shoulder and all these are the itchy feet and itchy legs and ears and ringing in your head. Like I learned a little bit. And low libido. Well, yeah, had that too. But now I'm better. I got on some testosterone. I got found my libido. We don't have to, you know, sort of trail off into pasture. Like there are ways like we know that if you know the right things to do,

when you know better you do better, when you know the right foods to eat because food is medicine, when you know, you know, if hormones are right for you, if you feel comfortable doing that,

that can be a game changer. Like we have the right to figure out what works for us.

“I think that's really important because what you're hitting on is it's not just about”

home or replacement therapy and it respine you do a comprehensive holistic approach, which includes lifestyle, diet, exercise, stress management sleep, relationships, all the things that matter nutritional support. And you know, we don't really pay attention to that. And you know, it folks should help. We do deep diagnostics that help them and understand where they are home only, where they are metabolically, where they are nutritionally. And you can start to see

the patterns. And one of the things that I think, you know, I don't know if you focus on this much, but what I noticed when women go through this late 40s or early 50s transition is there's basically a whole set of hormones that go right. It's not just sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, testosterone, it's insulin. And women get increased belly fat. It's cortisol, which also has the menobelie. Menobelie. Menobelie. Yeah. Who's got the menobelie?

Menobelie. You pay fully. Yeah. And it's cortisol goes up. The stress goes up. And you're often in the sandwich generation, your careers peaking, your kids are in teenagers, your parents are older. It's like a whole, it's a whole pressure cooker. And then you get thyroid dysfunction, very common too. So you've got insulin cortisol, thyroid sex hormones, four different hormones that go right. And are all interacting to cause a lot of chaos. And they're all treatable. And

women don't have to suffer if you understand what to look at and what to test for and what to diagnose. And that's really why we created function, health and power women. And everybody to be able to access their data and figure out what's going on. And that's the beauty of function. I just did my function test. You guys sent someone in my house. I swear they took every ounce of blood out of my body. She said, I'm going to take 17 vials of blood. I said, excuse me. What? You want to know everything?

“She said, yeah, that's what I'm doing. But you know what thank God she did because I learned so much.”

I got back such a comprehensive report. And some things I think I already knew and some things I learned and it was really eye-opening. And what women can do if they can get their function report, they can bring it over to us at respin and we can help them. Function can help them make sense of what that means too. But we at respin can hold their hand to make sure they follow through with all of these protocols that can actually change their life and help them understand it.

Because some of us need to ask the same question like 10 times before we get it. And we understand that at respin. You know, some of it can be very confusing and it can be daunting and you really

need someone to sit with you and break it down until you finally understand it.

You know, can you talk, Kelly, about what are those lifestyle factors and things that women experience that cause hormones to go wacky? It often feels like it's happening randomly to you. But it's not. It's the effect of everything washing over your biology, everything eat all those things. Can you kind of break that down for us in what you're learning about the things that are actually causing hormonal dysregulation? It's not just about giving

hormone replacement therapy. It's about addressing the whole package. Yeah, you need so much. I mean, I've been on hormones now for almost four years and I can say that took me about 50 or 60 percent of the way. It's certainly in the beginning. You know, it helped me sleep a little bit better.

“I was a little less moody. I could remember things a little bit more. But it didn't just do”

the trick either. I had to realize that like you said, the hormones only were as effective as my body was healthy, right? So I had to change the way I ate. Being a type two diabetic, I used to be very much in the ketogenic diet. And I learned that at this time of my life, that was no longer working for me. I needed a little carbs. I needed to eat more fiber. I needed to have more protein. I used to, I've worked out my whole life. I was a gymnast. As a kid,

I couldn't do as much cardio. I didn't need as much cardio as I used to need to do. I now needed

to lift heavy heavy weights. And I never did that before. You know, that was not something that

I felt I needed. And now I had to change all that about how I was operating my everyday life. So I realized that this new body was the better version of myself. We often think, oh, we're getting

we're upgrading, we're spiraling into the best version of ourselves. We just have to know how to support this new body, this new place we find ourselves. And it's not as sickness. It's a natural life transition that just has to be supported by evidence-based therapies and information. Yeah. And it's also something like alcohol and nicotine. Yeah, bring it up. You know, it's also like alcohol and nicotine and caffeine and also can cause problems. So

you've got to pay to stop drinking alcohol. Yeah. That was really hard. Well, alcohol really screws up. Best Virginia. In fact, one glass of wine or alcohol a day increases one of those compressed cancer by 40% wine because it interrupts estrogen metabolism in the liver and increases estrogen levels. You literally can see rising estrogen levels in high estrogen can cause all these problems. And you sleep. Yeah. It can really mess with your sleep. We often think I'll have

a nice glass of wine and go to sleep. It'll put you to sleep, but it's going to wake you up at 3 a.m. Yeah. Exactly. So it's not worth it. Yeah. And so there's so many things that are involved and sort of understanding how to optimize your health. And there's also, you know, the risk of diseases.

“And I think, you know, the things like the short-term symptoms are important. But when we're talking”

about longevity and we're talking about having a healthy lifespan and living to 100 healthy years, it's more than just, you know, getting rid of hot flaxions or improving your sleep or batch on dryness. It's those things that include your risk of Alzheimer's and osteoporosis, which are, and Alzheimer's is, you know, effects well in far greater rate than men. So can you talk a little about the benefits there? In here's something. Yes. And here's something I learned to

that also blew my mind. We have hot flashes that's part of it. And so many people have said, well, it's just hot flashes deal with it. Like, get a fan and carry it around with you. Like,

what's the problem? Well, it's more than a hot flash, first of all, because every time you have

a hot flash, they're ramifications to your brain, right? And what I learned with Dr. Mackie, who's also one of our doctors over at Respin, is that every time you have a hot flash, you don't actually know you have a hot flash. Sometimes you feel the hot flashes, but sometimes we don't. And Dr. Mackie was doing a study out of Chicago, and she would hook women, women up to a machine, and she's able to measure how many hot flashes they have. This one woman that she was studying while I was there

with her, this woman thought she had high five hot flashes, but in fact, she had 50 hot flashes in a 24 hour period. And every time you have a hot flash, there's adverse effects to your brain, right? And so it's not just getting rid of hot flashes. So where we don't feel physical discomfort, it's really trying to minimize the hot flashes to protect our brain. And when I realized that it would hot flashes are not just hot flashes, then I really started to realize, oh, this is really

serious. And I never let anybody tell me anymore, it's just a hot flash, like, you know, just

deal with it. No, it's not as simple as that. And one of the things that we now understand is that there's a therapeutic window, right? After menopause, that's important to start home and replacement

“therapy or making hot hormone optimization therapy if you want to prevent Alzheimer's. So if you start”

when you're 65, it may not actually have the benefit. And the same thing with your bones, your bones and start to lose your bones, you know, even in your 40s and earlier, and that needs also a long-term support with hormone therapy. And if you don't protect your bones, we all know and you have an ox and you break a bone in your 50s and 60s, it can be lights out. Many women within a year of that are no longer here. Yeah, 50% of women who or anyone who breaks their hip are dead in a year. Yeah.

It's worse than getting a terminal cancer diagnosis. So, and that's a hundred percent preventable through strengthening, through the proper diet, through support with hormones. And, you know, let's talk a little bit about testosterone because that's a male hormone. So what are women doing taking testosterone? Are they going to grow most assures? Well, that's what I thought would do.

When I first started, you should take a little bit of testosterone. Like, I don't need

hair on my chest. No, I'm not going to do that. But, you know, that's the ignorance talking. Right? I didn't know. I did my research. And now I'm on a little bit of testosterone. And I'm telling you, it changed everything. I got my libido back. And I also got my drive back. There was a certain period of time when I felt very depressed. And I didn't even want to get out of bed. And I thought, oh, I don't want to go to work. I'm done with all of this. But when I started taking

a little bit of testosterone with my estrogen and my progesterone, I got my drive back. I got my

“there there back. Right? And it's really been transformative. Yeah. I mean, the only way to know what's”

going on is you've got a test. You've got to measure what's going on. Because some women are fine. Some women are not. And, you know, I found, as a doctor, practicing in this whole age group, you know, you want to be careful not to overload a one with too much testosterone because it can

out there that are, you know, FDA prove that are prescriptions that are formulated and are regulated is almost none for women. And so, you know, as a doctor, I had to kind of figure out how to use compounding pharmacies and create the right formulas. And, you know, one of the things I came upon was using clitoral testosterone drops that you apply two drops every night. And it has profound benefits. And I know this because women keep calling for refills. Wait, now, what is this?

Okay, you can talk after. No, about these clitoral drops. Yeah, it's amazing. And so, like, you don't

“have to have the full systemic effect. The key to hormone replacement therapy is it's got to be”

personalized. It's not like a one-size-fits-all. There's creams, there's drops, there's, there's laws and Jews, there's, there's all sorts of ways to deliver this. But it should be in the lowest dose possible to get the benefit. It should be topically ideally, not orally. And it should be, you know, for the right amount of time for what one woman needs. And sometimes it's long-term, but it's really something that has to be personalized. And again, most physicians have no clue

how to do this. And it's not like you can just look up in your drug prescription book and see how to prescribe this because it doesn't exist in there. So, you can look how to prescribe premen or premaera, but not not these formulations. So, it's a really interesting learning curve as a physician to try to understand this. And you know what else I think is important to talk about when we think about our sexual health and not only things like these chlorojobs,

“but I think as women, we have to start talking to our partners about it, right? That's how we”

destigmatize it and we make it less taboo. We can take all the drops and take all the, you know, vaginal estrogen we want and we can use all the loops we want, but we have to start talking because 50% of marriage is end at this time of life, right? Because women, our vagina's just dry up and men go get a young hot 25-year-old get a red car and they go on with their life. And we're stuck there just, you know, getting old. So, we have to talk about it. We have to

have the courage to say to our partner, "I'm in menopause or perimenopause and this is what is happening to my body." And I found that when we talk to our partners, talk to men about it,

they're very receptive. You know, they're embarrassed at first, they don't want to talk about it,

but when we force them to, I think men are right there. They're right there and they feel relieved that you're talking with them, they feel relieved. They're understanding that there's not a breakdown in their marriage, but that you are just going through something that will pass and you can go through it together. You don't have to go through this all by yourself, ladies. We have to start the conversation with them. So, you know, because of, you know, your personal experience and this is usually

how great things start in the world. If somebody has a problem and they want to solve it, and this would happen to you. And you started to respen. So, can you give us the reader's digest version of what is respen and how members of the audience can actually join and it is hands

down my second-life passion. I am determined before I leave this planet to do everything I can

to change the life for women, especially in midlife and why, because we deserve it. And at respen, we've got, like he said earlier, we've got expert doctors that are experts in our menopausal bodies. We've got access to the latest in science. We've got coaches that will hold your hand, walk you through your function studies that you get help you be accountable to your optimal good health. We've got a beautiful community of women that are there to also laugh with you cry with you, hold you up, hold

you down. It's a 360 approach to wellness because we know, and if you want hormones, we have a clinic that can also get you on hormones, help you dose those hormones, help you regulate. If we get this right for me before I leave this planet, it will be a menopause one-stop shop where women can come

“to a trusted place where they know that we've got you. And I'm learning every day. That's why”

I'm at this conference. I mean, I'm learning every day. I've been shot up with so many peptides here since I've been here. Oh, so many nose and like all these things, and I'm all about trying to figure out how I can live my longest and healthiest life. But thank you for creating respect, which really gives women hope in a time that often can be very hopeless and very discouraging and very depressing. I mean, you know, I'm sure you're having suicidal thoughts. So what's a

moment of hope or a word of hope you can give to women listening who are in this position in your life and how do they have agency and take control? Well, I'll tell you one good way we can have agency. Besides all the things you've heard us say today, I have this belief that in order for us as women to really start taking care of our health and feeling good about that, we have to change culture. We have to change the way we feel about ourselves at this time and we have to do this

ladies. You know, so many of us have we've had the cool aid too. We have to change our ticker tape. We have to have agency over this time of our life and we have to force and I do say

children with their bar mitzvahs and their bot mitzvahs. We have sweet 16 birthdays. We have baby showers and wedding showers. Like, you know, bachelor at parties, we celebrate these

“milestone times in our life. I think as women we have to start being celebrated when we are in”

the menopause with a shiesta. She has to. She has to. Because we deserve it, right? We are deserving of being celebrated, right? We are the matriarchs of our family. We are the wisest ones in our family. I'm going to have to tell you and in other cultures we are revered at this time of life in our country. Not so much anymore and we have to change that and I think a good way to change that as we make our families give us a Shiesta and celebrate us and all that we are. It's one good

thing we can start doing. Amazing. So it's Shiesta time in America. Let's go. Shiesta. So now we have

a little bit of time for Q&A. Go ahead over here. What do you think about adding into the matriarchs is low-toxing the food in your home, the air quality, the products that you're using to add extra support on top of that as another layer? Yeah. You want to take it? You want me to. I think this is such an important question and we didn't have time to touch on it but it's a huge issue which is industrial petrochemicals which are in everything from makeup, house-hole cleaners,

to skincare products, to our food, pesticides, are what we call Xenoestrogens. There are foreign estrogens and they're highly bilective and they're not just additive, they're synergistic. So one plus one is equal to two, it equals a thousand and this is why we're seeing such increased

rates of breast cancer and uterine cancer and ovarine cancer and I think it's not really well appreciated

“but it's a huge issue and I think learning how to detox your life is so important. That's why I'm”

in the board of the Environmental Working Group and it's a great resource to ewg.org. It's a nonprofit that actually investigates all the products that are used in our household products and skincare products and our cleaning products and our food and everything and how do we reduce that burden and it can be by, you know, just simple things like watching which food is your organically and filtering your water and having air filter in your house and using skincare products that

are non-toxic and using household cleaning products are non-toxic. You don't have to be doing everything overnight but it's important to start to do that and just start to shift the

products you're using so that you're not adding to the load because the really a big factor

and then there's a whole process of biological detoxification which is a big part of functional medicine. So I could talk about that for hours but we got only a few minutes so I encourage you to check that out but it's a very important question. Thank you for bringing that up. I love cooking real whole foods at home and over the years I've written multiple cookbooks because I genuinely enjoy helping people make healthy eating simple and delicious.

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I was wondering if you considered a part of as women going through life, which is energetic, and it has to do with dissociation. Whether this is something that is being included in the

consideration of taking women back to... I mean, like, second spiritual integration, as I was

talking about... To me, it's an energetic structural. It's not the psychospiritual. It's going to flow. Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, it's all part of an energy medicine, and all of that is part of realigning yourself with, you know, nature and your life in a way that helps align your biology, and I think there's a lot of data on that. But it's a little woo-woo, but I think there's a lot of reality to it. My question very simply. How common is it to miss to not have the symptoms, to miss

the premenopause, the... Everything we're talking about here. It's a genetic, is it? Is there a lot

“people that miss it a percentage? I think that's a good question. That's why we need more research”

and more studies to really find that out. But I know that there are people that have said to me, I have had no symptoms of menopause, but that's when I go back, and I say to them, you might be having hot flashes that are causing adverse effects to your brains, but you just don't feel it. And I think there are many symptoms of menopause that people don't associate yet with menopause, because we're still uncovering what those symptoms actually are, right? So some

women do say they don't suffer very much, and they say they sail through it, but I'm not so sure that they haven't had some symptoms that have caused them some adverse effects. So that's why more research is, I think, very, very necessary to keep understanding what our symptoms and, you know, what we are suffering from that we don't even know. It's true, and I also think you're right. I mean, there's a wide variety of experiences that women have. Some women have very minimal symptoms,

or no symptoms, some women have a lot of symptoms, and it can be partly genetic, mean, or mental, but also it's lifestyle. It's one of the biggest drivers, and Japan doesn't even have a word for out flashes. And it's because you know, diets full of soy and fermented foods, and other things, it change hormones. So your hormones, just food is made of sentence, so your hormones are regulated by what you're eating, by stress, by environmental toxins, by you're

got microbiome, by the level of activity you have, by your sleep patterns, by your circadian rhythms, and I could go on and on. So we know how to modify those those systems in the body and create optimal health. There is a transition and things do happen, and there are symptoms that can happen over time, but they can be minimal for many women. Yeah, and also black and brown women suffer exponentially more. A lot more, yeah. And I would wonder, I'm curious to know why that

“is, we need more research. I think your question is important because, you know, in America,”

in the 1960s, after your American populations were far healthier than my populations.

And I remember watching this documentary about a reath of Franklin, amazing grace,

and you were looking at the church in Oakland. There was a single overweight in African America in that movie. And then what happened was that they got targeted by the food industry in a very malicious and deliberate way, and they then consume far more soda, far more junk food, far more processed food. And that's why they have now far hard rates of diabetes, kidney failure hypertension, cardiovascular disease, early death, mortality, or palliative,

kidney white, and we're 30% of the population in New Orleans in Chicago. We're 70% of the COVID deaths. That's why, because it's not some genetic abnormalities because of our embedded, I would call it kind of food racism. Where do you see medical schools in America updating

“curriculum to include menopause and other things that we have seen here this weekend?”

Well, I know that I've been to Washington several times now to pass a bill at $265 million

bill that will do just that. It will arm schools with the funding so that doctors can go back and be retooled and that more programs can be implemented in schools. And I think we are starting that slowly as we keep having this conversation and we keep talking about menopause and bringing it to the forefront. I think it's putting a lot of pressure on institutions to further education.

right now, which is finding ways to use our existing laws to mandate medical schools and post-graduate

medical education programs and residences and fellowships to include mandatory nutrition education, change our lives, things and answers, unless those change nothing will change.

“Can you also speak about sexual health and how joy-lux came to be?”

Joy-lux, yes, because that was my entry into realizing that I was in Paris menopause and I was trying to fix my own problem and I came across joy-lux in their red light therapy device, which is a vaginal device that sort of helps build college and moisture and that worked for me. So I reached out to the head of the company and I said, hey, what is this company? This actually moved my needle. What is this? And so she allowed me to get involved. And the next product

I needed was some sort of lubrication products. So I teamed up with them and we came up with this,

I think a beautiful product called Let's Spin. It's clean. It's hyaluronic acid, aloe vera. It's not sticky. It's, you know, it's a few are very sensitive in that area. It's clean for you. So that's been a beautiful partnership and we're working on other products. Thank you so much. Hi, Mark Talia from Beyond, I began. He just came from us. Just wanted to talk about psychedelics and the mind-body connection where this is heading in wellness in general.

“When I've spoken about this a few times in the conference, but I think when it's win psychiatric”

revolution, mental health is a massive crisis. Diabetes causes more hospitalizations and death, but mental health causes far more loss of what we call quality of life years and more disability and more dysfunction and more disruption in families and work and social life. And it's incredibly poorly dealt with in America in across the globe. And the twin psychiatric revolutions are metabolic and nutritional psychiatry, functional medicine psychiatry, and psychedelic psychiatry.

And Rick Talblin was here. There was a talk to the end I began. And I think these are going to unlock a lot of things that deal with both the biology of what causes mental health issues, which is often from the body. I mean, you were depressed, howling up because you were inherently depressed because your hormones were out of whack. It was biological. You have to treat the body in order to treat the brain. And I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called the

Ultramine Solution, how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. So that's really

“important. And that's what's happening right now across the science world. It's Stanford,”

Harvard, there's departments of metabolic and nutritional psychiatry. Some of the psychedelics psychiatry that's also advancing, which deals with a lot of our deep wounds and traumas and the operating systems that get installing or kids that drive our life and cause us to be seven-year-olds or ten-year-olds in relationships that really disrupt our life. Whether it's relations with ourselves or with our partners or with work or with friends or our families, those are really hard

things to change. And I think psychedelic medicine is a powerful tool to help unlock that source code

that drives a lot of our lives and can free us from the burden of those things we carry around from us with us for our lifetime. So I think those twin revolutions are really emerging rapidly. And I think hopefully with the next five to ten years are going to become more mainstream and more accessible and more paid for by healthcare insurance. Thanks to Holly for sitting down with me for this conversation. And thanks to you, our listeners for continuing to take charge of your health

and I'll see you in the next episode. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else. You think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Heiman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Heiman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Heiman for video versions of this podcast and more.

Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Heiman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center. My work at Cleveland Clinic and function health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care,

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“and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as”

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