Debunking the Menstrual Cycle and Hormone Imbalance with Dr. Scott Resnick | Part 1
Our bodies are complex machines and sometimes it’s difficult to understand how all the intricate parts work together. The menstrual cycle is often something that leaves us confused. Thankfully we have trusted functional medical professionals like Dr. Scott Resnick who help make it possible!
Meet Dr. Resnick:
Formally trained in general surgery and obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Resnick has committed his professional career to the practice and teaching of functional medicine. On this episode, we speak with Dr. Resnick to help demystify some beliefs surrounding women’s health, specifically concerning reproductive cycles and hormone imbalances.
Some Topics We Discussed:
What is the role of the menstrual cycle in a woman’s body? (6:37)
What are the signs of a healthy menstrual cycle? (12:12)
What if things seem relatively normal with your cycles but you experience great discomfort, lower fertility, etc.? (14:44)
What are common environmental factors that lead to issues in a woman’s cycle? (19:57)
What’s the difference between insulin and A1C? (24:56)
Key Takeaways From This Episode:
Our ability to reproduce and our ability to have normal menstrual cycles is unquestionably a part of our environment. (10:04)
We have to get back to more of a natural lifestyle of eating unprocessed foods and taking the right supplements. (19:43)
Insulin play a huge role in our hormones. (22:05)
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CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Brian Strickland 00:11 Hello, everyone, you're listening to The Holistic Navigator Podcast, where we believe in the body's ability to heal itself. My name is Brian Strickland. I'm the producer of the show. And today we're going to have a conversation with Dr. Scott Resnick. Dr. Resnick is a functional medicine practitioner, and is passionate about bringing the science of functional medicine into the mainstream. He believes that every person is uniquely suited to know him or herself. And that with a bit of teaching, coaching and support, each individual has the ability to make lasting changes that will improve their quality of life. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Resnick about women's health and hormonal balance issues. So without further delay, let me hand it over to your host, Ed Jones.
Ed Jones 01:29 Thank you so much, Brian. And again, I'm excited for another weekly podcast from The Holistic Navigator. You know, my goal is to create an encyclopedia for individuals where they can actually access a whole different kind of school of information. And yes, you know, 75% of my podcast is simply me ranting and hopefully educating but 25% when I find special individuals who I have trust in and have history with that I truly know his needs to express their knowledge, I begged them to come in. And today, I really am proud to have a gentleman, a physician, Dr. Scott Resnick on The Holistic Navigator. Welcome, my friend.
Dr. Resnick 02:14 Thank you. It is so good to be here. And I'm welcome the opportunity to maybe author one of the chapters of your encyclopedia. I'm really pleased to be here.
Ed Jones 02:23 Well, I'm honored to have you on and, you know, the first few minutes always kind of give personal history. I have no script. I work from whatever roles in my brain at the moment. I've been doing this for 41 years now involved heavily in the aspect of natural healing and health. Now, you know, we're going to deal with women, hormones, menstrual issues, and many things dealing with options and solutions. And also, some of the information needs to be known about the conventional approach to addressing these these problems which are epidemic. There's probably the only issue that I get asked more questions about there than from females other than weight loss and energy is this topic of hormones, menstrual issues, you know, foggy thinking associated with it lack of libido. And you know, I don't think I've mentioned this to you Dr. Resnick before, but it was probably about 1989. And I was, of course professionally involved with exactly what I am now. And there was a gentleman named Dr. John Lee, and he wrote a book named what your doctor may not tell you about menopause
Dr. Resnick 03:43 With Dr. Zaba. I might mention.
Ed Jones 03:46 Yes. And what was was I was so excited when that book came out that I get contacted him. And we're in a town that is definitely behind times on rethinking on health. And we rented the convention center in 1989. And we had 300 people, mainly all women who came to listen to dr. john Lee speak on this topic. And, and you know, today, it's still not super easy to bridge the gap. But back then we were the enemy. And people thought of us as true clowns and charlatans including Dr. John Lee, and it was wonderful people paid $15 to come and it truly, I believe was the opening for this conversation. Sadly to say the next lecture he gave, he dropped dead on stage. That was you know, the sad thing for all of us, but but let me get off my rabbit trails here and I want you Dr. Resnick, give a little history of you know your past what you did in the medical field and so people know who they're listening to.
Dr. Resnick 04:49 Well, thanks for the introduction. And I'll try to keep this brief so we can really get into the into the meat and potatoes of what we're going to talk about, but my formal training I'm an OB GYN. I did two years of general surgical training at the University of Colorado followed by four years of ob gyn training, and practice as a generalist ob gyn for maybe seven to 10 years. And at that point, I found that I was really becoming more interested in approaching health and what what I would what I would call would be a functional approach to health and, and over the last maybe 10 to 20 years, we've developed a new lexicon a new, I guess, way of describing this style of of healthcare, which is called functional medicine. So for the last 10 years, I've been practicing effectively, a functional medicine. And I believe that's the use of herbs, nutrients, supplements, diet, mind body practices, to actually get to the root of what can be contributing to symptoms in the human body.
Ed Jones 05:49 I love that I know that it you and Brian sitting here listening, this is exactly my language. I speak probably every single podcast, I use the word functional medicine or functional healing, because that is where the future of health and healing has to go. Unless you want to live in the world of treating symptoms and putting a big piece of tape on the red light on the dashboard, which do not. I mean, we are you know, Richard Nixon announced the war on cancer in 1970. There was one in 32 people had cancer today is one in three. And that's it being optimistic. So we're not winning the war on any disease, especially the chronic ones. So I, so let's get to the real meat of this, which is when my amount of people I talked to six days a week, and I'm not treating their medical conditions, I'm helping educate people on every degree I can, but the conversation that goes about is women who come in, generally, they're over 40, sometimes they can be less, but they are suffering, quality wise in their life, because they understand that their hormones are changing, or they are having female issues, a lot of it based in those hormones that are changing. Everything from you know, discomfort to foggy thinking to depression, to lack of libido, weight gain those who I guess would be my five bullet points. And I would like if you could Dr. Resnick, on this episode, let's explain from your perspective, exactly what is going on from a female's body, if you compare an 18 year old to a 40 year old and what is going awry. And then we'll get inside session two more of the options, but we need to have some kind of really good explanation, because the thing about educating people, they need to have this education to have the discussion with their healthcare practitioner, because most women will have to access someone to help them on this path. And they need to know the language to speak. They cannot go in there completely novice or they will have they will become a slave because they don't know the ability to converse. So let's see if you can summarize exactly the difference between an 18 year old and a 40 year old and maybe plug into okay, why is this is why it's kind of happening?
Dr. Resnick 08:08 Well, I think that this is a good place to start. Because we began this discussion talking about functional medicine, which really serves to break components of the body down into elemental jobs. So I would start this discussion by asking you Ed what is the what's the purpose of a menstrual cycle? I mean, if this is something which is contributing to problems across a woman's reproductive age, the first question I would ask is, What is this for? And I know this might sound really simplified, but in fact, I think it's important to take a more simple approach to really understand more of the complexities. So I would answer that question by saying that really the main purpose of a menstrual cycle is reproduction. And I know that sounds pretty, pretty basic. But if you go further back to our history, and the time we've been on the planet, let's assume there was a time when we didn't have copious food and clean water and a good national security system to keep us safe. The human animal has been subjected to variations and degrees of stressors and pressure on the body to be able to work well. So it would make sense that there would be the human body would be able to modify its ability to reproduce or not reproduce. So really, the very main purpose of the menstrual cycle is reproduction. And what happens is starting at the age of puberty, and this is connected between the pituitary and hypothalamus, which are in the brain, the thyroid, the adrenal glands, and finally, the ovaries all begin to work in concert and the age of I think the average age of puberty for a young girl in this country is somewhere between maybe 10 and 12. It's interesting that there are some data to suggest that over the last maybe 30 to 50 years that that age has becoming younger. And that might be an interesting discussion that we could have a little later on is this due to possibly some of these environmental factors, because really, I started talking at this point to review the fact that our ability to reproduce and our ability to have normal menstrual cycles is unquestionably a part of our environment. So what happens is, I would say age 10 to 12, young girl begins getting recycles. And it's not uncommon for a newly pubescent young woman to have some irregularity to her to her cycles. I mean, I think that's something that we see on a pretty regular basis. Basically, a menstrual cycle is a alteration to cycling have two primary hormones, and those primary hormones are estrogen, otherwise known as estradiol, and progesterone. Progesterone is named progesterone, because it is the pro gestational hormone, it's really the the hormone that helps to maintain the lining of the uterus if a woman is to get pregnant. So in the early years, we begin to start to see some cycling. And what this does is it creates different peaks of estrogen over the course of the month. Estrogen effectively has two peaks. So what I would like the listeners to think about is over the course of an average menstrual cycle, which is 28 days, give or give or take a couple three days on either end, that estrogen is going to have two peaks over the course of the month. So if you can close your eyes for a moment and listen to the radio and just imagine a 28 a month and two peaks of estrogen one in the first half of the month, and one in the second half of the month. Now if we were going to look at the relationship of progesterone, which is the hormone which is caused by ovulation, it's almost flat, it's undetectable in the first half of the month, up to days, maybe 13 or 14, at which point it begins to rise. What this is doing is this, this combination of estrogen and progesterone working together is basically priming the lining of the uterus to receive a fertilized egg. And so in the event that pregnancy does not happen, the progesterone is no longer released by something called the corpus luteum. And that, that signals to the lining of the uterus to shed this whining and to start again.
Ed Jones 12:10 And that's what a period is, is the shedding of the lining.
Dr. Resnick 12:12 And that's what that's what the period is, it's a shedding of the lining and I was thinking about this discussion we're gonna have today I kind of asked myself, Well, why does a woman not stay in a constant state of just being able to be pregnant all 28 days out of the month? Why does one need to have a menstrual cycle. And I think the answer to that lies in the characteristic of what estrogen is doing. So estrogen is what is known as a trophic hormone. Trophic is a scientific word that means it causes tissues to grow. Well, we know that when there is too much estrogen around in the female body, that we can potentially see some problems that are associated with too much unregulated cellular growth. And in an extreme case, that would be say, a breast cancer, or a cancer of the lining of the of the uterus, uterine cancer. So I think that nature or biology, whatever it is, that's kind of decided how our body works, has decided that a woman's lining of the uterus needs to be exposed to estrogen over the course of the month, but it can't be exposed to estrogen eternally, every day for maybe, say the the 35 years of a woman's reproductive life. So it needs to shed itself. So in a normal healthy reproductive cycle, the first thing that I see is that it's predictable. So I find that and we can talk about this later in this discussion, there's a number of different tests that can be done over that over the course of the cycle. As you'll see the timing of these tests is important. So if your gynecologist is just recommending that, Oh, we'll to send you to the lab and just go get some blood work. And let's sort of see what your numbers are. If they're not asking the critical questions of where are you on a cycle, stop them, don't waste your time and money and just go over willy nilly any day of the cycle. Because remember, if we go back to that mental picture we made of estrogen and progesterone, there's a high estrogen to progesterone relationship in the first half of the cycle. Remember that progesterone is almost immeasurable, then what happens is over the remainder of the cycle, these begin to modulate relative to one another as the levels of progesterone rise. So if you draw your blood work for your doctor at day three of your cycle, it's going to be vastly different from day 16 or 18, or 20.
Ed Jones 14:15 Beautiful and you know, very few people I know, consider that as a very important part of this evaluation of a client patient person. And even if you're doing things on your own, like you know, through The Holistic Navigator, you can go to products and go to Direct Labs, you can order all of this blood work on the website, and that doesn't mean you have the ability to completely interpret it but you have if you can become skilled in any area, including this and you are informing people. Well, let's take this scenario then. You know, the cycles are regular. If you had tested the woman, you know she's got the adequate level of estrogens , she's got the adequate elevation and progesterone at the right time. Obviously, that at least from the hormone subject part is balanced pretty well, probably. And the woman is having the normal amounts of again, libido and concentration and blank, blank blank that comes with a good healthy, balanced hormone. What is happening to this huge chunk of women, though, as a certain point of their life, when they are complaining and feeling these this very disruptive symptoms, and again, hot flashes is one, but it's only one of many, what is going on? Is there too much of something too little of something or what?
Dr. Resnick 15:33 That's a very good question. So as I was preparing for this talk, I figured that I would like to divide the a woman's reproductive life into basically three different components. One is sort of the newly pubertal age group where there can be some irregularity and in the cycles, and that's normal. The year there, a woman's hypothalamus and pituitary are kind of learning the ropes, you know, the uterine lining is kind of getting a sense of what it needs to do. The ovaries are learning how to regulate on a regular basis, that's pretty normal. What happens is, is that the most fertile years for a woman are probably between about the ages of 17 and 30, maybe 35, we start to see some step off and a woman's fertility. Now in terms of testing and knowing that where you are in terms of your overall health, it's actually pretty easy. And in my clinical practice, I actually really just assess women's hormonal levels for starters, just by some simple clinical questions. So if you're in those sort of primed reproductive ages, maybe so we'll say 16 to 35. And you've got predictable cycles on a monthly basis. And you know, that your cycles are going to come. I'd ask my patients, if you were on a desert island, no cell phones, no apps, no calendars, would you know that your period is going to come? And if the woman goes, you know, Doc, I do I get kind of poochy, I crave Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, not that I support those. I get breast tenderness, I get Moody, that's telling me that she's having likely and appropriate rise of progesterone in the second half of her cycle. So if a woman comes in and says, I have regular cycles, they're predictable. My flow is predictable. I get breast tenderness. I get poochy, I get moody, I probably won't even measure labs on her because more than likely, she's telling me that she is ovulatory from from these symptoms. But that's not the people we're talking about right now. And what we tend to see is we tend to see that typically as a woman's ovulatory cycling, becomes less competent, as there are more environmental stressors on this, this really this female animal that she's not ovulating as well. So there are a lot of different factors that start start to come into play. And this is where it starts getting complex. And this is what we need to start thinking about how the environment comes into play. So when I say environment, I put this back to you. But when like, when you think of the environment, what what does that mean to you?
Ed Jones 17:51 Well, you know, and I know you and I both have lived a life of connecting to more of the natural philosophies. And if you really think about, and I've said this before, compare where we are today to 100 years ago, and is truly like living on a different planet. I mean, the things that truly are disrupting so much of our health is called endocrine disruptors. And they come from our environment, they come from, you know, the plastic bottles, the excessive soy that's not grown, right, the milk that has growth hormone in it, and the fact that we are a nation who's eating processed food continuously. And, you know, in my opinion, and I certainly want yours to, it's feeding into so much of these imbalances. And of course, again, on segment two of this, we're gonna have more specific tips and options for the females to help come up with a game plan to help balance this. But you know, the thing is, we're in a nation that wants to have magic pills, they want to have the someone wave a wand and everything go back to good again. But we have such a disconnect from the natural world, including the sun, including the earth, where we need to be grounding ourselves with bare feet, including all the way down to, you know, the course to EMF, all of this together, or singularly, none of these create major problems. But when you add them all on top of another, and the cup runs over, I mean, hormones are one of the biggest things that is being disrupted. And I speak the word man boobies all the time, because, I mean, I've never seen anything like I did last week at the beach. I went down and, you know, a whole percentage, the guy's need bras. And it wasn't like that when I was growing up. And I know it probably wasn't for you. And we're not going to talk about guys here. But that same thing that disrupts men is from the environment is disrupting women. And so we have to get back to more of a natural lifestyle of eating unprocessed foods and taking the right supplements, which we'll talk about in the next segment, though, so there I go on a rabbit trail, but what's your comment on that?
Dr. Resnick 19:57 Well, my comment on on that is I think you're entirely right. And what we need to do is we need to look at the first of all, what the different environmental pressures are on that on the body. And then by identifying those pressures, then we can start to modify things. So if you don't know what's putting pressure on the system, you can't change things. So in terms of hormonal functioning, and these are the things that I see in my clinical practice as being strongly trunk contributors to a woman who starts to have some dysfunctional cycling, heavier cycles, more infrequent cycles, maybe some excessive hair growth on the body, this condition known as polycystic ovarian syndrome, what I like to do is I like to explore with that patient, the variety of different stressors that could be contributing to this. So you mentioned the endocrine disrupters. These are xeno estrogens. And what they are is these are a number of molecules that are found that are really ubiquitous in our society, I mean, in foods, in plastics, in pesticides, that actually have endocrine, or hormonal like workings on the body. But I also like to think of a number of other even more prevalent exposures that we have on our day to day lives. And the first is stress. And the second is calories. So when I'm thinking about some of the two strongest factors that are influencing a dysfunctional menstrual cycle, meaning a sub adequate rise of progesterone in the second half of the cycle, or in some women, the progesterone doesn't even rise at all. The first thing that I'm going to address is where's their stress? For example, it's been well studied that women who are under a good amount of stress whether a maybe a political prisoner, or even a woman who is choosing to run seven to eight miles a day, those changes in cortisol start to affect all the different hormonal interrelationships in our body to include thyroid, to include the pituitary function, and that in and of itself can start to influence a woman's menstrual cycling. So the first thing that I like thinking about and I know that in, in the people who you are educating in your store, I mean, what percentage of those people do you think you're talking to about stress, what 80%? So the other real significant stressor that we see on the human body comes down to our fat cells. And it's amazing when we see how much of their research these days is looking towards fat cell deposition, the inflammatory cytokines, the inflammatory molecules that are made by fat cells. And the other thing that happens is fat cells also are little estrogen producing factories. So I can't talk about fat cells without talking about insulin. And, and I bet you you've done you could probably do a dozen of these podcasts just talking about insulin, and this this dysfunctional relationship that we have in our society.
Ed Jones 22:41 Well, and you know, every time that we've talked and said the word insulin. In fact, you're on a radio show just last week, and again, it came back up, and it's on my podcast probably every other time. And I will bet you money right now. Now, I'd like to hear your opinion on this. Out of 100 women that I talked to who actually go to their conventional physicians, I would say that maybe maybe 5% of those are getting insulin checked. In fact, when I give advice, and I say, you know, I believe insulin is the one of the most important blood tests you can ever get done. And they go to their doctor, the doctor is saying, Who in the world advised you for that, because that's ridiculous. You're not a diabetic, you don't need your insulin checked. Well it shows that they are living still in a small box. And you're person who is definitely not living in that small box, because it has to do with inflammation, weight gain, chronic diseases down the road. In fact, I read along ago and I've really seen this to come to fruition is when they looked at people who were 90 plus years old, who were very stable, resilient, able to take care of themselves, and were really acting like a 50 to 60 year old, they really couldn't find any common denominators on bloodwork until they looked at insulin. When insulin is at about 12 or above long term, you probably will not make it to really old age and be stable and strong. When it is under two, which is ideal, which is difficult when you get past 60. But at least if you're in single digits, you're going to fare so much better. And no one listening to this who's getting a physical ever gets insulin checked. And we talked about it on a couple of my previous podcasts, one of which was weight loss and blood chemistry. If you go back and listen to that, I tell you exactly the blood tests you have to demand or you just go to our site under products and order the damn things because you don't have to put up with this inefficient healthcare system or sick care system, as I call it. You have command of this now. We didn't have this 10 to 20 years ago. There was no way you could have ordered your own bloodwork 15 years ago, and you could not have walked in and ask your physician because he would have scoffed at you because what their comment back then was, what did you get your medical degree?
Dr. Resnick 24:56 Well, let me let me do this. I'm going to interject right here because I want to offer a really good clinical pearl along these lines. Yeah, and that is that well, very, very few of you listening have ever had your insulin checked, there are probably a number of you, particularly if you got a few extra pounds on you who've had the hemoglobin a one c checked. What this is it's a, it's a measure that basically averages out glucose over the previous 100 days. So I can just see the patient you're talking about Ed who goes into the doctrine says, check my insulin, what does the doctor check? Hemoglobin A1C. So let's say that hemoglobin a1c comes back into normal range, they say that between maybe 5.7, and 6.4 is pre diabetic. This is another one where you want your hemoglobin A1C as low as possible. But here's what's interesting is the hemoglobin A1C reflects your average blood sugar over the previous 100 days, it doesn't tell what your insulin is doing. And I have had patients come into my office on dozens of occasion, who from every clinical standpoint look like they're diabetic. But they come in proudly saying my doctor checked my A1C and it came back at 5.2. So I'm not diabetic, I've got something else going on. Well, what I do is I do two insulin checks. And again, you can do this in the privacy of your own home, you can do this and assess these numbers and again through some of the resources that Ed has available for you. The first is checking a fasting insulin, the next thing to do is to challenge your insulin. And what I have patients do is eat a crappy bagel with two tablespoons of jelly. Again, this is a glucose blood test. So it's a crappy go to the frozen section of your store, get a crappy bagel, toast it, put two tablespoons of jelly on it, eat that. And two hours later, check your insulin again. What I find is that some of these people who have the hemoglobin A1C, which are normal, they've got insulins that are absolutely out the roof. And out the roof is maybe more than 25 or 30. So if you do this test on yourself, and you come back with an insulin of 60, or 80, or God forbid, 150, you are well along your way towards becoming diabetic. And the reason that's important is because I can guarantee you that of the women that come to see me in my practice the vast majority who have menstrual abnormalities. And again, this risk factor confirmed by it confirmed by insulin does extend into the menopausal years as well. I would say the vast majority of women who are struggling with their menstrual cycles are overweight. And in being overweight, they are inflamed. And they have dysfunctional insulin.
Ed Jones 27:22 Bingo. And that's a wonderful at home education test. And I will say that, of course as you have learned to her also is is even more so than just being diabetic, we're going to create the risk for every single chronic disease there is including Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, heart disease, plaque in your arteries, everything will come associated with high levels of insulin. I want to end this right now. Because we're going to, you know, have a second segment talking about here's more of the options that really come down to the put on the table for you to consider. And I want to say I'm sitting here looking at Dr. Resnick, he's how old are you now?
Dr. Resnick 28:00 57.
Ed Jones 28:01
- I will only guess his body fat is extremely low without saying numbers. He's fit as a fiddle. He weighs exactly what a human should weigh that's six foot tall and fit, and everything else. And please forgive me for this. But you know, I go into a health professional or someone comes to me, and they're 60 pounds overweight, and they have pale color in their skin and they're not agile, they're stiff. I don't care what they have to say I don't care how many freakin degrees they have on the wall. If you can't practice it yourself. I don't want to hear it with Dr. Resnick is the living example of this. And so I'm going to end this podcast a little bit. So I want to say as I always do it, remember if a doctor cannot do you good, he meant must be kept from doing harm. And that was Hippocrate very long ago. So tune in for the second podcast with Dr. Resnick and myself for all the options that you want to hear. Thank you so much. And please, you know, remember to subscribe to The Holistic Navigator and share it and write it because that is how we continue to grow. Thank you everyone.
Brian Strickland 29:15 The information on this podcast and the topics discussed have not been evaluated by the FDA or anyone of the medical profession and is not aimed to replace any advice you may receive from your medical practitioner. The holistic navigator assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever on the behalf of any purchaser or reader of these materials. The holistic navigator is not a doctor nor does he claim to be please consult your physician before beginning any health regimen.