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In this interview, we are highlighting the impact of functional medicine and functional nutrition in women’s health. Whether you are navigating perimenopause, menopause, or the beginning stages of menstruation, functional medicine looks at the whole picture of your life to provide sustainable solutions to otherwise challenging health conditions.
Dr. Jessica Drummond is an expert on functional nutrition and women’s health. She has gone through some of her own recent health challenges that you’ll learn about in the interview, regarding long COVID.
Some of the most important takeaways from this interview include getting some clarity around these topics:
With the common occurrence of medical gaslighting, we know how important getting quality, compassionate care is to your health and well-being.
Tune in to hear/watch this amazing conversation. You’ll walk away feeling optimistic, empowered, and with a renewed sense of hope.
Dr. Jessica Drummond, DCN, CNS, PT, NBC-HWC Founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute is passionate about caring for and empowering women who struggle with women’s and pelvic health conditions. She is equally passionate about educating and supporting clinicians in confidently and safely using integrative tools to transform women’s and pelvic healthcare.
Having two decades of experience in women’s and pelvic health as a physical therapist and functional nutritionist, plus owning a private women’s health clinical nutrition and coaching practice, gives her a unique perspective on the integrative, conservative options for pelvic pain management, hormone balance, preconception and fertility support, postpartum recovery, and chronic pain and fatigue management in active and athletic women. She regularly lectures on topics such as integrative pelvic pain management, natural fertility options, optimal hormone health, female athletes, and functional and integrative nutrition for rehabilitation, nutrition, wellness, fitness, and medical professionals.
Dr. Drummond was educated at the University of Virginia, Emory University, Duke Integrative Medicine, and Maryland University of Integrative Health.
0:00 Dr. Ginger Garner: Hello, everyone, and welcome back. I’m here today with a guest that I’ve been waiting to talk to for a really long time. And I’m just going to jump right into the introduction and say first of all, to Dr. Jessica Drummond, welcome.
0:18 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
0:20 Dr. Ginger Garner: I’m so glad that you’re here. You guys, she is a wealth of knowledge. I just want to say that. Like, that could be her bio. I am a wealth of knowledge. Because it’s true. But because I want you guys to understand a little bit of the background and where we’re headed, This is going to be about all things women’s health and supporting and sustaining women’s health. Because as you guys know, if you’ve listened to me talk long enough, we’ve been ignored long enough, we’ve been gaslit long enough, and it’s time for that to change.
So let’s see how Dr. Jessica Drummond has been doing this. She has a bunch of letters behind her name. She has her doctorate in clinical nutrition, also certified as a nutrition specialist and a PT, as well as a health coach. And also, she’s the founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. They are passionate about, as you can imagine, empowering women and caring for them and their pelvic health conditions.
She’s also really supportive of clinicians, so she has training and offerings for both, and we will get to all of that and how that, no matter if you’re a healthcare provider or just a healthcare provider or a person with a pelvis, there’s something here for you in this podcast today. Dr. Jess has over two decades of experience in women’s and pelvic health as a pelvic PT, as a functional nutritionist, plus having her own private women’s health clinical nutrition and coaching practice, which really gives, you know, a deep dive and really rich insight on integrative and conservative options for all kinds of things, not just pelvic pain, which is what we think of first, but hormone balance, preconception, fertility support, postpartum recovery, chronic pain, chronic fatigue management is a host of things, because there’s a lot of types of care that we need throughout the lifespan as as women.
I think that I mentioned most of that, but I did I mention hormone health? If not, it’s because it’s kind of at the top of the list lately. And I want to talk about a prospective paper to you guys that just came out that you’ll be excited to know about because it will impact 100% of women at some point in their lives. And finally, Dr. Drummond was educated at the University of Virginia, close by to me, Emory University, Duke Integrative Medicine, which is very close by to me here in North Carolina, and Maryland University of Integrative Health. Welcome, Jessica.
3:02 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Thank you so much, Ginger, for having me and for that really kind introduction. I think much of the reason why my career has been so all over the place is just you know, when you’re in the thick of it, there are always new questions, new curiosities. And, you know, I’ve just been doing this for a really long time now. And my children remind me of that constantly when they say things like, back in the 1900s, did you blah, blah, blah. Oh my gosh.
3:38 Dr. Ginger Garner: Remind me again, you have one daughter in college, right? Yeah. And what, how old is the other daughter?
3:44 Dr. Jessica Drummond: The other one’s 13. So she’s in eighth grade. And my husband gave her a sweatshirt from when we’re trying to clean out our basement. And he has tons of old, like running t-shirts and sweatshirts. And it relatively was sort of close to you down in the South. We used to run the Peachtree, 10 K, 5K, I guess it’s a 10 K race. So we had a sweatshirt from that. He’s like, Oh, does anybody want this? And Kate was like, Oh my gosh, it’s from the 1900s. And she was so excited. So yeah, so my 13 year old and then my 20 year old.
So I’ve also been knee deep in women’s health, kind of navigating like menstrual health and birth control and all of that as a mom, which has been very interesting, because of course, almost nothing has really changed since when I was going through it, which is terrible.
4:39 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s worth repeating actually. There hasn’t been enough change. I have similar age kids and so I am just going to underscore that and just have everybody pause for a minute and realize that this podcast today is about that, forwarding the conversation, um, to let you guys know what. Has changed in the literature and what kind of help that you can access now, even if your providers aren’t up on the science.
5:08 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, and I think that’s so important because you’re right in that the literature has changed, the research has changed, our ability to learn. So what’s really interesting about kids, young women in their 20s, they have a lot more information, they’re a lot more comfortable talking about these things. Even my 13 year old, they talk a lot about their periods and if they’re synced and what period underwear they have and period bathing suits. You know, all of this stuff that they talk about amongst their friends really comfortably, which I think is great. Same thing as young women in their 20s talk about birth control, but they also have a lot of hurdles.
Some of the things have actually gotten worse. My, you know, my older daughter is in Tennessee, which is a dangerous state to live in from, you know, abortion access, which is not just about abortion. It’s about ectopic pregnancy risk. It’s about birth control access, you know? And so it’s really complicated, I think, for us to help girls and women navigate the landscape because physicians are both overworked and kind of undertrained on some of the more recent developments and they’re in higher risk situations, and almost very few of our kind of standard gynecology colleagues have any coaching training or integrative training. So their communication skill set is lacking, you know, it’s not something they learn about in their training, even though it’s very extensive in certain areas.
So yeah, so I think that’s been really eye-opening for me because I guess when you’re immersed in this field for more than 20 years, and then you just take your late teenager to a doctor’s appointment, you expect so much more than what you get.
7:16 Dr. Ginger Garner: Oh my goodness, yes. And you have a unique experience having daughters. I have no idea what’s happening in the world of, you know, adolescence in terms of, because I only see adults (as patients) because I have three boys. So I think your experiences is so valuable to be talking about today because of your experience as a clinician, because of your experience as a mom, because of your, also your advocacy, because of your work in forwarding women’s health so that more women and girls have access to the care that they frankly deserve and must have that we in our generation didn’t due to a lack of science, but also lack of access.
And now that we have more support for better care, including functional, integrative lifestyle medicine based care. Let’s talk about how we can get the word out now and what that care looks like.
One of the first things that I wanted to ask you was just, you know, your story, I know you have so many cases to draw from, and that’s personally, it’s professionally, but if we could just like kick off, because I want to talk about at the top of our conversation here, something that’s going to impact 100% of, you know, all women listening, and that is perimenopause and menopause.
And there’s just a paper that came out. Let me look at mine. I want to miss this here. A paper, a prospective paper that came out in the Menopause Society Journal last week or something like that. And it actually is, the title is Tis But a Scratch. So if you’re a Monty Python buff, then you’ll recognize the reference. It’s when the character Arthur gravely wounds a guard and the guard continuously claims, tis but a scratch, tis but a scratch. And that’s what it’s referring to, that an entire generation of women missed out on the benefits of hormone replacement because of bad science at that time.
So I’d like to kick it off with that, but if you could give me a little bit of perspective about, you know, and the listener about your work and, you know, where you kind of dove into that whole perimenopausal, menopausal, you know, part of your expertise.
09:41 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, so we have two certification programs. One’s in perimenopause and menopause and one is in longevity, which I think of as like advanced menopause support because once a woman is sort of like once a woman is postpartum, she’s always postpartum. Once a woman is menopausal, she’s always menopausal, you know, even if she’s 90, she’s postmenopausal or gone through that transition.
And so I think longevity, you know, a lot of times we think about fertility as starting in puberty, right? So as healthy as we can get girls and women, girls, as soon as they’re transitioning into puberty, the healthier their fertility is, even when they’re in their early 40s. And I think the same goes for longevity for women begins in their perimenopausal and menopausal years. So roughly starting at age 35 to 40. We really want to be paying attention to our neuroendocrine health because it’s really the foundation for everything else. It’s the foundation for cardiovascular health. It’s the foundation for bone health, musculoskeletal health, you know, dementia, like brain health, memory, brain focus, sleep quality. Even our skin structure, our our sexual health, so every system and even immune system are impacted by neuroendocrine health in ages 35 to 40.
So if a woman’s 40 42 And she’s starting to struggle with sleep or mild cognitive impairments. You know, she goes to the doctor and she’s like, I’m kind of anxious. I’m stressed. The reality is she does have a lot going on. Like she’s taking care of sometimes babies, sometimes teenagers, sometimes five dogs, aging parents, and, right? It’s like not or, and aging parents, and she’s in the kind of midst of a really key growth time in her career. So there is a lot going on.
And so the first response is always, and this has been my personal experience on most of my clients, antidepressants. Like you’re stressed or you need to just drop your stress, which that’s useless information without context. You know, and sure the antidepressants may be helpful at some level, but I think we have to slow down. And this is what conventional medicine doesn’t allow is space for women to just kind of stop for a second and look at what are they doing out of obligation, because we do have research that shows that women doing things that they feel good about their contribution in the world, even if it’s the exact same task as another woman who feels that it’s an obligation, it’s two very different impacts to their neuroendocrine system.
So how can we kind of let our brain and our hormones relax by taking an audit, if you will, of our day-to-day stressors and seeing what can be changed, what can be modified? Because one of the things that also has accelerated in the 20 years that I’ve been in practice, or more than that now, is the environment has gotten more, quote unquote, toxic. And that includes the level of stress that we’re supposed to endure and by day-to-day stress, I mean, just stuff to do, right? There’s just more stuff to do. If we take a step back and look at what working women in the 1980s would be required to do, working people in the 1980s. First of all, you couldn’t even work if you weren’t at work because it wasn’t like you had a computer at home. You know, you could be an executive and no one could find you after 5.30 p.m. They just wouldn’t know where to look. Right?
So there are those kinds of day-to-day stressors of stuff to do, but we’re also in an environment that’s increasingly chemically toxic. So we have increasing air pollution, effects of climate change. The number one cause of death for women in the United States has actually changed in the last few years to be COPD, because more women are smoking, more women are living in air pollution that they can’t avoid. And so in the United States, the number one cause of death has actually shifted. And these are things that we don’t have as much control over as we think. Our water supply, even things like microplastics in our food and our drinks and our clothing.
14:54 Dr. Ginger Garner: And the soil being depleted of its micronutrients and yeah.
15:00 Dr. Jessica Drummond: And the reality is that the environment has kind of shifted beneath us in an accelerated way from one generation. When our mothers were in their 40s and 50s, the level of stress was exponentially less from a biochemical standpoint. Does that make sense?
15:22 Dr. Ginger Garner: It’s a pretty bad picture, right? When we stand back and look at the 40,000 ft views, like, oh, we are in a handbasket. What are we going to do? Because there’s so many variables that you cannot change. If you’re growing your own carrots, you think, great, I’m growing them. Well, they’re not going to be as nutrient dense as they were 40 years ago, right?
So you think about those things outside your control. And you think about the average, you know, mom, let’s just say showing up to work at, you know, 36 years old or whatever, and all of the things, the stressors that we’ve just listed. So how do we begin to make that shift and begin to control the variables that we can because it is kind of a pretty dark you know, reality that, but we wanna be aware of that. We don’t wanna stick our head in the sand. We wanna be aware of all these variables that exist.
16:14 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, because here’s the good news. If we’re aware of them, we have the capacity to strip them away at some level. Not all of them probably, but we can start saying no to just more things we don’t wanna do or setting boundaries around those. If we know that most of our food is depleted, we can supplement with some of the most common nutrients that everyone just needs now. We can do fancy nutrient testing, but most of the time we don’t need a lot of that. Everyone needs some vitamin D. Every woman needs some magnesium. Every woman probably needs some zinc and just microminerals. And we can get those even from more food-based sources like greens powders, red powders, you know, it doesn’t always have to be in pill form.
But we can be thinking more actively about filling in the gaps that are just because our environment has shifted below us. And then on the other end of that kind of biochemical bucket of toxic awareness, we can be really, at a very basic level, starting to help our body detoxify more actively. I used to be kind of… allergic to the word detox. I’m like, you know, your liver, your gut is going to do this work for you, which is true. And the level, it’s sort of like, we’re now asking our liver and gut instead of to do like a few exercises with some five pound weights, they have to start doing like full body, hundred pound squats, you know?
17:50 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s a really smart way to think about it and to kind of break it down because I totally agree. I avoided a couple of words. Stretching, you know, stretch it out, right? And then I’m just going to detox my liver. I really avoided that like the plague. But when you do put it like that, like if our liver is expected to take on more and more and more and the gut, at the same time we’re living in an environment that regularly depletes it or harms the gut bacteria, then we actually do have to fill in those gaps.
And so I think that’s really what we’re talking about with perimenopause, menopausal support, is gap filling. And that’s the lovely thing about functional nutrition, functional medicine, and the things that integrative and lifestyle medicine offer because that’s individualized. Like we couldn’t sit here and say, if you add X and B and D, everyone is going to be fine. I wish that it was that easy. But the beautiful thing is, you know, and I know you’re going to launch into this in just a second. It’s kind of a segue as like, everyone has the capacity and it doesn’t have to be that expensive to be able to learn what your gaps are and then be able to fill them. And that’s what we’re that is kind of the nature of, of a functional medicine.
19:11 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Absolutely. Um, I don’t think you need a lot of functional testing, first of all, because most of the sort of overarching strategies that a lot of people need as an experienced clinician and functional nutrition, functional medicine, I can listen to your story. What I, what most practitioners don’t have is enough time to hear the gaps. And we can hear it based on symptoms, based on your life, based on where you live, where you get most of your food, where you get your water, you know, there are a lot of things we can just, we can just know, from the environment that you’re individually living in.
19:52 Dr. Ginger Garner: In a way, it’s like a full circle return to what medicine began as listening to the person’s story and beginning to determine what they individually needed. And then we began to rely on fancy diagnostic tests and labs and things. And so, you’re basically saying, you know, as a clinician, you sit down, you listen, and in listening to their story, which is, that’s what you want to find for those of you guys listening. People who will listen to your story, because a well attended to story does provide you the information that you need to fill those gaps. And for the, for the listener, can you just like briefly overview because I think people can get lost. They may know, oh, I’ve been to functional medicine provider and they wanted me to spend $3,000.
Can we just talk a little bit about those functional medicine tests that they may not need in order to get started with a very simple routine that’s going to greatly improve their health?
20:45 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, so one of the things that I think we do need in many cases, or one of the tests that can give us a lot of information. So step one is you want your clinician to really listen, to give almost a whole, you know, in our private client program, we have an hour where we do nothing, but really hear the story and come up with a couple of initial steps. The other thing that would be important to work with an integrative or functional practitioner, no matter what their skillset is, if they’re a physical therapist, if they’re a nutritionist, if they’re a physician, that’s in some level irrelevant because integrative and functional practitioners sort of bring the whole window of usable tools, and then they have some various scope of practice.
21:34 Dr. Ginger Garner: Good point. Such a good point. So your functional provider, med provider, just to reiterate what you said, because that’s important. I don’t want anybody to miss it, is that they could be PT or do or nurse practitioner or health coaching or a number of different things and be able to provide the information to you.
21:51 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Very true, because functional medicine is a perspective, not a subspecialty. So it’s not like a gastroenterologist or a cardiologist. It’s a practitioner of any discipline of health, health coaching, nutritionist, physical therapist, occupational therapist, nurse practitioner, whatever, who thinks broadly and who slows down to take the time to look basically at the two ends of the equation. What’s missing, what nutrients are missing, what laughter is missing, what joy is missing.
22:30 Dr. Ginger Garner: These aspects of lifestyle medicine, you know, how’s their sleep? How’s their relationship? Do they feel safe? Do they live in a food desert? You know, all those things.
22:39 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah. All that stuff, like what’s missing and what needs to be kind of detoxified, like what needs to be cleaned up. So, and that can be done in so many different ways. Sweating can come from exercise, it can come from sauna, it can come from, you know, lots of different things. So, that is what you want to look for in your sort of functional provider is someone who thinks broadly, who listens. And then the best test that I think looks at kind of all of that at some level, no one functional test is perfect, but urinary organic acids test gives us a lot of information about two things, what’s going on in the gut microbiome, and which is kind of the organ of bacteria and other microbes that lives in your large intestine.
You actually want this giant community of microbes, bacteria, viruses, whatever, living fungi, living in your colon. You want that whole subpopulation of beings who lives within us to be super happy. So we can get a snapshot of what that’s looking like and we can look for nutrient deficiencies and we can see about brain neurotransmitter deficiencies because sometimes that drives some mood related symptoms in perimenopause and menopause. Yeah. So that’s one valuable test.
Again, it doesn’t have to happen right away. It maybe it’ll happen three months in when you’ve got some things under your belt. The other really important thing to look for in a functional practitioner is are they gonna work with you for a while? Because especially if you’re coming to this to kind of address your health in your forties and your fifties and your thirties, you’ve probably had three or four decades where you’ve been piling up challenges and no one’s really addressed them or you’ve kind of band-aided them with antidepressants or hormonal birth control or steroid injections or anything.
24:42 Dr. Ginger Garner: That’s so important that you just mentioned that because a number of people think that and feel or we’re told, let’s just put it that way, we’re told that that birth control was the fix. The antidepressants are the actual fix. And in some cases, yes, it can certainly help, but we’re still needing to look for root cause and determine more broadly what’s going on.
25:06 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Right, so if you really want to kind of think in a regenerative, restorative capacity around your health, almost thinking of midlife as an opportunity to reset your health that’ll carry you through the next 50 years, almost everyone is gonna have to clean up some challenges, do some maintenance, if you will, from the 30 years before. And if you struggled with, any kind of chronic health condition in that time, which may be genetic, something like endometriosis or maybe autoimmune or maybe chronic post-viral syndrome or whatever, there’s a number of things to do to really rebuild up the system in perimenopause and menopause. So that can be valuable.
And then the other couple of tests that can be valuable, I do like looking at a stool test for the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is so integrative to your, or integral to your brain, to your digestion, which is how we can process a lot of this stuff, and your immune system, which is then related to your hormones. Because anytime there’s stress, the hormone system is gonna be knocked out of balance. Stress that is unmanaged, unprocessed, the hormone system will be affected.
So those two tests give us a lot of information. The Dutch test you’ll hear a lot about related to endocrine health, and there’s some value in that. It’s less valuable to sort of determine what dosing of hormones you need or things like that, but it can give us some information about your, stress tolerance based on your cortisol levels and your cortisol curve, which is a stress buffering hormone that should be kind of robustly active during the day. And it can give us some information about how your body is processing hormones. So it can tolerate, you know, is it good to add hormones or not?
And the paper you were just mentioning, I’ll let you dig into that a bit more, but what we were now learning is how much benefit it is for almost every woman starting in midlife to have hormone support, especially with declining estrogen, progesterone, and in some cases, testosterone. So those can also be measured in the blood. In our training, we talk a lot. I interviewed about 15 different experts in hormone replacement therapy who had all different perspectives. So the one thing I am a bit concerned around about perimenopausal and menopausal hormone replacement therapy is I’m a little afraid we’re gonna start just giving it to everyone in the same way we did birth control pills. It’s like, here’s the standard dose.
27:58 Dr. Ginger Garner: Without properly looking at everything, like metabolizing all of the estrogen that they’re being given, right? And if you don’t look at that, you could really get a clogged up bathtub.
28:08 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yes, exactly. I think I like the bathtub image even more. There’s another image, it’s like a bucket with a hole in it. So clogged up bathtub for sure. And in certain countries, that’s a real problem. It’s like, here’s the standard dose of estrogen and progesterone. And I don’t love that. Now there are FDA approved bio-identical in the way that that’s described, hormone options that are variable in dosing that can be covered by insurance. So it doesn’t have to be compounded, it doesn’t have to be especially expensive, but it does have to, your practitioner, maybe not the person prescribing your hormones because that’s a sort of a subspecialty. That’s true.
But someone else on your team does have to have the time and skillset to make sure that if you’re also going to be processing these added hormones, you’re able to process the added pesticides that you’re taking in and your extra supplements and how much fat you’re eating and how much, you know, whatever, are you getting enough fiber? Are you not constipated? Are you sweating enough? You know, so we have to think about all of that And there are certain situations.
So personally, I’m, we can get into the details of this, but I’ve been living with long COVID, recovering from long COVID for about three years now. And I’m feeling at this point pretty well recovered, but it was an interesting experience for me because it rapidly and abruptly threw me into menopause. Which anyone who’s had a hysterectomy or any other kind of medical menopause will say is not fun to go into.
29:52 Dr. Ginger Garner: No, it’s not. I experienced that.
29:58 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah. So we can both tell you that it’s no fun to go into abrupt menopause, even if you’re in very good condition going into it.
30:07 Dr. Ginger Garner: Even if you’re in pelvic health and you’re doing functional medicine, it’s still a shock to your system. You’re not going to escape that, right? Being human, it’s just going to happen that way.
30:18 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yes. So I tried to supplement with estrogen, but because I was having terrible hot flashes, which can also be caused by some of the tick-borne chronic infections, things like Babesia and Bartonella, some of the underlying causes of Lyme, which by the way, never had before that, never had any symptoms of, don’t have any recollection of even being bitten by a tick. May or may not even have, it’s hard to tell, because the testing for chronic hidden infections is even less helpful because sometimes they can be really hidden and you can be dealing with them without being able to really see them on the lab. So that’s one possibility.
The other thing that can make it more difficult to deal with estrogen, there are a few others, is having mast cell activation syndrome, which a lot of people with endometriosis do have because essentially you can be sort of irritated by the increase in histamine that Estrogen modulates histamine and histamine clearance, so that can be problematic. So if you’re a person who has hives at the beginning, an ovulation, or you tend to have skin blotchiness, itchiness, or you tend to have burning sensations, often in the bladder, or other parts of the body. Red flag for MCAS or histamine issues. I see this a lot with my patients with endometriosis.
So estrogen can exacerbate that. It doesn’t mean you don’t want to eventually take estrogen maybe, but you also have to optimize your body’s ability to process histamine to be able to tolerate it. And then there is a gene SNP, PAI1, otherwise known as Serpene1. That this gene encodes for an enzyme that breaks down fibrin. So one of the things that happens in long COVID is you get little micro clots throughout the body, which makes it hard for the capillaries to give oxygen to the cells. So the, for the blood to give oxygen to the cells and the same stuff that can gunk up the blood in this sort of mild way that can make people very fatigued or, you know, have trouble with oxygen exchange, exercise, things like that also can create a kind of barrier wrapping around chronic viruses.
So if you had Epstein-Barr or mono as a kid, or you had COVID and didn’t fully bounce right back, or you have a chronic yeast issue, or you have mold toxicity, these things can be, the body binds them up in what are known as biofilms. They kind of package these pathogens or these toxins in little packets to protect the body from having to deal with them. But you get more of that packaging happening, which hides them from the immune system.
So the body can’t fully get rid of them either until we take some enzymes that break that all up, whether you’re talking about your blood flow or the hidden pathogens or toxins. And we have to do that slowly because otherwise it’s like you can get really symptomatic from suddenly dumping a bunch of toxins in the body. That also, those kinds of things can be exacerbated by estrogen because if you have that genetic snip where you’re not clearing the clotting, using the enzyme that really cleans up these clotting factors as efficiently as someone else, you’ll need a little support to be able to do that and not have some potential side effects from the added estrogen.
34:12 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. And, you know, and to, and to kind of parse all that out for the listener, because, um, just, just threw out a lot of terms you may not be aware of, like single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs. Right. So don’t be afraid.
34:28 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. That was a little high level, but it was a little hard to otherwise basically there are enzymes that clean up the mess.
34:36 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah, so when you break these things down, and you go, Oh, well, do I need to get genetic testing? Well, not right away. Because when you go into a practitioner, they’re going to listen to your story. And they’re going to address all the pillars of lifestyle medicine, they’re going to look broadly at the complaints that you’re bringing in, and they’re going to work on helping your body process if you’re on estrogen or you want to be. Because maybe just say, because we’re both pelvic PTs, you come in with pelvic organ prolapse, right?
And you need to, it is requisite for you to actually be on hormone support if you’re postmenopausal because the tissues can’t handle what, let’s say if you need a pessary, your tissues can’t handle that unless you are, they’re very healthy and supported by estrogen. So your practitioner is going to help you process that in a very organic, holistic way. And if you continue to have issues and you, let’s just say you end up needing, you know, a Dutch test, because we’re worried that, well, you’re still having symptoms that says your bathtub is kind of clogged still. You’re not processing the estrogen properly, or metabolizing it, then that is next level.
That’s next level of saying, okay, let’s go get genetic testing loads. Let’s go actually look at how your body is metabolizing all three types of estrogen. So I don’t, we’re not talking about it to confuse you as the listener, we’re talking about it to say, these are all the options that you have available that if you still have symptoms, Don’t worry. There’s another level. There’s another layer. We just keep taking off the layers.
So, you know, when Jess is talking about SNPs or other things like that, that is the higher level stuff that is out there that can help you. So if you’ve said, if you’re saying, oh, I’ve tried estrogen, it was a disaster and I went off of it, don’t worry, don’t worry. Maybe it’s just you didn’t take, your practitioner didn’t understand how to take you to level two or level three or level four, because that’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about now is there’s all these things open to you. If you’ve tried hormone replacement or other things before and it didn’t work, don’t worry. There are other things that can be tried.
36:54 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Well, and I think that’s really the message around kind of the fact that we do know so much, but any given one practitioner, including you and I, don’t know everything. And when we hit our upper limit of understanding, you want your practitioner to be collaborating with people. You want them to be asking more questions, to be looking at more options, because very often in women’s health, we need multiple solutions for a whole person problem.
So, you know, let’s go back to the story of a 20 something year old girl in Tennessee who doesn’t wanna get pregnant, is sexually active, has the best kind of birth control effect on hormonal birth control, but maybe she’s experiencing some side effects. Well, let’s look at all the options. Maybe a copper IUD would be better. Still maybe not perfect. Maybe we need to balance that with zinc, right? So there’s not always like another one perfect answer.
It’s not just that your menopausal hormones need to be dose adjusted. It could be that you’re taking the right menopausal hormones, support hormones, and you need a little bit of liver support. and you need some enzymatic supplement support, you know, and this is where, and like, and you need to be sweating more, maybe you just need to exercise in addition to being on these hormones, right? So I think that’s where medicine in general, that’s the level I think of knowledge that we now have, and that is a, either whether you’re a practitioner or you’re a person, a patient navigating the system, who’s just looking for help or both, because quite frankly, we’re all sort of both.
And certainly every practitioner is also a patient. You can now request this level of care from your team. And you may have to put it together as a team, might not be just one person. And I think that’s where our communication skills as practitioners need to be improved, but also as people navigating the system, because sometimes, you know, our practitioners are under an immense amount of stress, they have very limited time, and we’re, we’re on the inside. I mean, you and I, Ginger, are certainly trying to change how medicine is practiced. And because that’s probably a lifetime job..
39:48 Dr. Ginger Garner: Multigenerational.
39:50 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Multigenerational job. Absolutely. Just knowing, just having attended this conversation, you have new tools to ask for better support for your health. And unfortunately, you’re probably going to have to.
40:09 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yeah. I think understanding, going back to something that you said in the beginning about: we’ll use OBGYNs because we’re talking about, we’ve mentioned menopause, we’ve mentioned endometriosis, for example. Those would usually fall into, and I hear this over and over again, where a patient or a friend, I was at a gathering over the weekend and someone’s like, well, I went to my OBGYN and I was like, “Stop right there.”
Let me just explain that in addition to getting zero education on pelvic health as a PT, OBGYNs get zero education on menopause. So if you’re going to your OBGYN, unless they have had specific post-doc training in menopause, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Not that they’re not amazing for what they are doing, but that is not their specific training. And there’s a misconception, there’s misinformation that, you know, your OB-GYN is basically for everything in the kitchen sink. And that puts, you know, an unfair burden on them. But also at the same time, I think there’s a little bit of a, I think all practitioners can struggle with the ego thing of just admitting, I have no idea how to manage that, right?
So if you’re listening and you have endo, you have menopause, or you’re just, it’s your preconception, and you’re having fertility issues. It’s important to ask those hard questions about, well, have you had, you know, that training and that specific training to address this? And it’s also important to get to the point where you can, you know, talk to your friends about the issues like you’re mentioning with your daughter, you know, talking, being very open about it. But I just wanted to point that out because it’s so important to make sure you get to the right practitioner and continue to ask questions. And if it feels strange, or if you feel dismissed, then you were.
42:10 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah.
42:11 Dr. Ginger Garner: And to keep asking questions until you get to someone who, and that’s why I’m so excited about doing this podcast today, because you can leave a note in the comments on YouTube. You can reach out to the websites. There are resources here for you to be able to get to the right practitioner, no matter where you live on the planet.
42:30 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Right, because increasingly there’s education and resources that are through telehealth that are widely and globally available. And sometimes you’re going to have to take the real active approach of bringing specific knowledge and questions to your doctor. If you need them. One of the things that a colleague of mine wrote a book five, 10 years ago called the doctor of the future is the patient. And I agree with that. I think that’s going to happen. That’s increasingly happening already because of the dispersal of information via the internet.
Like we have an endometriosis certificate program in our community, as well. Of which and actually any of these are open to lay people as well because you need to be really skilled about your own health circumstance and usually because you’re really focused on the one thing that’s bothering you in very many cases you’re going to be ahead of your practitioner who has to be aware of a lot of different things all the time.
So I encourage that if your practitioner doesn’t and they’re feeling threatened by it, take a step back and know that that’s probably not the right person for you. You have to be able to have a really comfortable conversation with your practitioner where you might know some different data than they know or some newer data than they know. And they have to be willing to both listen and help you navigate that because where their skill sets comes in is being able to read that and poke any holes in the quality of the data, things like that. give you resources of where you can access some of these tools, know if they’re approved yet, if they’re still in early stages of research, like where we are in the process.
But they should never feel like, oh, you can’t bring up something I don’t know about. If someone in my client says that for me, I’m glad it’s like a whole different rabbit hole we have to go down. And in long COVID, I’ve had to do that a million times because the professionals and the patients were having to learn at the same time something that was brand new.
44:49 Dr. Ginger Garner: Science was like emerging, you know, it was like every single day. I think that you point out something really important and that the practitioner has to be humble enough to say, well, we’re going to have to learn about that together. Yeah, not I remember the first time I pulled out a Dutch test to an OBGYN years ago. She basically ignored me.
45:12 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, that’s ridiculous.
45:14 Dr. Ginger Garner: She took it and as I was giving it to her, she was already putting it down and going, I don’t know what that is and completely ignored it.
45:22 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah. See, this is what you don’t want. To me, it’s going to be impossible the rate of how quickly the available data is going to change with AI. It’s accelerating so much now also the dispersion of that information, right? Because you’ve got podcasts, you’ve got YouTube channels, you’ve got TikTok, you’ve got Instagram reels. People are going to be able to go down rabbit holes of any subtopic from the global expert. You no longer have to be at XYZ conference to learn the cutting edge stuff because you can see clips of it all over the internet, which is great.
And I do think you, by the way, should also still go to conferences of your own subspecialty because, you know, people have conversations there that advance the science, as well. You can ask questions of luminaries, you know, it’s all great. And the world in a way is so much flatter, and we have so much direct consumer testing. So all three of those tests that we just mentioned, any person can gather that information on themselves. The other tests that I’ve been really knee deep in are longevity tests, which show you your biological age.
46:37 Dr. Ginger Garner: Fascinating, fascinating.
46:39 Dr. Jessica Drummond: And it’s really good because in midlife, again, you get this opportunity to sort of reassess. Are you aging? One of the most accurate clocks that measures how old you are physically, measures the pace of your aging. So if you’re aging at faster than a year per year, you’re going to accelerate, you know, your aging, which isn’t what you want, because disease is essentially a form of aging, right?
Then one of the other clocks that I love, by the way, was developed by a woman, Dr. Morgan Levine at Yale, who now works out in the West Coast. She developed the Levine clock. The first clock was the Horvath clock developed by Dr. Horvath, who’s a man in UCLA. More accurate, more up-to-date. There’s the Levine clock, which you can get through a company called LCM. What I like about it is we take that kind of system by system approach in our clinic, like nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, digestive system and so forth.
And this clock measures not just your overall genetic age, but each system as well, which is valuable for helping you to see, do you need more support in one area? than another. And one other tool I want to briefly mention actually, there are some women who can’t at all tolerate hormone replacement therapy for whatever reason. They’re just, with any tool, there are going to be some people who can’t tolerate it.
48:09 Dr. Ginger Garner: I’ve had a couple of patients with that situation, yeah.
48:12 Dr. Jessica Drummond: And I don’t know if this is going to be better yet, because essentially there are these tools out of about 40 years of research only done in Russia for the Russian military. Dr. Kavinson was the scientist who did this work. Now there’s a U.S. physician, Dr. Bill Lawrence, who for the last five or ten years, I forget how long, has been working with U.S. and European universities to sort of replicate the data.
And they found really good results on essentially taking peptides, which are similar to the naturopathic strategy of like supports like. So if you want to strengthen your liver, for example, there’s a peptide, which is a small chain of amino acids. It’s like a tiny protein. that normally we might’ve eaten liver, right? From well-raised cows or pigs or whatever. We don’t do a lot of that anymore. We don’t eat a lot of organ meats. There are some supplements that are very similar to organ meats and that exists already. And then this is just a little bit more refined.
It’s pieces of the amino acids that are little small chains of amino acids that make up these organ meats and so if you want to strengthen your: this one for example endolutin is for your pineal gland which and hypothalamus which is great because that’s kind of the regulator of your endocrine system. So there are some interesting studies that are so far only presented at scientific meetings on gerontology and from the Russian labs, but they showed, for example, that women who are having trouble with fertility due to sort of early menopause-like functioning of their ovaries, say in their 30s rather than their late 40s, they would take pineal gland and ovarian peptides, usually combined with like a vascular peptide, and that actually helped not only increase their estrogen levels back to normal, but helped them to get pregnant.
And so this is another path in menopause to support essentially the regeneration of your neuroendocrine system using these peptides. And they’ve been used not to kind of restart fertility necessarily in women over 40 or 50, but to extend, improve age-related decline and it does actually lower biological age anywhere from one year up to 33 years. So some of the early, the people in the U.S. and European-based studies are mostly physicians And some of them are in their 30s, I mean, 70s now, and they’re testing in their 40s.
So it’s really a valuable tool. They’ve also tested on Olympic athletes who tend to have accelerated aging because of the stress. And one of the really interesting things about the difference between the people who are having improvements of 30 years versus just one year is stress. So it all kind of circles back to the beginning of this conversation that all the tools we have, hormones, peptide bioregulators, magnesium, saunas, like all the tools we have are to support the accelerated stressors of modern midlife, biochemical and emotional.
And so step one with any practitioner is to sit in a regulated space, nervous system regulated space, and help people process which stressors they’re going to choose to continue, or they have to, right? Because they just, for whatever reason, You know, just that they can drink tap water. That’s their choice. That’s their only option. Sometimes that’s the reality, right? They can’t not take care of their mother-in-law, like whatever it is, right? Sometimes there are certain stressors we don’t choose, but if we can create regulated spaces with people where we can help them co-regulate, kind of calm and settle down in our presence, and then just kind of take an audit of all of these stressors and lighten the load. Then we don’t need as many tools or they don’t have to be at such high doses or so intensely utilized because we’re no longer lifting a hundred pound weight.
53:15 Dr. Ginger Garner: I think that Well, first of all, as we began to talk about shifting to kind of a permanent state of growth mindset, instead of thinking I’m aging and there’s nothing that I can do, there’s a lot that you can do that is low cost and easy access, things you can even execute yourself. Because just like we have all the systems of the body. I think one of the most important take home messages. I think we both agree with is that whether we’re talking about we started talking about menopause, or we could have also dove into which I’d have loved to dive into other chronic conditions like endometriosis, which also affects men, not just women.
These things, just like heart disease, are systemic. If someone has type 2 diabetes, it’s not just about regulating insulin for the body. It’s about how they’re seeing, what their balance is, the health of their eyes, their foot health, their musculoskeletal health. It’s very systemic in nature. And that if your practitioner isn’t considering that these conditions are systemic and they’re not able to treat you like a whole person, then that’s your first red flag that you haven’t found the right practitioner yet, because the science is there to support all the many things that we threw out your way today, whether it is an OAT test, organic acid test, or whether it is getting one of the new cool longevity tests.
The science is there. It’s quite sound. And I want to kind of end this podcast by saying there’s a lot of hope in that. There’s a lot of hope that if you have chronic pain or other kind of persistent condition, persistent pain, rather than really calling it chronic, there’s a lot that you can do. There’s a lot of hope. I don’t want you to you know, leave feeling overwhelmed. I want you to leave feeling like, wow, I need to reach out for some of these resources, because there’s probably, we probably listed at least 12, 15 things, you know, like right off the top of your head that you can immediately start doing to change things. So there’s a lot of hope. Yeah.
55:34 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, absolutely. And I think to take away that, if you’re a woman in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you can right this minute, start living more healthfully. This is an opportunity to kind of reassess and take a break and take a step back and reassess. And that there are increasing numbers of kind of holistic minded practitioners all over the place because the system is broken and it’s evolving, but it’s doing it in a really messy way.
56:15 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yes, fractured.
56:17 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, very fractured. So there’s a few good people here, a few good people there, a few in this, and that’s where you’re gonna find, and it’s not that the other people aren’t good people, but they’re just, you know, the people who are leading the change in what healthcare is going to look like are scattered.
And you have a role in it because for you to capture your best healthcare, you have to start asking questions. You have to think collaboratively. You have to be a really active participant in your healthcare. And when you do that, you’re going to start realizing that almost every resource that you need, you can access yourself.
And there’s also a lot of value in doing it with a person who’s going to walk that path with you. Yeah. And there also are these tools of co-regulation, whether it’s a physical therapist putting their hands on you, whether it’s a nutritionist or a health coach breathing with you, that we are social animals and we need to learn And so we do heal best in community. And you can create that community with one practitioner, with a small group in your health coaching group, with people in a support group, and you can access tools to help you live healthier all over the place. They’re increasingly available with that guidance. So look for your health professionals to be guides not gods.
57:55 Dr. Ginger Garner: Yes. Yes. And speaking of resources, let’s start with integrativewomenshealthinstitute.com as the first stop for resources. And I know we’ve mentioned a couple of other things. So Jess, if you want to think about that, we’ll be putting some of those, you know, in the show notes, some of those things that we mentioned, we’ll be curating a list of those things. So just check the show notes out for that. And thank you so much for being here today, Jess.
58:26 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
58:29 Dr. Ginger Garner: This is an amazing discussion. And I really hope that you guys leave kind of on a cloud going, there’s a lot of stuff I can do.
58:38 Dr. Jessica Drummond: Yeah, yeah.
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