Josh (02:10.259) Today's guest has dedicated her life to studying the intricacies of women. She's a triple board certified OB-GYN physician who specializes in using functional medicine as her primary way for treating women's health. She utilizes food, movement, mindfulness practices, herbs, supplements, and energy healing techniques as medicine to help her patients reverse chronic illness and create a more vibrant, energized life. She's known as the gutsy gynecologist, Dr. Tabitha Barber. Thanks so much for joining us today.
DrTabatha (02:50.95) Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. It's such an important conversation.
Josh (02:57.115) I think it really is and one that is often misunderstood. And there's so many topics to go over today that I think are sort of in the back of people's minds, but not fully understood. But before we really dive into the intricacies of those conversations, those topics, can you just explain for our listeners, particularly for maybe the men who might be listening, what an OBGYN is and what it is that you do?
DrTabatha (03:20.106) Yeah, so, excuse me. So an OBGYN stands for obstetrician gynecologist. And I spent four years in a surgical residency. I learned how to deliver babies, do C-sections, do hysterectomies, multiple different ways, open laparoscopically, robotically. And...
to do many office procedures, colposcopies and IUD insertions and ultrasounds and all of these things related to, you know, pregnant women or just women's health in general. Tons of annual exams, that kind of thing. So even though gynecologists are surgeons, people are surprised by that, we look to them for being the women's health expert when really I didn't
spend four years studying hormones and the intricate endocrine system and how it functions with the gut and is impacted by the thyroid and the adrenals and all of the things that are necessary to actually understand women's health. So I'd like people to understand that we are looking to the wrong doctor when it comes to women's health and wellness.
DrTabatha (04:41.35) very much focused on either pregnancy or disease management. Like you have fibroids, let's figure out how to get rid of them. We don't question why. Why did you get fibroids? What is the hormone imbalance associated with fibroids? So it's a completely different way of looking at things. And once I started starting functional medicine,
I started asking why and the way I practice now is completely different than how I practiced as a conventional gynecologist.
Josh (05:17.043) Which is a beautiful segue into my next question. This is something I think is very important to understand. So our listeners can really get a context of who you are and what you do. How did you find yourself pursuing holistic functional medicine practices over the conventional medicine where it's just treating the symptoms but not getting to the why in the root cause?
DrTabatha (05:41.574) I'm so sorry, Josh, you totally froze and I didn't hear it. I'm guessing how did I pursue functional medicine?
Josh (05:43.659) That's all right. That's all right, can you hear me now?
Josh (05:50.503) Yeah, if going from conventional, where it's all symptom focused, to where you are today going through functional medicine in the root cause, what got you from conventional medicine to your career now?
DrTabatha (06:02.87) Yeah, so like most functional practitioners, I had my own pain to purpose story. I was actually a teen mom in a high school dropout. I didn't finish after 11th grade, and I had a very traumatic delivery in pregnancy. Things were done to me and not explained. There was no informed consent, everything. I felt like a second class citizen and...
out of that traumatic experience really it birthed this desire for me to figure out how to help women not go through what I went through, especially my daughter. I was like determined not to have her ever have that experience. And so, you know, I figured out how to go back and get my GED, get into college, get into medical school, and do all of the things.
that I thought I needed to do to help women. But fast forward 30, 25, 30 years, here I am burnt out, broken in a broken medical system. I could barely function. I was so sleep deprived. I required my assistant to tell me the name of the person I delivered the night before because I was so miserable and sleep deprived and exhausted. And so...
I had to go on a journey to heal myself. I could barely function. I could barely get through c-sections. My back was in so much pain. I ended up having back surgery and it didn't help. And I went back to the surgeon and he was like, that's okay. Back surgery is like Lays potato chips. You can't have just one. So we're just going to put some rods and screws in there and you'll be fine. You'll just take another six weeks off. It's not the end of the world. And that...
just rocked me to my core. I said time out, I'm not doing this. This doesn't make any sense at 40 years old that I would need multiple back surgeries. And so I did the unthinkable and I took four months off of work and I went on this journey. I just started listening to podcasts and reading books and watching summits and absorbing everything I possibly could and I found
DrTabatha (08:17.55) Institute for Functional Medicine and I started taking courses through the Cleveland Clinic and you know this like once your eyes are opened you can't go back like all of a sudden I saw this whole world of health and wellness that I knew nothing about as a doctor like we are so focused on disease and diagnoses for insurance companies that we have no idea how
food impacts our health, how our environment impacts our health, like none of it. I was just in shock. And that changed the trajectory of my whole life personally, and how I practiced medicine. So I eventually gave up that world of conventional gynecology and now I only do functional medicine for women.
Josh (09:05.367) I love it. I think that's absolutely brilliant. You know, pain to purpose is something, like you said, most functional practitioners and many healthcare practitioners have gone through. It's that other parents wanted them to be doctors because, you know, it's better for the family, it's better job, it's better pay, it's whatever. But really having a pain to purpose story, I think is so, so powerful.
DrTabatha (09:07.047) laughs
Josh (09:27.991) Can we ask about your traumatic delivery? Now you mentioned that there were things that were dehumanizing, it was a process that you never want anybody to go through. And I think it's something that is also largely misunderstood or unknown entirely in conventional medicine on how traumatic the birth process can be and how they really can treat pregnant women like cattle.
DrTabatha (09:30.647) Yeah.
DrTabatha (09:49.75) Yeah, so I was on Medicaid and food stamps and I was treated like a second class citizen because of it. The doctor, the nurses at the office, they made it clear that they weren't getting paid like 20 cents on the dollar to see me and that it was just them doing me a favor and really...
Nothing was ever explained. You know, I just remember getting shots in the butt and endless pelvic exams, being handed a diaphragm after delivery and saying, good luck, here's your birth control. Like imagine giving a 17-year-old a diaphragm. Like it requires a lot of work to not get pregnant using a diaphragm. And there was no education. So I really learned a lot out of that. And then I developed
hyperthyroid issue. All of a sudden I started losing a ton of weight. I was losing my hair. I was like shaking and jittery and my heart was racing and I was told that my thyroid was overactive. And all I remember is being sent to the hospital, being laid on this big table in the x-ray room. They injected me with some stuff.
come to find out years later in medical school, they had burnt my thyroid out with radioactive iodine therapy and then put me on hormone medication for my thyroid. But those conversations didn't happen because I, you know, I was seen as not smart enough to handle that kind of discussion or he's paternalistic and he knows best as the physician. And so...
That's the kind of crap that is still happening in this world today is that you have doctors, even female doctors, acting very paternalistic. I know best what's right. You don't know what's best for your body. You need to do what I say. And if you don't, you're being non-compliant. That's the very popular term in conventional medicine. When a patient questions receiving a medication or doing a procedure,
DrTabatha (11:56.534) that they're like, I don't know if I want this procedure. We call them non-compliant. We write it in their chart. And that is the type of relationship that I am on a mission to stop. Like we need informed consent. This man came into my delivery room after I had been pushing for three and a half hours and used forceps to deliver my baby and tore me from front to back. There was no...
consent. There was no this is what's gonna happen. I was crying and begging for a c-section. I was writhing in so much pain and I only understood why years later because I figured out he was a family practice doctor and he couldn't do c-sections. He didn't have that option or that tool to help me in my delivery. So I only got the option that he had and there was no discussion and that
really affected me, you know, as a 17 year old girl and how my body functioned after that. I've had lifelong complications from that. So these are big deals, but nobody talks about it, you know, and we just chalk it up to like this is how it works and you have to deal with it.
Josh (13:13.875) Wow. I mean, they could make an entire movie or TV series about this stuff and what's really going on in the back end. You know, when it really does sound like the entire industry, not the first who's really said this, that we're really serving insurance companies. And it's all about pay, it's all about finance and all about profit. I'm an advocate for professionals getting paid for what they do.
but when it's an insurance driven process where we have to get, you know, we have to get these ID10 codes and you have to get certain process done and give a certain medication and you get a cut of pharmaceuticals more so in the States than Canada. There's so much wrong with it and it leaves so much room for, it actually breeds error, which I think is absolutely ludicrous. So you've had this really crazy experience.
I mean, that's for lack of a better term. I'm not sure what words are appropriate to describe something like that, that led you from where you were, from being treated like a second class citizen, from having this horrifically traumatic birthing process, to becoming a doctor, to getting into functional medicine, to being now an advocate for women. But that process could not have been.
easy, not just the origin story, but really the process of becoming an integrative or functional medicine practitioner. Can you walk me through what that was like for you and what that process is now like for your patients?
DrTabatha (14:41.11) Oh my goodness. Yeah. I just had a flashback to during my residency, we were doing rounds with the attending physician one day. And I asked him why this woman had to be on a medication pump for her preterm labor. She wasn't dilating. She was like 34 weeks. And I had questioned his decision.
and he looked at me and said, we don't ask why. We follow the protocol. This is the protocol for preterm labor. Now write the order. And I thought to myself, I'm still learning. I'm trying to understand so that I can create these orders and protocols in my head once I'm an attending physician. And that was literally just one example of hundreds of examples of my attendings.
trying to shut me down and not have me go against the norm. And unfortunately, or fortunately for me, I guess I would say I've always been the black sheep. I've never conformed, obviously. I didn't, you know, even graduate high school. Like I don't listen to authority if it doesn't make sense. I question and I ask why. And so functional medicine just made complete sense to me from the get go. Like, oh my gosh, we're figuring out.
why this is happening and now I'm obsessed with knowing why something's happening. I cannot handle band-aid medicine anymore. It's so frustrating and the biggest population of people I think that this is affecting are perimenopausal and menopausal women. They're getting gaslighted by the doctors. They're given anti-depressants and sleep aids like Ambien which
people sleepwalk and do disastrous things. Somebody murdered somebody on ambient. Like this stuff is dangerous. And this is what we're handing out instead of hormones and telling patients, you need to just deal with it, get over it, this is a natural occurrence. And I have thousands of women who reach out to me every single day on every social media platform you can think of begging for my help because conventional medicine is...
Josh (16:43.176) What?
DrTabatha (17:06.894) failing them. They are failing to figure out why are these women struggling with this menopausal transition so much and how can we actually help them in this process.
Josh (17:20.551) It just really is a broken system full of cookbook medicine. I don't know what would, I don't know what would possess a doctor to say something like that where we don't ask questions, we just follow the protocol, this is the protocol. What kind of medicine is that? Medicine really is supposed to be a personalized process. It's more expensive, it's more time consuming, and maybe that's why the roots of the system are created that way.
DrTabatha (17:24.612) Mm-hmm.
Josh (17:50.415) I very much believe big pharma has their hands in way too many things and that they have way too much control over medical school and what studies get published, what gets funded, what doesn't get funded, what gets published in medical journals. I mean, we saw back in 2020 all kinds of really prominent research getting redacted because it didn't fit what big pharma wanted it to say. This is a big, big problem. One of the things obviously, please.
DrTabatha (18:16.106) Yeah, can I just say, can I just, yeah, I would love to comment on that because when I went through my training of medical school and residency, it was during a time when medicine was really shifting. We were realizing that doctors and nurses were making a lot of medical mistakes and like it was almost the number one cause of death for a little while that patients were dying because of our care.
Like we were causing deaths in the hospitals. And so there was this big push to standardize things so that you made sure they got the right dose of this heart medication to keep you alive. And you got the right labs checked every day if you're in the hospital for congestive heart failure. And so all these protocols started getting developed. But the problem with that was these new people who were being trained, myself included,
we were being taught how to just memorize the protocols and not use our critical thinking skills to see if these were actually making sense for that individual patient. They might've made sense for 90% of the congestive heart failure patients we were admitting, but what about the other 10% who are alcoholics or who have psych meds on their list or who aren't exactly in that mold? And so...
They were trying to fix a problem, I get it, but they've created an entirely new problem of this cookbook medicine where doctors are no longer using their critical thinking skills. And so we haven't changed anything, we just shifted how we did this broken medicine. And the other piece of it, which I don't think most people understand,
is that as soon as I started second year of medical school and started going to the doctor's offices and shadowing the doctors and in learning how to be a doctor, I got to meet the drug reps two to three times a week for lunch. They would come to the offices, bring us lunch, teach us about their medications, and that is how I learned to treat patients was whatever drug was new and popular at the time. Here's your new endometriosis medication.
Josh (20:29.143) Mm.
DrTabatha (20:34.454) You try this before the surgery and they give you a little presentation and your free lunch and your pens and your trips. I had so many trips paid for by equipment reps that sell endometrial ablation devices, laparoscopic devices, the robotic devices. They are driving our education, our decision making processes. They are there.
in the training facilities all day long in our faces. That, so you hit the nail on the head. It's not only insurance, but it's the drug companies and the equipment companies. They are driving the medical school education.
Josh (21:15.511) Hmm.
Josh (21:20.319) The saddest part about that really is that sickness is far more profitable than healthy people. The sicker you are, the more money you're worth. Yup.
DrTabatha (21:26.294) Ding ding ding. Right, if you heal someone, they no longer need your services. Right? They're not a paying customer anymore. Right?
Josh (21:33.935) Absolutely. And what kind of business would, right? Yeah, what kind of business would, what kind of company would drive itself out of business by making people healthy if you keep them sick, don't fix them all these surgeries. I mean, I used to be a paramedic. And then I was a personal trainer. And then I got into nutrition and functional medicine, I specialize in inflammatory bowel disease. And even if I go farther back in my education, before I really knew a percentage of what I know now, like
people getting carpal tunnel surgeries or knee replacements, hip replacements, it's all muscular skeletal imbalances that can be easily fixed with a little bit of exercise and some chiropractic. And so we're seeing people go for unnecessary surgeries on a constant basis. And there's so much that's misunderstood. And I'd really like to take some time with you here to sort of outline some things for the women listening to understand more about the hormones or hormonal profiles, how it's connected and really what they can do about it.
Now, this is a really loaded question, because it's a huge, huge gun with lots of bullets in it, but can you explain the hormone and gut connection, particularly for women and sex hormones?
DrTabatha (22:37.888) Okay.
DrTabatha (22:43.394) Hmm. Well, the gut is the root of everything. The gut is where all disease or health begins. And so it's not just your hormone balance. It's your thyroid balance, your adrenals, everything. It's how your body function starts in the gut. And so I didn't really understand that as a gynecologist, even though
you know I was a very well sought after robotic surgeon because I did a lot of advanced procedures that other surgeons were afraid to touch like stage 4 endometriosis which means there's so much endometrial disease that the bowels are scarred to the uterus the tubes
the ovaries and I have to go in and dissect away and separate them all off and remove that endometriosis which is just a bunch of inflammation causing tissue to stick together. And so I would go in and do these surgeries for hours and just like spend hours peeling the bowels away from all of these pelvic organs and nobody was talking about the fact that maybe this inflammation was coming from.
Josh (23:27.907) Mm.
DrTabatha (23:56.262) those gut organs or that the inflammation in the pelvis was affecting the gut and vice versa. So even though those organs all live together, there's no compartments separating them. Literally your bowels lay on your pelvic organs. We're not thinking how is what is happening in our gut affecting our uterus tubes and ovaries. And honestly,
If you are eating the standard American diet, if you have microbiome issues, gut dysbiosis, all these things, you have tiny chemical processes happening in your intestines all day long. And those chemical processes are making cytokines and interleukins. People probably heard those words with the pandemic. They're inflammatory chemicals that cause an inflammatory response. They seep through the bowels.
they go into the ovaries, they go to the tubes, they go to the uterus. So now we're seeing tons of premature ovarian insufficiency and fertility, fallopian tube disease, and uterine issues, endometriosis, fibroids, and it's being driven by the inflammation in the gut. Not only is the stuff floating through the bloodstream to those pelvic organs,
but it's the physical close proximity. They're literally just transferring through the exudate. That's all big fancy medical term, but I promise you all these processes, they just flow to the next tissue. And so we're just wasting all our time separating this tissue and never stopping the inflammatory process. So most women with endometriosis,
They're signing up for surgery every one to two years. Like that is what I would tell them as the conventional gynecologist. Okay, we got you cleaned up. We call it cleaning you up for another year. Probably, hopefully you'll last a year, maybe two, but let's plan to do this again. And that is what happens until they go into menopause and we just.
DrTabatha (26:07.214) call that normal. We say, oh, your mom had it, your grandma had it, you're just gonna have it. This is genetics. When it's not genetics, it's diet and lifestyle. We have to address the gut issues and clean up the gut and that will stop the pelvic issues.
Josh (26:11.52) Mm.
Josh (26:25.071) I personally detest the term was just genetic. And I think it's a total cop out. We have a map. Yeah, we've mapped the entire human genome. I challenge you to show me the gene that unequivocally, unquestionably causes endometriosis. Now, I understand there are contributing factors or there's correlations where 40% or 60% might have this gene and they happen to have this disease, but there's no 100% cause. Blood pressure is not genetic. These things aren't just...
DrTabatha (26:31.13) It totally is.
Josh (26:54.211) unquestionably genetic. And I think it's really important for the general public to be able to understand that genetics, we don't have gene codes that unquestionably cause disease, they just don't work that way. And so what are the things that are creating these misprints or these misfire rings of if you look at genetics, kind of like the printer, and they, you know, they tell things what to print, they go, choo, and they make the things and everything goes out to the body. That's kind of what genes do. But
If we look at them as a blueprint, what is skewing the byproducts of these good blueprints? So let's talk a bit about menstruation. One of the most common things that I see, right, specialized in IBD, there's a commonality that I see in my female clients with gut issues. They have terrible periods. There's pain, there's bloating, severe breast tenderness, mood swings, insomnia, depression, anxiety, cravings, like the works. What do you see being the main driver?
that throws menstruation. And mind you, of course, we call this normal while it's just normal period pains. But when I fix somebody's gut and we fix their cycle and balance the hormones, half of them, they're 28 days, like clockwork, they don't even know, sometimes it'll creep up on them. Worst they have is a little bit of a cramp and now the period's there, but no tenderness, no nausea, no insomnia. What is happening to make women's menstrual cycles so severe and what can we do to really undo this?
DrTabatha (28:19.082) Yeah, so it's exactly what I was saying. You have to address the gut. You have to stop that inflammatory process. You have to stop the cytokines and the interleukins from being processed and the prostaglandins that cause all the uterine contractions. All of those things are happening from an inflammatory response. And what I'm seeing a ton of since the pandemic is women's IgA levels in their gut are crazy low.
They have no beneficial acrimansia, which is a super important bacteria that makes a mucus wall. So you know this, we have three barriers in our intestines that are protecting us from the outside world. So even though you've put something in your mouth, it's in your stomach or your intestines, it's not physically in your body until it crosses through the cells into the bloodstream. And so we have three.
barriers that decide does something get to come in from the outside world. We have this mucus wall from the good bacteria that slow things down and help us be protected. We have the gap junctions which are the doors on the cells. They open, they let the good stuff in, they close, they keep the bad stuff out. If those are broken that's called leaky gut. And then we have this IgA barrier which is
part of our immune system. I like to think of IGA like the bouncer at the front door of the club. He's standing at the door and he's deciding who's safe to come in, who has to stay out. And he will get in a fight and kick you out if you don't belong in there. But what I've seen a ton of the past couple years is not only do women have leaky gut, the doors are broken wide open, but they don't have any bouncers at the doors.
And then if they don't have that mucus wall, all three barriers are completely destroyed. It's like a free for all. It's just like, come on into my body, every thing, everybody, there's no stopping it. And then you're getting all these food sensitivities created because your immune system is seeing things that should never have to see inside of your bloodstream. Our IgG branch, our IgE branch of our immune systems.
DrTabatha (30:33.098) should not be seeing these undigested proteins. It should not be seeing these toxins from these bad bacteria. All of this stuff should never even be in our body in the first place. And so why is this happening? Because we are out of control stressed first of all. That is destroying our IGA, our bouncers at the front gate. We're
way overstressed. We're not sleeping enough. We're not in circadian rhythm balance. We're not getting up with the sun and sleeping when it's time to sleep. We're drinking too much alcohol. That's a huge one. That's destroying all that good beneficial bacteria. It's destroying the doors and causing leaky gut. And then we're all on us, I say us, women.
are on these hormonal contraceptives. And that is a huge one that women have no idea about. And that is what kills me is there is no informed consent going on. No doctor is saying chronic birth control causes leaky gut. It changes your microbiome. It down-regulates your HPO axis. So you stop making your own hormones. And
Nobody's having these conversations. We say things like, oh, it regulates your hormones or it corrects your period when that's not true. It's causing major destruction. It causes vitamin and mineral deficiencies long term. So the birth control pill is absolutely affecting your gut health, which in turn affects your hormone health. Long term, it causes these problems. So
You might be getting a band-aid fix, you know, up front immediately, but you're trading it in for some long-term problems like infertility, early menopause, all kinds of issues.
Josh (32:29.783) Hmm. So obviously, it's a very personalized process. Everyone's hormones are gonna be different. There's so much more going on. This is such an in-depth topic. You could do medical symposiums and lectures for weeks on this type of stuff. But can you give us a quick general overview on, and I'll put some context to this. The reason why I'm asking this question, one of the most common things that I get asked for, gut or whatever specialty is, I'm sure you get it, what's the supplement I can take for my hormones? What's the supplement I can take for
gut health. And I think it's a very backwards way to look at things when we understand how woven this is. So my question to you Tabatha is what is the first step that you take when you see someone new in your office who's having, let's go basic, they're having irregular menstruation. What's the first thing you do with them?
DrTabatha (33:17.926) I love looking at all the pieces of the puzzle because what I have found is, you know, I practice conventional gynecology for way over a decade. I'm not going to tell you how long, but conventional medicine looks at things in a silo. So you go to the gynecologist for your period, you go to the endocrinologist for your thyroid, you go to the gastroenterologist for your IBS, your irritable bowel syndrome, and none of them look at the other systems.
So that is a huge problem because as I just explained, the gut affects your hormones and it affects your thyroid and your adrenals and everything else. We could go on for days. So I need to see all the pieces of the puzzle. I'm addressing the gut. I am healing the gut. I am addressing the adrenal dysfunction.
and dealing with that. I am addressing is the thyroid being aggravated? Is the thyroid being attacked by your own immune system? Do you have Hashimoto's or Graves or something like that? What are your environmental toxin exposures? So I really love when women just do like I have a healthy her program. It's stool testing, food sensitivity testing, Dutch adrenal and hormone testing, and then basic blood work for blood sugar.
and fasting insulin levels because that's a huge problem for women. And really covering all the bases because if you don't turn over all the pieces you don't see the accurate picture. You get a very skewed picture of what's happening and if I just try to balance your hormones it's like a dog chasing his tail. You're not going to get anywhere and it's going to be super frustrating. You're constantly going to be adjusting doses and rechecking this and checking that
the root cause of what is driving the dysfunction in the first place. So you have to turn over all those pieces of the puzzle. And so that is how I do that with my patients. And you know, this is a really common thing that I see all the time. I get a person who was like, oh, I just did food sensitivity six months ago. I got rid of those foods. It didn't help. That's not the problem. And I explained to them.
DrTabatha (35:33.502) It's not the food that's the problem. You're reacting to that because your immune system is seeing food in a way that it shouldn't because your gut is not functioning properly. Those three barriers are compromised. You don't have the right microbiome or you have yeast overgrowth or parasites. That stuff all has to be addressed for your immune system to stop having those reactions and those food sensitivities are gonna continue.
you're going to create new food sensitivities until you heal the guts. You have to do all the pieces together to actually create the transformation in the healing process. You have to calm the immune system down while you heal the gut. And then everything else kind of balances out your thyroid and goes, we're no longer in survival mode. We no longer have to divert resources to the gut and heal this. Oh my gosh, our adrenal glands can function again. Like...
everything can be in harmony together but you can't do that if you're just, I call it whack-a-mole medicine, if you're like let's just work on this one and then something else pops up five minutes later because you didn't address it all.
Josh (36:37.151) Hehehehehehe
Josh (36:46.151) I might put that on a t-shirt with your permission. I'll make sure you get royalties with Whack-a-Mole medicine. That's fantastic. So what are the most common factors affecting women's health? There's so much trending right now about toxins and endocrine disrupting chemicals. And there's so much that I think is out there, but maybe not fully understood or even accepted. What are the most common threads that you see with women coming into your office dealing with hormonal imbalances?
DrTabatha (36:47.81) Hahaha.
DrTabatha (36:53.477) Uh huh.
DrTabatha (37:14.99) So I hit on it a little bit earlier, but I would say alcohol is probably near the top of the list. And women have been sold this lie that it's healthy and good for you to have a glass of wine every night with dinner. They do it in Italy and they are the, you know, these Mediterranean healthy people. It's normal and you should do it. That is a lie.
Josh (37:37.579) Mm-hmm.
DrTabatha (37:43.446) Women's bodies are not created to handle alcohol every day. That is too much alcohol because every time your liver has to break down that alcohol called metabolizing it, it has to put your hormones on the back burner and take care of the alcohol first. It will always metabolize exogenous things before endogenous, like your natural hormones. And so every time you drink alcohol,
your estrogen has to sit there and not get broken down and handled. And what it does is it goes down another pathway called 4-hydroxyestrone and that can cause a quinone reaction, which damages the DNA inside the cells. And that's what increases your risk of breast and uterine cancer. It's not that estrogen is bad for you. It's that you didn't...
allow your liver to metabolize your estrogen properly because you were drinking alcohol or taking Benadryl for sleep or Tylenol PM every night. All of those are very hard on the liver and that is affecting your estrogen. And so I say to women like make alcohol special again, have one or two drinks a month.
Josh (38:56.172) Hmm.
DrTabatha (38:57.886) as a special occasion when you're going out with your girlfriends or whoever, but don't do it every day because that's jacking up your hormones big time. Alcohol is the most, the biggest reason for breast cancer, but we want to blame the hormones and it's not, it's the alcohol. So the other piece of it, which our great grandmothers never had to deal with,
are all of these xenoestrogens in the environment. These are called endocrine disruptors. They are chemicals that look kind of like estrogen. So when they get into our body, they bind to our estrogen receptor and they send a warped signal. It's enough to tell the uterine lining to overgrow and the breast tissue to grow, but it's not the actual healthy, correct... Horror.
signal and so we don't get the benefits to our brain and to our bone and to our cardiovascular system and our skin. And xenoestrogens are birth control pills, all the synthetic hormones that we've created and also all the plastics that we've created in our environment that our great-great grandmother's bodies never had seen. Like these things did not exist before the 1960s, 1970s. This is new for us as a human species to have.
world full of plastic and we think it's no big deal but the flexible plastics especially that all of our food is in all of our drinks it leaches these xenoestrogens into our food and drink all day long and then we ingest it and those get bind to our receptors and send these warped signals so what do you think's happened over the past 30 years breast cancer has shot up
uterine cancer has shot up. This stuff did not exist before the 60s and 70s. It was unheard of and now it's like one in eight women. Everybody, it's the most common thing. It's just life. That's how it is. It's just your genetics. No, it's not your genetics. It's our environment. So it can be overwhelming when you are like, oh my gosh, how do I get rid of all the fragrance?
DrTabatha (41:13.93) All the fragrances, all the personal care products full of these plastics and these compounds, these BPAs and all the toxins. Just start with one thing. Like as you use something up, replace it with something else. If you buy food in plastic, heat it in on the stove in your stainless steel pan. Heat it in glass. Don't heat it in that plastic.
start to swap things out. Just start to get a little more aware and your hormones will shift. Here's another one that you probably wouldn't even think to ask. Tampons. Okay so tampons are full of nasty chemicals and I have had women switch out their tampons and pads for organic and their crazy painful periods stop. Their periods are no longer painful and like soaking through and you know
Josh (41:49.495) Hmm.
DrTabatha (42:06.966) because all those taxons were getting absorbed right into the uterus.
Josh (42:12.575) It really is a toxic world and all the products, everything we have is just, it's poisoning us like crazy. And I think there's been a really big push, at least in my circle, and as far as my Instagram algorithms are concerned towards more like homesteading and natural living and all that stuff. And it's really neat to see if there is a movement for it. And one of the parts that I've seen from women a lot as this natural movement is actually moving away from birth control. Women who have been on it for 15, 20, 30 years.
So my question to you Tabitha is what is sort of your long-term wellness philosophy for women who want to maintain healthy sex hormones and actually come off birth control? What does that process look like? What is the transition and what's that next step for them?
DrTabatha (42:58.31) Yeah, so this is definitely individualized and you're gonna probably need a provider, maybe not. Some women can stop taking birth control pills and they will have a cycle. Their periods will come on their own and they can use like the rhythm method, the natural family planning methods to kind of know when they're fertile and when to avoid intercourse and just do that.
Some women will use barrier methods like condoms, diaphragms, sponges. Some women will try either low dose IUDs or non-hormonal IUDs like the copper IUD because they really don't want to get pregnant or they'll do permanent sterilization like having their tubes tied or having a vasectomy for their partner. So there's a lot of options. I will tell you hormonal IUDs.
act just like birth control pills and implants that go in your arm and the depot shot and the mini pill which is now available over the counter at the drugstore. Super scary because with the mini pill you have to take it at the exact same time every single day and not miss a dose or you're probably going to get pregnant.
Josh (44:01.835) which is scary.
DrTabatha (44:13.342) It's the absolute worst pill to put on the market for the general public. It makes me cringe because now we have this false sense of security. You're like, oh, I'm on birth control. Oh, no, it's the worst. The pregnancy rate is like 30% or something. It's horrible. So please don't get on the mini pill over at your local drugstore public service announcement. But if you're trying to wean off
Josh (44:35.999) Hehehehe. Hehehe.
DrTabatha (44:42.334) and you don't have a period or it's super irregular, you're probably gonna wanna get testing or at least starting to do some basic supplemental and diet support to support your ovaries to make their hormones again, because as I mentioned before, your hormones have not been produced. Your ovaries have been on strike. They have not been making estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone the entire time you were on a birth control pill. And now you're asking them
to do a job again. They might not do that job or they might not know how to do it or how to do it well. So, Vitex or Chase Tree is a great herbal supplement that can support your ovaries to do their job again. It does usually take a good four to six months for that to really take effect. So, that's one thing that you can start and some basic supplementation. You need those basic
DrTabatha (45:41.322) You need basic minerals for your cells to do their processes. You need that kind of basic support going in. And I will tell you if you get on a prenatal at the local drugstore, you might be doing yourself more harm than good because those cheap supplements are full of heavy metals. They're full of gluten fillers. They don't have.
the doses required that actually get your body to do what it needs to do. And the B vitamins are often not methylated, they're synthetic like folic acid instead of folate. And so your body has to go through this whole process using energy to even turn it into folate. And so all that stuff can work against you. So taking care of your health, like there's no point in trying to be cheap and save a dime. It's gonna be
you know, just cause more headaches and problems. So women might need to get testing done. If they're not having any kind of normal cycle, you can do some basic testing and I guarantee your hormones are going to be low and you need someone to guide you on either how to get your hormones working again, your ovaries, or if you're kind of in the 45 plus age range north of 45, you might want to have the discussion about bioidentical hormone replacement.
So it depends on your goals, your age, your health status. There's so many factors that are driving this process that I can't just say like, oh, stop the pill and good luck with that. Like that's what conventional gynecologists do and it's very, very sad.
Josh (47:26.515) And very detrimental to a lot of women. I mean, not only biologically and hormonally, but socially. Can you imagine like that the mood swings, the insomnia, whether it does to a family unit, your partner, your personal life, like it just throws things out of whack. It's like a short-term six to eight month medically induced mental illness until your body can balance itself back out again. It's crazy what these hormones can do. So.
DrTabatha (47:52.81) Mm-hmm.
Josh (47:53.887) Tabitha, let's talk a little bit towards the direction of, we'll say end of hormonal cycles, menopause, perimenopause. For women who are looking for a smooth transition, what sort of things, what steps can they take? Maybe they're coming off of birth control, maybe they've had great periods, but they're worried about their family history of maybe mom gained 40 pounds during menopause. What sort of steps can they take to make sure they're gonna have a healthy hormonal process?
DrTabatha (48:20.958) Yeah, so I have a free guide that goes over how to balance your hormones naturally during this time period because there are some basic foundational things that you can do on your own that you don't need me for. And it's a lot of the stuff that we talked about, like really checking your alcohol intake, evaluating what over-the-counter medications that your poor liver has to deal with.
evaluating your environment for xenoestrogens and all these toxins that are going into our body. Really evaluate your stress. People think, oh I can handle my life mentally so I must be fine, but I promise you your physiology can't handle it. Your body can't handle it. We have not developed
as quickly as our society has. Like things have shifted. I mean if you think about when we were children how the telephone was on the wall with a cord and how much has advanced since then. We can take a gazillion pictures in our phone and transmit them to India within 10 seconds. Like things have changed quicker than our physiology has changed. So we are not caught up yet. So just because you're
like going from dusk until dawn and multitasking and running a business and a family and you know working out and doing triathlons and all the crazy stuff where women are doing that doesn't mean your physiology isn't affected. It doesn't mean that your hormones can handle that disruption. They're not happy. I promise you I diagnose adrenal dysfunction every single day in my practice and it's because we are living
in a way that we never have that our grandmothers would roll over going, how do you do this? This is crazy. Like, okay, I'm almost 49. And when my grandma was 49, she was like, enjoying her grandkids and making dinner and not doing much. You know, I'm running two six and seven figure businesses, and I still have children and I'm coaching lacrosse and I'm working out in the mornings like
DrTabatha (50:45.21) my life looks nothing like women over the past gazillion centuries, you know, it's like we just we haven't even stopped to realize what we're putting our body through. We just haven't. So you need to just take a step back and be curious. Hey, what does my stress look like? Do I linger about work all evening long and take that to bed with me? Am I in a toxic relationship that's destroying me?
You know, the newest thing is like soul atrophy. We have like just not even nourished our souls to the point where it's not even alive anymore. Like we have no feeling or purpose. I hear this every day in my practice. It's like take a step back and be curious and just look at your life from an outsider's perspective. Does that seem healthy and sustainable? And if it doesn't...
Josh (51:17.853) Mm.
DrTabatha (51:42.434) Like start making some little changes, you know, and I'm not saying this is easy, but when I had these chronic back pain issues and I was in physical therapy constantly and running this ragged life of an OBGYN, I had a physical therapist laugh at me one day because I was telling him everything I had done that day. He goes, is that sustainable? And I said, no, it's not. That's why I'm here. And he's like, you.
really need to consider what you're doing with your life and consider making some changes. And I was so, I was not thankful at the time I was pissed, but I was so thankful five years later that he planted that seed in my brain and said that to me because at the time I was annoyed like, no, I have responsibilities. I'm chief of staff. I got to take care of my kids. I got to do all the stuff, right? I got to do the stuff.
But my soul was dying. I was not nourishing my soul or my purpose on this earth. I was just going through the motions and doing all the stuff. And it affected my health. So that's my little seed to everybody listening today. You might not want to hear this, but maybe you need to get out of that job or that relationship. Or maybe you need to stop watching TV every night and do something else.
Josh (53:10.023) Now that might be a perfect segue to close, but I gotta tell you Tabitha, one question I ask every guest who comes on is my favorite question every single time because it opens so many doors. Is there anything that we haven't discussed yet or anything that you'd like to mention off the back of our last conversation here to the audience who's listening now?
DrTabatha (53:29.842) Yeah, so this is, you know, I'm sure there are men listening that this pertains to, but this is what I see with women all of the time. And this is what I personally had to figure out was, you cannot heal a body you hate. I hated my body. I was angry at my body for being in pain and not doing what I wanted it to do and not like pushing through the day. And when I learned
that I needed to love my body and give it what it was lacking and screaming for, that's when my health came back. When I started treating my body the way God wanted me to treat it. Like it is a vessel, it is a gift for this earthly experience I'm having and it's an amazing tool that I can do so many amazing things with. But if I abuse it, I can't be mad at it.
for how it turned out, but that's what we do. We're like, oh my gosh, I'm so fat, I'm miserable in my clothes, I don't fit my clothes, my body's in so much pain, it doesn't work, I can't do this, I can't do that. And we need to stop and say why. And I love you and thank you for getting me through that stressful day. I'm gonna treat you better next time because that is how you're going to heal and shift.
Josh (54:57.651) That's brilliant. Now Tabitha, you mentioned some free resources. I know you've got a website. You help thousands of women. How can people find you who are looking for help with their hormones and their hormonal health?
DrTabatha (55:08.734) Yeah, so you can go to drtabatha.com. You can get the free guide. I think it's a great place to start. I have a Facebook group called Achieve the Body You Deserve Over 40. That's super active. I teach women how to fast and how to feed their faith and really dive into this deeper stuff because these pieces are missing from the conventional world and even sometimes the functional space. So
You can listen to the Gutsy Gynecologist show as well. We go over all this stuff in detail. I love talking about all these whys. Why is it happening?
Josh (55:48.083) I'll make sure to put all that information in the show notes. Well Tabatha, this has been a very interesting interview.
DrTabatha (55:50.786) Thank you.
Josh (55:56.547) Once in a while, I'll tell my guests this. There are some interviews that, you know, I really enjoy all of my guests. They're incredible. But there are some that just really piqued my interest more than most. And I really enjoyed our conversation today. So I just wanna say thank you for being here, for sharing your expertise, your experience, your story, your origin story, and really just shedding some light on the truth of what happens in the medical field, particularly to women who are going through this so they can avoid what it is you had to go through. Thank you.
DrTabatha (56:24.786) Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I mean, I am on a mission for every woman to hear this so that they know they don't have to just put up with the care that they're getting. There is another way. There's another choice. So thank you so much, Josh. I really appreciate it.
Josh (56:42.615) Brilliant. Well, I'm just gonna press the stop record button here, Tabatha. I do have to.