“Everything will work on some people. Nothing works on everyone”
Dr. Mache
Dr. Mache Seibel is a national expert in helping women in and around menopause improve their symptoms including sleep, stress, diabetes and weight control. He brings innovation to health education, focusing on creative approaches to help America stay well.
During this episode, Dr. Mache will share his best-kept secrets to improve your symptoms through menopause and overall quality of life. Find out if its safe to take estrogen, hormones, and Maca root. Learn how to reduce your stress related issues and how diet plays a role. Listen to the end to hear if your Vitamin D3 levels are dangerously low.
Listen to episode 100 on iTunes here or subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
100: Show Notes
Dr. Veronica Anderson’s Links:
Recommended Links:
- The Estrogen Fix: The Breakthrough Guide to Being Healthy, Energized, and Hormonally Balanced
- But Now I See: A Medical Intuitive Surgeon’s Guide To The Meaning of Your Illness and The Secrets To Healing Chronic and Incurable Disease
- HotYearsMag.com
- Time Stamps:
- 03:19 – Dr. Maches medical journey
- 07:36 – “I wanted to use my voice to try and help women” – Dr. Mache
- 11:42 – How safe is it to take estrogen?
- 17:11 – What you must do if you don’t take hormones
- 29:01 – Reducing your stress related issues
- 31:18 – The benefits of Maca root
- 35:27 – Does Homeopathy actually work?
- 37:08 – “Everything will work on some people. Nothing works on everyone” – Dr. Mache
- 40:01 – Vitamin D3 levels and K2 data
Dr. Veronica: Today. Here we’re going to talk about the middle of life, the hot years with an expert on a hot years. And I’m bringing a man here as an expert on the hot years Dr. Mache Seibel. Well, did I pronounce that correctly, mate? You know, here’s the thing. He gave me the phonetic pronunciation and still I messed it up. Okay, so here we go. We’re going to talk about the hot, you’re still travel book too.
Dr. Mache: I do. I have a book called the estrogen fix, which actually explains how to get rid of the hot years.
Dr. Veronica: Okay, so, so here’s the thing. I’m going to ask you some questions that are off script just because I want to know, and I want the audience out there to know that what we’re going to talk about today has to do with our own personal journeys. I’ve been reaching out to all kinds of healthcare practitioners asking about their personal journey, their spiritually emotional journey that has led them to practice a particular way. And we all have a story. So you all might’ve seen my book, but now I see where I laced throughout the book. Part of my, not only journey in this life, but my journey and past lives and how I came to the thought process and the lessons that I teach right now to the people who become clients. And so if you’re out there and you’re a practitioner and you think, Oh my gosh, my story is so relevant to how I practice, reach out to me because I want to feature you.
Dr. Veronica: So people hear that we’re human just like everybody else. We go through illnesses and injuries and life crisis that shaped exactly the way that we practice today. And Dr. Mache has a similar story, one from medical school and one from dealing with his wife, his beloved wife, who I’ve also met who has an interesting story too. I mean, I’d have to pull her on too because she has a, a different type of a story. And I’m sure that has shaped the way you practice too. But I want to talk about the hot years. You’ve got to show, show us this magazine. Dr. Mache has a magazine, he publishes about the middle of life for women. Called the hot years. I’m like, Oh my God. I’m in the hot years. Okay.
Dr. Mache: He’s the founders of the a Zoomba goal that I did an interview with them and they have really interesting women at their peak doing what they’re doing naturally and we tell their stories and also exercises and other things that go with it so that women in the hot years can continue to feel hot in more ways than one.
Dr. Veronica: Besides just that at night in a bed, sweaty
Dr. Mache: Besides this, you know.
Dr. Veronica: So I want to hear a little bit of first, let’s get over with your credentials. You know, we think about in credentials and we know you’re an MD, but you also have some other, you know, really been aerated wonderful credentials behind you, which made you who you are aware you are in your education. So let’s talk about that first, move that off the table and then go to why you really do what you do.
Dr. Mache: Sure. Well, I started my journey down in Texas at the university of Texas medical school. Went on to Emory University and then I went to Harvard medical school where I did my fellowship. I’ve been at Harvard for, I’ve been a 20 some odd year member of the faculty there. And I’m involved in all of the residency training and other things related to women’s health in terms of menopause, perimenopause. When I started my career there, I was actually in people magazine for helping gorillas get pregnant. I was in people magazine as Dr. Zoo.
Dr. Mache: Okay. And so I’ve done a, I used to do sperm determined, now I do womb to tomb. And part of my personal journey has to do with why I swiped a transition from one thing to the other. And I’ve taken care of a lot of patients. As I say, I have been through menopause over 10,000 times because I’ve helped over 10,000 women transition and make this very challenging time in life. Something that they can live with and feel good and then bountiful and and really get past the symptoms of enjoy who they become.
Dr. Veronica: Yeah. I want to thank you for that because the focus generally on women especially now is on the other end of life, the life where about fertility and all that type of stuff. And while, while that’s important we have many more years, a lot of times outside of fertility than we do when we are fertile. And so yes, it’s important to continue to populate parents and we all want to be mothers and some people don’t want to be mothers and that’s okay too. But on the other side, we spent a quite a many years and many of them we don’t even know that we’re spending those years transitioning out of fertility years and into another part of life where we’re, we birth a lot of other things. And in fact, most people in the second half of their lives are greater than in the first half of their lives. So it’s important for women to feel good and productive and all that other type of stuff. And Dr. Mays helps us do that. But I want to know it like most people, you know, fertility is big business, big, big, big, big business. But on the other end of life where a lot of the women are really feeling horrible for lots of years, what made you decide to focus on that side?
Dr. Mache: There were really two things and I’ll tell both of them in kind of in sequence because in my training, in my personal training, my residency training, I was about to go into the last year of my training. And one day I was looking in the mirror and I noticed I had a bulge in my neck that was about the size of my fist. It was located right over here. And I went to see my doctor with a little bit of trepidation because I tried, I did with any medical person would do in their right mind when they see something they don’t like boating in their neck. I tried to push it and make it go away, but it wouldn’t. And so I ended up going to see my, the head of the E and T department, ear, nose and throat. And the thought was that I had a cancer in my neck and probably it was going to be a very big deal.
Dr. Mache: And when the resident came in to talk to me, he was my age. We were peers, just, he was in surgery and I was in gynecology. He told me, well, gee, there’s just nothing good this could be and I hope we don’t have to take out of your tongue and angle your jaw and just go the whole nine yards. And I said, well, thank you. I said, that’s very reassuring. And I said, but you know, you’re just done. And he said, no. And I said, well, you’ve just spoken to me for the very last time. I just just get out of my room. But to make a long story very short, it turned out that it was a very rare benign tumor of one of the nerves in my neck. And very fortunately my voice was fair because I was told that only was I likely to have a very Derrick, a bad cancer, but that would probably never speak again because they thought it was going to be on my nerves, a speech.
Dr. Mache: And so at that point when I was able to have my speech spirit, I thought it was fair for a reason. And so I wanted to use my voice to try and help women because that was my area of medicine and to try and help women in the area that I was involved in in early in my career. It was in, I did some of the first in vitro fertilizations in the country. I did about the fourth one. And I was involved in that very heavily for a long time. But then the second part of the story happened that is that I’ve shared with you before and then had to do with my wife because some of you will remember, you may remember that back in 2002, there was a study that came out that said incorrectly that hormones can cause breast cancer.
Dr. Mache: And other things. And my book, the estrogen fix actually explains why they got it wrong and that estrogen is actually safe for most women. But at the time, women were throwing away hormones. It was the number one drug in the United States. It was a $7 billion drug, and women were using that routinely from the time of menopause on through to death. And some women wanted to be buried with the bottle of estrogen in the coffin because they weren’t going to give it up. But then this study came out and then seven months after that study came out, my wife had surgery that threw her into early menopause. And when that happened, her doctors were reluctant to treat her with estrogen or hormones because they thought it was going to be harmful for her. And so I had to really transition to figure it out because she was going to have to tough it out.
Dr. Mache: And I’m very short and simple terms. That is what happens. So I shifted my career at that time from the a reproductive window of life to the next phase, which is a menopause, perimenopause, menopause, which affects, of course, right now about 50 million women in the United States, 6,000 women a day in a, in a lot of people think that’s older women. But in fact, up to 10% of women go into menopause before age 45, one and a hundred before age 41 in a thousand before age 30. So menopause is not about age, it’s about transition. And I wanted to be able to help remove some of the stigma that went with it to help women realize that they can have the opportunity to be symptom free or at least relieved the bulk of their symptoms. Whether or not they choose estrogen. You don’t have to have estrogen, there are other approaches you can use, but you have to do something or else life is going to be much more challenging and it doesn’t have to be that way.
Dr. Veronica: So let’s talk a little bit more about so your wife goes into this early menopause and this is during the time where everybody’s scared of estrogen. And let’s just be honest about the, the fear for doctors, the fearful doctors is you prescribed estrogen, something bad happens and your blood is getting sued because this is the way people think you do something wrong. They’re going down. So doctors are not going to break protocol with some major study. And even though there are women who say, I want to die with my estrogen, I bet you those women had a hard time getting doctors to write it for them because if something negative happened to those woman, their finger would be pointed back on a doctor in the form of a lawsuit. And nobody wants that. So people wonder and just want to understand how medicines practices today, it’s CYA medicine. And so the, the, our country has allowed it to be that way. And that’s why many things aren’t available. But then there are doctors like you who say, we need to find a different answer. We need to evaluate the strengths. And the weaknesses of all the different studies that come out and decide yes or no. Is it right or is it wrong? So before we go onto the other approaches, I want to put aside, be able to put aside what you have found out now is the low down on estrogen, is it safe? Is it not safe? What forms are safe? I got a lot of training and background on this of thing, so I know
Dr. Mache: Some of the answer, but other people don’t. There’s still some fear out there. Well, there’s a lot of fear because today compared to 2002 there are 88 Oh percent fewer women taking hormones today. Then we’re taking it in 2002 and a lot of that has to do with the misunderstandings, the myth understandings as I call them, because myths become reality. If you hear them enough, you hear it on television all the time. The fake news that this, that what we’re hearing is myths being stated until they’re believed this truth and that’s what happened with estrogen therapy. But actually the reason that the study, the basis for this misunderstanding or misunderstanding is really in how they designed the study. Estrogen was so popular in 2000 in the year 2019 98 when that study started that the average woman was on it. So they had so many women on hormones, they couldn’t find anybody to be in the study.
Dr. Mache: And so as a result, they had to take women who were older. So what happened was they compared women who were between the ages of 50 and 59 and in other words, women in their fifties and they compare who took a placebo as they entered menopause and they compared them to women in their sixties and seventies who were taking the estrogen or the estrogen and the progesterone. So the 50 year olds got the placebo, the 16 and 17 year olds overwhelmingly not totally overwhelmingly got the hormones and who’s going to have more problems just with or without hormones. If you look at women by age, the younger women or the older women, and it’s going to be older women will have more breast cancer, more heart disease or high blood pressure, et cetera. And that’s what the study founded. But then 15 years later they looked at the same data, not a new study, the same women.
Dr. Mache: But they took those women who were between the ages of 50 and 60 whether they had hormones or they didn’t. And they put them together. And when the women were looked at together at the same ages, starting at near the time of menopause and what I called the estrogen window, all these problems went away by BI. And then estrogen became safe for the majority of women because it never was unsafe. But when you don’t take estrogen near the time of menopause, your body is aging and plaque builds up in your arteries and different things can happen. And so when you started later, your body has advanced in the aging process. And as a result you have more risk. And that’s basically what happened. So to amiss desire, poorly designed study, a myth developed that estrogen was harmful and now we have abundant data data from all around the world looking at women who started in their estrogen window at the time of menopause or within the first 10 years after, and this is really important if you’re a woman who goes into early menopause because as I said, five to 10% of women going into menopause before 45 if you’re at that point and you don’t take hormones, your risk for dementia, heart disease, mental health issues, a whole host of other problems is seriously increased.
Dr. Veronica: But if you do add hormones at that time at 45 or whatever age, you go into menopause up until the age of natural menopause, which is 51 about in the United States, you get rid of all those problems. Now, this is a big deal for women because this is going to change your intimacy, your looks, your ability to be effective at work, your men, your mental health, your physical health, your state of wellbeing, your happiness factor, all the things that matter that make you hold this. Some of you, not some of you, but the, some of you will suddenly be healthier, happier, and more vibrant. So it just has to get this message out.
Dr. Veronica: Okay, so now we’ve got the, everybody should take estrogen kind of side of things. On the other side, couple of things. Number one, there are women in other parts of the world who transitioned through menopause without doing this and without dying and getting heart disease and everything like that. On the other side, there are women who just say, you know what? I don’t, I don’t necessarily want to take estrogen. I would like another approach. Now I have found in my training,
Dr. Mache: There are fewer women who can clear, you know, if you have cancer,
Dr. Veronica: Well, what did the, what you’ve just said is woman. If you don’t take estrogen, you’re going to get old looking. You’re not going to be able to have sex, your heart disease, you’re going to get dementia. And let’s talk about people who don’t do it and what they can do to keep themselves well and not have all those things happen. If they don’t want to take hormones. Tell us some other news.
Dr. Mache: If you don’t want to take hormones, that’s perfectly fine because there will always be women who either cannot or will not. And that’s okay. I will say though that the big thing you must do is do something now that something may include in the things I’m going to be saying now can be done. Whether or not you take hormones, but if you don’t take hormones, you really have to do it. And they’re really pretty straightforward things. Number one, you have really eat healthy. I mean, you have to eat the right kinds of food and you have to be much more attuned to you know, the more organic kinds of foods and more vegetables versus meat, avoiding processed foods, things that are really very basic but very essential. So I’m just going to go into a little dialogue about that, but I want to make
Dr. Veronica: Is there. It would. Okay. So as you’re going through this stage, there are some foods that you want to avoid, more. Name a few of those.
Dr. Mache: Well, I think that alcohol is not your friend. And I think that if you’re gonna drink, you have to really drink one glass of wine or whatever you choose to drink or less a day. So that I think you wanna avoid processed foods. I think you wanna try and avoid sugar. Sugar is a big issue and Nobel, it’s not exactly food. Smoking is really bad for you and unhealthy. You want to invoid avoid saturated fats, particularly a large amounts of saturated fats if you’re going to eat meats. I try the eat grass fed meats and I try to eat things that are more healthy for me if I’m going to eat. Those kinds of things. A large amounts of caffeine are not particularly good.
Dr. Veronica: Well yeah, so what we’re too, we’re talking about is really, you know, what, what you and I would call it just a, a healthful lifestyle, but I wanted to list out some of those things. I know sugar is very big. So you talked about alcohol and sugar and alcohol and sugar are almost the same thing. Big deal. And so women who are having symptoms, some of the first things to do is cut out the sugar. And that’s not something people like to hear. It doesn’t mean you can’t totally have it ever. It means you need to cut it way, way, way back. In fact, a lot of women will notice their symptoms related on a day to day basis based on how much alcohol and sugar and processed food they have. And if you really keep a food diary, you’ll notice that your symptoms are correlated with how much of the process sugar producing or sugar turning into food that you, that you meet.
Dr. Veronica: Now I understand a lot of people are addicted even though they don’t want to admit it and there’s ways to help you over that addiction. That’s a whole nother discussion. That we’re not going to go with. So I just wanted to say, so first of all, women, whether you’re taking hormones or not, you gotta change the way you’re doing things. You cannot do the things the same way that you did them pre menopause. And number one is the processed foods and the sugar. Okay. What else can people do besides change their eating to help them through the stage?
Dr. Mache: Exercise exercises like really critical because it’s going to be that lowers the risk of heart disease and the risk of breast cancer. It lowers the risk of dementia, it lowers the risk of depression. I mean exercise is really good for you and it’s important because you need to have both the cardio kinds of exercises but also strength training exercises and if you do exercise regularly, and I mean regularly, ideally five times a week, minimally three times a week for you know, you want to try and get about a hundred to 120 minutes in a week, even 150 minutes in a week. If you do these things, it will change the proportion of muscle versus fat in your body. It will help you with the things I just mentioned in terms of keeping you healthier and it will also help to control some of your hot flashes and some of the other symptoms, particularly if you exercise away from a bedtimes. Can I say that? We’ll get into the third thing. We’re going to talk about which is [inaudible].
Dr. Veronica: So let me, I want to give some specificity to this because when people are making up their program, maybe think about what they’re doing. Okay. 150 minutes a week is generally what’s recommended. When you talk about the type of exercise, I say 150 minutes a week, all heart rate being weigher. So let’s talk about monitoring the heart rate. I’d say your heart rate needs to be in a 75 to 80% 150 minutes. And also strength training is recommended because you’re losing muscle mass awareness before you, we’re not strength training. You may need to add that on to your 150 minutes is true or false?
Dr. Mache: Well, if you can add them on, it’s all the better. You know that’s certainly better. If you think about 150 minutes in the course of a week, that’s not a lot of time. And the benefit of that is just immense.
Dr. Veronica: 30 minutes, five times a week, which is not a ton.
Dr. Mache: Right? And a lot of people are doing work at a computer. A lot of people are commuting to work in their cars. So there’s a lot of sitting and we have to really undo that negative of sitting all that time and be active.
Dr. Veronica: Yeah. Sitting is the new smoking. So if you’re not smoking, but you’re sitting a lot, it’s equal. We’ve, they’ve, they’ve done some studies and said, you know, sitting a lot can be pretty equal. Now it may manifest a little bit different, but we’re doing a lot less active activity. We’re sitting around a lot. People are bingeing, watching Netflix all the time, not getting outside. Okay, so now number three is really right. Go ahead and talk about sleep.
Dr. Mache: Well, Shakespeare said it best sleep that knits the raveled sleave of care. And sleep is good for keeping you feeling better, but sleep is also a time of activity. You know, you’ve, you may be lying there, but in fact, part of you is producing hormones that affect your weight. In other words, there’s hormones produced in your stomach that make you suppress your appetite. And that’s called leptin. There’s hunger. There’s hormones that are made in your stomach that cause you to increase your appetite. That’s called gorilla and G, H, R, E. L. I. N. and so what happens is when you’re sleeping, you’re suppressing the gorilla and then increasing the leptin, which means you’re making yourself, allowing yourself to get full quicker and not feel hungrier. People who don’t sleep enough and they should be around seven hours a night. For most people, people who don’t sleep enough are a bigger risk for heart disease, bigger risks for high blood pressure, bigger risks for depression.
Dr. Mache: And these are all, and certainly you’re going to feel better. We have now about 5% of the country that falls asleep at the wheel when they’re driving within the last six months. That’s a lot of people and it’s contributing to a lot of the weight gain because the people, you can’t dye it if you don’t sleep because your body’s going to try and torch you. So if you go on these big diets and you’re not sleeping, your body is trying to eat more. And so sleep, we’ll just leave it there for the moment. But so it’s basically a nutrition, exercise, sleep. Those are the, the three we’ve talked about. Really important whether or not you take hormones and
Dr. Veronica: The question about the sleep, so Dr. Mache, I really want to sleep, but all of a sudden I can’t sleep. What can I do?
Dr. Mache: Well, that would be a whole discussion on its own. It’s harder to do without estrogen because estrogen actually extends the phases of sleep so that your rapid eye motion sleep, the REM sleep or REM sleep is an extended, so estrogen is a very good a sleep inducer and sleep enhancer because a lot of people when they’re in menopause peri-menopause in particular, they say, I wake up, I’m tired. You know, they, they go to bed tired, they wake up tired. That’s because quality of sleep can go down. But there are a lot of things that people can do to improve sleep. There’s a non therapeutic approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, which is a way that you learn to kind of talk yourself through and get yourself into sleep. Meditation is a wonderful thing to do before sleep. That this very simple yoga is very helpful to do in association with sleep.
Dr. Mache: And as a matter of fact, there’s been studies published in the last year showing that if you just sit at the head of the room at the, on the floor and just do simple stretching, that it would be considered some very mild yoga kind of exercises. If you do that for 15 minutes before you go to sleep, then that can help you sleep better. Eating earlier in the day and lighter meals as you get later in the night. Those are good things to do. Going and taking a nice hot bath before bedtime. Instead of looking at your computer where all the little pixels are in your brain, better to go and take a bath, get on your little lavender candle, put on some gentle music that you really groove too. And just chill. Call someone that you care about. Get connected with people who you love and love you.
Dr. Mache: All of these things can help you with sleep. You can do docking, I call it, it’s called docking, where if you have something on your mind you wonder to remember, remembered in the morning, you take a piece of paper, you put it on your desk and write down that thought so you don’t get on how you stay up on it. I’m not going to forget, I’m not gonna forget. I’m like, you’re up all night, not forgetting. And then you wake up in the morning, you’re so tired, you forgot it. So just write the thing down, put it on your table, and then you’re done with it. And then go to sleep. And it’s like a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s like an old joke about a guy is can’t sleep. You can’t sleep, can’t sleep. His wife says, what’s the matter max? You can’t sleep. He says, well, he says, I owe Lou a hundred dollars.
Dr. Mache: I haven’t got it. The wife goes over to the window, she opens it up. She says, low max hasn’t got the money. He’s not going to pay you now go to sleep. So, so it’s that kind of a thing. So darkening shades. There’s a lot of things that you can do. Keep the room cool at 68 degrees. There’s lots of things you can do to help you sleep. And there are other things for hot flashes that are non estrogen approaches that can be helpful. So using those, if hot flashes are keeping you up, if you have a sensitive bladder, you have to talk to your doctor about things to do about that so that you’re not getting up to go to the bathroom multiple times. There’s lots to be done. It’s just why are you getting up and then focus on those.
Dr. Veronica: Yeah, there’s so many there. There are a lot that can be done. And so I know we, it’s not exhaustive here. I do have to deal with people holistically and there’s some simple things that can be done that’ll, that. Or once you hear it you’re like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. But it’s not something you wouldn’t necessarily think on your own because without the proper medical background that I know everybody thinks they have an MD from web MD these days, but to don’t, let’s talk a little bit about supplements. Say
Dr. Mache: The fourth one, which is stress reduction. Let me just get that last one down because, so it’s, it’s exercise, nutrition, sleep and stress reduction because stress is killing us today and stress is really adding weight to people. What people eat, their, their, you know, mood. You talked about depression, people eat for that. People eat to feel emptiness. People eat because their self esteem is low. There’s a lot of reasons that people habitually eat. I mean, I was thinking I wanted to get somebody to lose weight. I would put a brace on their elbow so they couldn’t, couldn’t do that. But but people eat nervously and they smoke nervously. So anyway, I won’t go into it any further. Stress reduction seems so obvious, but believe me, stress is killing your arteries and it’s killing your adrenal glands and it’s, it’s really causing hot flashes and it’s causing a lot of sleeplessness. People are stressed, they can’t sleep. So dealing with stress is a very critical point to move on to supplements. I think so
Dr. Veronica: One of my, one of my favorite supplements, I mean, I know there’s a lot out there and everybody has a cocktail, but one of the supplements that I have gotten a lot of results for in a wide range of people without necessarily taken into account everything in their background. Maka and there’s different kinds of Maka. So tell us, what do you know about Maka? Yes. No, I mean it’s like the one that’s like this, the super virility one, I mean, makes you feel fabulous. And I’ve had people I’ve given to that. They’re like, where do I get more of that? Oh my gosh. So I don’t know if you have any things in your toolkit like that, but if you’re looking now I want people to know about the Maka there’s different grains and strains and everything like that. All of it. You need to make sure you’re getting the right one. There’s combinations. And this is where a practitioner with some brains behind them and training behind them can help you select which one is right for you. There’s Maka for different phases of your life in fact. And getting the right one is very crucial. So just all mockers are not created equal. I want to first say that, but tell us what you know. Dr [inaudible]
Dr. Mache: Rock is an ancient, a home remedy, if you will. I mean, it’s a Peruvian plant. It’s a root and it’s been used by people there and the indigenous people for centuries. It’s used for fertility issues. It’s used for menopause symptoms. It’s used for a variety of both for men and for women. It has been used and it’s available in a lot of forms in the United States. Now different people are making it available. Some of them in combination with other things. Some of them as a, as a simple and not simple, but a direct straight Maka route preparation. My comment about all of the supplements in terms of the roots and herbs and things like that. That is that everything works for somebody and nothing works for everybody. So I have my own approach to how you use these things. I believe if you’re going to use a supplement that you should use it like this one at a time, use it for one to three months.
Dr. Mache: It’s not like a heavy duty medicine. It takes time for your body to identify if it’s helping it or not and use it if it’s not helping you to the level that you want. And remember some people, all they want to do with hot, which is the number one symptom. There are many symptoms, but the number one symptom you have both frequency and intensity. So you have how strong they are and how often they come. And not many of the things that you take are not going to make them go away. They’re going to make them come a little bit less strong and a little bit less often. And that might be enough to allow you to sleep through the night. So if that’s good enough, you don’t have to have perfection, you’d have to get what you need. Not necessarily get everything perfect. So I try one thing at a time.
Dr. Mache: I try it for one to three months and then if that doesn’t work, I don’t add another one. I take that one away and add a different one. Because what will happen to many women I see is they come in and they are paying like hundreds of dollars every month for they got it. Like I say, what are you taking in? They open up the pocket stuff on the desk and it’s 10 things. And I say, well, which of those are helping you say, well I take them all and I said, but there’s one of them you never know. So if you try this approach, it’s slower. But you may find there’s one thing that cuts down the frequency and the intensity of whatever your symptom is. And so I like to do it that way. And then after you’ve been through the top, whatever number are the ones that are most likely to work, you may have to add them up. If you don’t want to go with you know, more traditional approaches. Yes. One thing, I will
Dr. Veronica: That one at a time. I think that’s important because you know, I like you, everybody comes in with their big bag of everything. And one of my favorite things to do as a supplement Washoe. Okay, let’s just stop everything and see how you feel and then decide based on how you feel and what the whole issues are to slowly add back and see what the symptoms we get and what results we get and understanding that nothing is instantaneous and it does take one to three months. And I liked the 90 days is a, to me a good trial if it hasn’t worked after 90 days for get it, if you got part, keep that and then let’s figure out what we add on. But you have to have some result. You don’t just take it because you saw it on a popular TV show because every supplement doesn’t work for everybody.
Dr. Veronica: And I just want to put in a plug for another type of supplement that a lot of people don’t necessarily think about or know a lot and a lot of people think is quackery but works well. Homeopathics I’ve had some great results with homeopathics with people who they’ve been on something. I’m like, okay, try this little thing, which will not interact with anything that they’re on. And all of a sudden they’re just like, Oh my God, what did you do to me? So realize that if you, you may not have heard about it, you may think it’s you know, magic or witchcraft or whatever. But these, these, there’s no, there are other of theirs. There’s, there is not only ones that we see that there’s either Vedic herbs, there’s traditional Chinese medicine herbs, there’s so many different, we talked about Maka, but there’s so many different preparations around the world that may work for you.
Dr. Veronica: To me, it’s Irv. Seeing practitioners who have different expertise says, because if you say, you know, I’m committed to doing this a particular way. If you go to a doctor and you get like the the nutrients and that doesn’t work. So traditional Chinese medicine trained person might work and you get a few acupuncture treatments and all of a sudden you’re like, I’m good. You go to a chiropractor or somebody like that who does traditions, who does Tony total body modification and figures out things that way you might say, I’m good. And so we’re talking about this just so people open their mind to understand that if you have tried something to the limits of what you know from your research, and I’m talking about people who don’t have medical background and people have medical background too, it doesn’t mean that nothing works. And you can do these in combination with a lot of times taking estrogen.
Dr. Mache: Yes, you can take these with estrogen. And I think that there are a lot of, you know, a lot of areas like there’s ashwagandha and there’s other kinds of, you know, there’s many products out there, which I have used to some extent, most of them on different people. And as I said, everything will work on some people. Nothing works on everyone. And I think that the trick is to be patient and to throw and don’t leave those lifestyle things off the exercise and nutrition, the stress reduction and sleep. Because all these things go together and we have to keep thinking this, the sum of you, because the key factor here is to realize that if you do use hormones, it’s kind of going to every cell in your body. If you don’t, you have to really work at each part. And it’s very important.
Dr. Mache: The nutrition also gets into the supplement parts because you are talking about supplements. But two of the most important supplements I think for women, particularly in midlife, but at any time, but particularly in midlife, is calcium and vitamin D, vitamin D three. Because right now the fear of 50 50 year old woman who’s healthy, your chances of dying from a complication of osteoporosis, like a broken hip or something like that is about the same as your risk of dying from breast cancer. Now, everybody is worrying about breast cancer, but let me tell you, in addition to your mammogram, you should have a bone density somewhere around age 50 if your mom had osteoporosis or you’ve had several broken bones when you were younger, you should even get a bone density at age because that is a big deal and that is preventable for the most part, but, and vitamin D is a hormone and it’s not only for bone health, which you probably know, but vitamin D, I’ve found that some women who are profoundly low and in vitamin D actually got benefit from their hot flashes.
Dr. Mache: When I got the vitamin D up, I find that the vitamin D has been implicated and if it’s low, increasing the risk of breast cancer, it may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. It contributes to hair loss, which is a terrible problem for a lot of women. They really get upset about thinning hair. The issue of muscle weakening vitamin D is involved in that. So vitamin D is a very important hormone as well as just a vitamin. And so I think that you really need to make sure your provider is getting your bone density and a vitamin D three level 25 hydroxy vitamin D, O H hydroxy vitamin D.
Dr. Veronica: A little more about vitamin D. There’s a, I tell people, okay, let’s check your vitamin D. But for me, when I’m looking for a level, I’m not looking for, you’re in the lab range, I’m looking for an optimal range, which is higher than the bottom lab reference range. That’s the first thing. The second is for women who are in mid life, generally, I prescribed vitamin D three along with K two. What do you say about that?
Dr. Mache: So the first part, the vitamin D three levels right now in the laboratories are a little bit lower than they, you know, really the optimal range. So if your lab goes from say 30 to 45 or whatever your numbers are in your lab, if you’re in the 30 range or 29 range or 31 range, I try to bump limit up to, you know, get to the other side or even through the top of those ranges because I think that the ranges are actually too low. So you want to not be at the bottom of that range. And I get a lot of women who are between, you know, people trying to avoid skin cancer and they’re always having sunscreen on and avoiding the sun and so forth. A lot of women’s vitamin D can be down to the, you know, half of the normal values and they suddenly, they feel better.
Dr. Mache: And it does take about one to three months to get your levels back up. It’s just like the other things you take as a supplement, it takes time to build it back up. And if you don’t continue taking at a lower level the rest of your life, you will have a lower level in another year or so. So I, if I put somebody in vitamin D to bring them up to normal, I usually give a higher dose and then when they get to normal, I lower the dose but keep them on it because they will go back down to below normal if they don’t.
Dr. Veronica: Yeah. And this is especially important for people who have darker skin. They tend to be more vitamin D deficient. So if you’re a darker skin person or you live in a area like the Northeast, we tend to be deficient in vitamin D. So I think everybody should check it. When I’m telling people to look for a range, I like people to be in the 60 to 80 range before I’m comfortable that they’re good. I knew, I’ve noticed that people start feeling good with vitamin D in that low more optimal range would send to be more 60 to 80 versus you’re at 30 to 45 and saying okay, your normal. So I th I’ve found same thing, lower level, that’s not that lab reference range is based on something different than what is the optimal level for people’s body to feel good. And for them to get relief from the symptoms. Now what about the K two?
Dr. Mache: I don’t have enough data on the K two to comment on it with certainty. So I will leave it be that I don’t see that it’s anything but a good thing, but I don’t have data to support doing it or not off the top of my head.
Dr. Veronica: Okay, fair enough. There’s a lot of debate about that. So that’s almost like saying okay from the Harvard doctor, let’s hear what you got to say. And I always appreciate when you say I don’t have enough data so I’m going to leave it out there. But if so right now you can’t say it’s wrong to do, it could be right. Just you’re not sure if this point. Yes. Okay. So let’s, let’s wrap up here. You started doing this because you first had this experience where you said, I’m going to use my voice because I kept it after having this, what you thought was a tumor that was horrible and you’re going to have everything resected onto your wife being thrown into early menopause early. I love this is this is a message for hope and I’m happy. Like I said, there’s somebody out there who’s looking at women most of their life because think about it, we’re all living longer now and women, you hit menopause, you start going through with a lot earlier than you even know before symptoms happen. And so you’re dealing with women for most of their life versus just the fertility years. That’s interesting. It used to do the IVF and switched completely over to the other side.
Dr. Mache: It’s a lot of women who go through fertility and are unsuccessful, you know, the more and more successful. But many of the ones who they call difficult responders are poor responders. The women whose ovaries are not working well, those women are going to probably go into earlier menopause. And the symptoms of menopause, as you pointed out, start up to 10 years before you actually hit menopause. So there’s this whole window of transition that women can be helping themselves be prepared.
Dr. Veronica: Wonderful. And so those are the basics of lifestyle that we talked about. Key Kia. So I want to see again before we wrap up. First your book and where we can get it. And then also the hot years magazine.
Dr. Mache: Sure. The book can be gotten just about anywhere. And I will the book is called the estrogen fix. I have an earlier one called the estrogen window, but this book has been recommended by the North American menopause society, not only for women but also practitioners cause it’s easy to read. But I have references for everything I said. So, you know, you don’t have to believe me. You can look up the paper.
Dr. Veronica: I love it.
Dr. Mache: And then the magazine, I’d like to give everyone a free subscription. It’s called hot years and you can go to hot years, mag.com. It looks like I’m going to be having it backwards there. So maybe you can, okay. Hot years, mag.com. And if you go there, you can get a free issue. It’s a digital magazine and download it and share it with your friends. Because we do interviews, we have exercises, we have recipes, we have, it might be yoga in it, but there’s also a distillation of the latest medical information. So hot years, mag.com
Dr. Veronica: Wonderful. You’re such a resource for women of all years and also their partners who have to deal with women in all these different years because we all want to think that we’re old and evil. We want to feel like we’re hot in transitioning in a wonderful way, and so thank you for your work. Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine Practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.
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