Why Hormone Education Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm trying to teach women how their menstrual cycle works and what it does to them and what these different cycles, balance, and transitions that you go through. It's all predictable. And if you understand something, it's a lot easier to deal with it. And I tell patients 50% of my job is to help you understand what's going on with you. And that's that's 50% of it. They feel better just by saying, oh, somebody at least explained it to me.

SPEAKER_03 0:26

Welcome to Hormone Heroes, where I share testimonials from real people who have experienced bio-identical hormone therapy. Men and women share the symptoms they have experienced and the difference proper hormone replacement has made.

Dr. Taylor’s Shift From Standard Care

SPEAKER_03 1:01

Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today I'm very excited and very honored to have Dr. Eldred Taylor. He is an OBGYN, he's an author, a speaker, and hormone physiology educator who has spent more than 25 years helping women understand persistent symptoms that may continue even when routine laboratory results are described as normal. He is in Atlanta, Georgia. And along with his wife, Dr. Ava Bell, he has written two books. And we're just so honored to have you. Thank you, Dr. Taylor.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the introduction. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

So helping women with their hormones and understanding that what you were taught necessarily in med school wasn't the direction you really needed to go to give women the most help. So just walk us through the connection of how all that came to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

So I came to Atlanta from Nashville, went to Vanderbilt undergrad, and I came here to Emory Medical School, decided I wanted to be in OBGYN. So I got married right after I did medical school to my wife. And she's a trained as a psychiatrist, but we practice together like functional medicine now. But anyway, so I practiced OBGYN just like I was taught in my residency. And the way I remember it is that if someone less than 45 came in with any type of symptom, the answer was always birth control pills. I did not really understand why, but I knew that was the treatment. So that's that's what I did. And if they were older, you decided whether or not they needed, and and tell you, I've been in this for 30 years, decided whether or not you needed Primarin and Provera based on whether or not you had a uterus, where primer and provera are not found in the body at all. But that's what I was told to do, so that's what I did. And I kept doing that for about the first five or six years until my wife started getting into her 30s and she was having all those symptoms, and I did what I was taught to do, and it was not helping her. It was actually making her worse. And I was like, wow, if this is not working for my wife, and anyway, I'm gonna try and condense this as much as possible. So at that time, a patient came in and said, Do you know anything about progesterone and saliva testing? And embarrassingly, I said, not really. So she gave me a cassette tape. That's how long ago it was. And I put it in the car, and my wife listened to it and said, This guy's talking about me. And he was talking about basic physiology, how progesterone, you know, it slows down growth and how it's different between a progesterone and progesterone. And I was like, finally, I understand this. It was like a light bulb went off, and I'm like, this is my calling. And the other thing that I'd learned is when I was in my residency, we never drew blood or anything to look at hormone levels. We just weren't taught that. We were told that blood doesn't tell you anything, and it actually that that's actually true. So we just did what we did. So then I began to understand saliva testing, and that's really what turned me around, is that finally I could see the imbalance, I could correct it, and then I could see if her symptoms, if I corrected the testing, could that also mean that I corrected those symptoms? And for 25 years, it has been, and nothing's 100% matched, okay?

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

But it has been, it has been eye-opening for me that I could actually see what I'm trying to do instead of waiting till a person had a breast lump or till her hair started falling out, until, you know, to know that she was either over-medicated or under-medicated. So just like you, yeah, I also tell women, I'm gonna stop here. I also tell women, I said, look, you wouldn't take blood pressure medicine if nobody ever checked your blood pressure. You wouldn't take cholesterol medicine if nobody ever looked at your lipid profile. But women all the time, and men all the time, are taking hormones without accurate monitoring. And so, you know, I see these women on Facebook groups and everything, trying to figure out what's going on. And I believe if you understand the basic physiology, you will be able to ask better questions and you'll also be able to determine what is right for you and what's not right for you. Because we're taught, you know, generalities. Give everybody this, give everybody that. So uh that was a way I could individualize my my treatment, and I could feel confident that I wasn't causing a more of an imbalance or anything.

SPEAKER_03 5:46

That's that's a great story. The the initial cassette tape back in the day, was it Dr.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Jonathan Wright produce or it was John Lee.

SPEAKER_03 5:56

John Lee, yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Yeah, John Lee. You know, he was the really pioneer of it was like the the miracle progesterone or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

And all I knew was north endulk acetate, level digester. That's all I knew.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

And I'm so, you know, I'm so embarrassed that I know I learned that physiology the first two years of medical school. But then the second two years of medical school and in your residency, you're told how to survive in the hospital, how to write prescriptions, who needs surgery, whatever. But the vast majority of people who are suffering, they never go to the hospital. Or when they go to the hospital, and this is, I think this is the biggest problem is that women go to the doctor, they know they have hormone issues, fibroids, irregular bleeding, uh, breast tenderness, fibrocyte, whatever. And they go to the doctor and they say your hormone tests are normal. That is, and then so then they get shuttled off to the psychiatrist, the endocrinologist, this and that, and the other. And it's obvious that their reproductive system is somewhere, it's out of balance. But because we are not taught how to properly measure hormones, we're still we're guessing. We're like, oh, I hope this works. And then two or three months later, when they have side effects, then we change it again. I hope that works. And then so now you're a year and a half, two years down the road, and you still don't have solutions. And that's where I think women are caught in this gap. Okay? Normal laps, but abnormal symptoms. I tell people you don't have 10 or 15 problems. You have a lot of symptoms that probably can get dwindled down. And I think the big culprit is stress. Stress is the it's the top of the pyramid, and I feel like everything else is downstream. Stress disrupts ovulation, so now you don't have a proper estrogen progesterone balance. It disrupts your immune system, your gut, your brain, everything. So that's really what I've got interested in. Started out, we wrote a book called Are Your Hormones Making You Sick. And then about two or three years later, we were like, this doesn't apply 100%. But when you look at cortisol, and you can actually measure cortisol in the saliva also, and you get a pattern and you can see what their circadian rhythm looks like. And that's what controls everything, is that circadian rhythm in the sleep and awake. Everything controlled is controlled by that. So I'm gonna stop talking, but that's kind of my story, and I'm sticking to it, okay?

SPEAKER_03 8:31

Well, you're the expert today. We we will we want to hear everything

Normal Labs With Real Symptoms

SPEAKER_03 8:35

you have to say. But I do want to circle back. Tell us why you prefer saliva testing versus serum or blood testing.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Okay. So, and this is I I I uh used to give a lecture called Hormone Replacement by the Book, and I totally base it off of quotes from the GYN Endocrinology book, right? So, in that, and I could pull it up, it's like serum measurement of fat-soluble hormones give you limited clinically useful information. And the reason, the way I understand this concept is, is that the blood carries, blood is like a highway. It's it's carrying things from one place to the other. It's carrying from your ovary to your breast, to your uterus, whatever. Now, but they're fat-soluble. So how do, and oil and water don't mix. So, how do you carry a fat-soluble hormone in a water-soluble blood? Well, you put in something called sex hormone binding glyphant. I like to call it when I'm talking to patients, a FedEx truck. Okay, so in the blood, you're looking at all of the packages in the FedEx truck. And let's say there are a hundred packages in the FedEx truck. So you look at that and it goes from 100 to 98 or whatever. You say, Oh, that's normal. You look in the blood, oh, your hormones are normal. The key is how many packages got delivered to your uterus, to your uh breast, or whatever. So it may be a hundred packages on there, but only about one to two percent of the hormone is bioavailable and free. That's what binds to the receptor and causes the whole cascade of, you know, of hormone balance. All right, so it so the saliva testing, the asinar cells around the saliva gland, it's it the astiner cells are fat-soluble. So some of that hormone gets delivered to that tissue. If you know the normal range in that tissue, you can assume that, okay, the normal amount got delivered here. Let's see, I'm gonna assume that the normal amount got delivered other way, uh other places. And the key is the balance of estrogen and progesterone. Okay, so if you get two estrogen packages, you have to get enough progesterone to balance that out. Because estrogen causes growth, estrogen causes you to store fat, progesterone slows growth, and it burns fat for energy. So everything has a balance and a counterbalance, but it's not how much is traveling around, it's how how much is in your tissue, okay, and how is that being balanced. And the only way I know how to look at that particular, that that particular area is in the saliva testing. Now I know there's also urine testing, but this is how I look at that. Urine testing is telling you what got metabolized. Okay. And then in this, in the in the textbook, it says estrogen can be estrogen can have this action several times before it's ever metabolized. So some of these hormones can get recirculated in the tissue. So if you're only looking at what's metabolized, what you're looking at is what was the what was your liver and your detoxification system, what was it able to produce? But you still don't know how much is still, how much has accumulated in that tissue. So even if you gave two packages yesterday, but you only used one and a half, that other half package is still in the tissue. And that's why I think people get so confused about how can you be gaining weight on estrogen. And what I see here is that your blood tests are normal and also your urine test doesn't show anything because a lot of that tissue is, I mean a lot of that hormone is still in the tissue. Testosterone is the most fat-soluble, so it stays the longest. Progesterone is second, and estrogen is the one that doesn't bind as tightly. So sometimes those fluctuations are, you feel it more. But if you have enough of the progesterone, and if your cortisol is in the is in a reasonable circadian rhythm. And until we figure that out, and then we wrote the book, The Stress Connection, then everything came together. When something didn't make sense, we look at cortisol, and now we almost look at cortisol on everybody because everybody is stressed. And what you're going to find out is that when people say they're stressed, or I think my cortisol is high, most of the time, if you look at the saliva, that cortisol is actually low. Because cortisol is your adaptability hormone. So you need cortisol to be able to adapt to the different situations that come up in your life. And when you don't have enough, that's when adrenaline kicks in, because that's the only way you can get this energy. So you get these bursts of energy, it feels like fight or flight. But when your cortisol rhythm is right, you get the right amount of energy at the right time. You see a lot of people who say they're tired and wired, and that's what we call it. That means they have a low, usually, if you look on saliva, they will have a low morning cortisol and a high nighttime cortisol. And so they're tired all day, and then they have they have trouble going to sleep, or they wake up at two or three o'clock in the morning. And a lot of times it's because you have a high nighttime cortisol. And there's ways to correct circadian rhythm for cortisol curves. There's ways to do that. So that's a long answer to a short question. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03 14:00

I was just thinking, okay, let's circle back to that and that and that and that. So back to to help people understand why they might need a saliva test. It's it's going to show what's bioavailable to the tissues, where hormones that are bound to the red blood cell, and that's what's being measured in serum. That's that's not an indication of what's really truly bioavailable to the tissue. Is that correct? Am I close on that?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

Oh no, you're very close. And let me tell you, most women know that, okay? Because what you what I see on Facebook is how could my labs be normal when I feel so awful? You know? Yes. So they know the blood is not telling them something. And I believe that healthcare practitioners, they know the same thing. That's why they're so confused, and that's why you hear so many voices out there telling you, oh, estrogen is the key, progesterone is the key, testosterone is the key, this is the key. No, I always say balance is good, imbalance is bad. And the only way you can balance something is to measure it accurately. That's how you cannot you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

Yes.

Saliva Vs Blood Testing Explained

SPEAKER_03 15:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

So if if you know in business, you know, you have to track all of these things, you gotta measure everything. But for some reason, we're allowed to either use testing that that really confuses both the hair care the health care practitioner and the patient, or we just do what we think is right and hope it turns out okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

And and all I say is even if saliva testing is 50% better than serum testing, at least we're 50% closer to trying to balance this and give and and the other thing is that when the patient sees it, oh wow, that's why I'm staying, that's why I wake up at two or three o'clock in the morning. Wow, that's why I'm tired in the morning. And most of the time when they're there, these perimenopausal women, they're not only going through a physical change, but this is the usually it's the most stressful time in their life. The kids are going to college, the parents are getting older, you know, they've been married for 20, 30 years, she's going through menopause, he doesn't understand it, so they're arguing, they're arguing about the fact that this and that. And and so all of that hits right at that time. And I think that's why some women can go through perimenopause and menopause and be fine, and some women they have a even a harder time because they have all of that stress that's affecting the cortisol, their sleep, and then now you've got all of, you know, now you've got your actual female hormones that you're trying to do. And then you go to the doctor and and they seem confused, so then they think they have some kind of incurable disease.

unknown 16:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

You know, and so that just increases the stress more. Then they're going to different doctor's appointments, they got to take time off work, they've got to provide medications that may not be right for them. And I call it the cost of hormone confusion. And that's what I'm trying to teach women how their menstrual cycle works and what it does to them and what these different cycles, balance, and transitions that you go through. It's all predictable. And if you understand something, it's a lot easier to deal with it. And I tell patients 50% of my job is to help you understand what's going on with you. And that's that's 50% of it. They feel better just by saying, oh, somebody at least explained it to them.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

And then, you know, and then, you know, we can try and see, hey, can we do the testing? And then I can really tell you what's going on. So so that that that's how I look at it. I'm I'm trying to, I feel like I'm trying to teach women what they should have learned in fifth grade health class.

unknown 17:53

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

How does my body work? Right. Okay. Why do I have these menstrual psyches? You know, what is going on? And the problem is that grandmothers never talk about that to their mother. The mother doesn't know how to talk about it to the daughter. And I just did a podcast last week. And what it was talking about is that women and menstruation has been confusing since ancient times. I was looking at it, it's like 10,000 years ago. You know, they used to think women when their hormones changed, that they were witches, or they would put them, you know, they would isolate them. And 10,000 years later, we're still confused.

SPEAKER_03 18:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

That's what I can't understand. So anyway.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

So back to the stress connection, the adrenal glands are the backup system to our sex hormones, inflammation, process, you know, blood sugar regulation, all these things. And if we are having to steal away the main adrenal hormone, which is pregnant alone, over to make cortisol constantly, we do we have no backup system for our sex hormones, meaning estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. So I agree, and we tell our patients that if you're going through menopause or andropause, if you're a man and you are stressed uh with all the things, then you are have you have an empty gas tank. And I tell us a little bit about the adrenal testing. You you do what you mentioned the core cortical rhythm or the circadian rhythm.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Circadian rhythm.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

And so if someone was going to do a saliva test at home, uh tell us what we'd be looking for in each of those samples throughout the day.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Okay, so what you do is you take four samples throughout the day and you collect it, it's only about two CC's. People look at it and they say, oh my God, it takes about five minutes to do. And you would take one, uh you would collect one sample 30 minutes after you wake up. Okay, so we're trying to, and you can even look at the uh what they call a cortisol awakening response. Do you get a surge of cortisol? Because you have to think, you're trying to go from unconscious to conscious. That takes a lot of energy, you know, to wake you up. So you have this cortisol response. So you take it 30 minutes after you wake, and then you do another one around four hours later. We try to separate these out four hours apart. So we say around lunchtime, but at least a half hour before. Don't eat anything because if you nick your gum with the potato chip or something, there's even microscopic bleeding, it throws the whole test off. Okay. So four hours apart, and what they do is we we connect the dots to see what your cortisol curve looks like. It should be high in the morning and low at night. When people are stressed, what's supposed to happen when you have a minor stress, you get a little bit more energy, you handle the stress, it goes back down to normal. When people are under chronic stress, cortisol stays high, and that's what you're talking about, being out of gas. So most of the time in your 20s and 30s, you're pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. You're trying to get your career, you got your kids, and then around 40 or 50, I tell everybody, around 40 or 50, if you don't start trying to fill up that tank kind of naturally, you're going to have, you're going to have an issue. So anyway, so you go up here, and then your body, then you're, like you said, you run out of gas. The first thing is you get this, where it's just straight across. So in the morning, you've got the energy that you're supposed to have at noon, and then at night, you've got the energy that you still are supposed to have at noon, because you just got a straight line like this. And so that's the tired and wired. You don't wake up with the surge, and then at night you don't calm down because you got this steady cortisol rhythm. So, and a lot of times when a patient sees it, that's when they say, Now I see what you're talking about. And a lot of times I'll ask a patient, I was like, after this big stressor, do you think these stressors had an effect on your health? And they'll say, 100%. Okay, but nobody can really show them that. So when you when they see it, it becomes real to them. And then I think they try to manage it. And I try to help them manage it.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

So do you do you find that no matter what method you are giving someone their hormones that you can adequately test with saliva, whether it's capsules or creams or patches or injections, all the everything works.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

That's how I feel, because I'm looking at what is available to the tissue. Now, here's where I think the key insight to saliva testing is for postmenopause woman. All right? She's had a total hysterectomy, and everybody says, I know I don't have any hormones. And then what I tell them is that, look, I think God made it where women had a little bit more fat tissue because fat tissue can aromatize androgens into estrogens. So even so we do have a backup estrogen system. We just don't have a backup progesterone and testosterone system. So if a postmenopausal woman comes in and if she has anywhere more than you know 20% body fat or 30% body fat, if you do a saliva test on them, you will see they're making estrogen. But 100% of women will stop ovulating. And progesterone is the only hormone that is pretty much exclusively based on ovulation. You have some, but it's based on ovulation. So 100% of women, their progesterone is going to go down to almost nothing. So they're not going to ovulate. However, the fat tissue is still making estrogen. So that creates an imbalance. So you can do one of two things. You can either lower the estrogen, okay, or you can raise the progesterone. And it's a lot easier to raise the progesterone than to try and lower the estrogen and get people to get rid of fat tissue. And this is why I want to say we use aromatase inhibitors, even though we don't see the estrogen that we're inhibiting. Okay? Because if you look, you know, if you look in the blood in a woman who has endometrial cancer, in a post-menopausal woman with endometrial cancer, her blood hormones, her blood uh estrogen is still going to be low because the the blood only measures what comes out of the ovary. That's the only thing it measures. So you can have fat tissue, you know, that's that's you know making a lot of estrogen, and you don't see it in the blood. So though those are all the things, you know, that I feel like we accept. Like, okay, we got an aromatase inhibitor for this estrogen-positive breast cancer, but we don't have any way to know how much estrogen she's making by looking at the blood. If you look in the saliva, I'm not saying it's 100%, but it gives you an idea. And this is how I connect it. You know, we look at sodium and potassium in the blood, but we know that the heart and that there's a sodium and potassium pump. So we don't know exactly what the sodium and potassium is in the heart by looking at the blood, but we say, hey, if it's if it's okay in the blood, then it's it's probably okay everywhere else.

unknown 25:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

So that's how I look at saliva. We know the reference range of that. We know what the balance should be. In the lab I use the balance of estrogen and progesterone is 200 to 1. Different labs will have different balances. Sure. But I look at that 200 to 1 ratio, and if that's right, most of the time the symptoms start to match the testing. And that's what I longed for. I think that's what patients long for. Please give me some information about why I'm feeling like this so I can understand. So I'll know what to do, I'll know what to ask, I'll know what's right for me and what's not right for me.

SPEAKER_03 25:46

Uh, Dr. Taylor, what are your preferred methods of delivery for hormones? Just what's your personal preference and your practice?

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Well, this is, I look at it, whatever the patient will do on a consistent basis is great. It's great, yeah. If you can't take pills, here's a cream or here's an ejection. Whatever. But

Cortisol Curves And Tired Wired Sleep

SPEAKER_00 26:08

I do believe that you do measure it in saliva, no matter what. Whatever delivery method is, what is the balance between those two? Are they balanced or not? And what is what is that cortisol? Because it's really not replacing cortisol. Uh, what you do is you give them adaptatives, like gensine rhodology, and helps them to better adapt to stress. And it can raise that cortisol curve. So I don't really care. Whatever the patient will do. Now, I will tell you that creams are a little bit harder to manage uh because you don't know how they're applying it. It can build up over time, all those things. I I use trokeys, you just got to make sure you know they haven't had the troche for two or three days so that it doesn't contaminate the sample. Okay. You know, you can use anything. It's important to do what the patient feels comfortable and will do on a regular basis. And and so that's that's how I that's how I look at it. Is whatever the patient will do, that's that's what I'll give them, and then I'll try to manage it appropriately.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

That's a wise doctor speaking there. Patient compliance is you know, you you have so many patients come in and tell you something's not working and they haven't been doing it according to your directions.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_03 27:22

Yeah. You mentioned estrogen and progesterone. Do you do you give women testosterone as well?

SPEAKER_00 27:30

So here's how I look at testosterone with women. I know a lot of women and a lot of people, they advocate testosterone for women for libido. This is how I look at it. If that woman's estrogen and progesterone is out of balance and her cortisol and she's not sleeping, I feel like you can give them testosterone until they grow a beard. Sure. And until that is corrected, nothing is going to happen. Women, men and testosterone are just like this. Okay? If a man comes in, libido's low, testosterone's low until proven otherwise. Women are different, as we all know. They're more complicated. Everything needs to be just right for them to really have a libido. They need to feel good. They need to feel good about themselves, they need to feel good about their relationship, they need to feel good about their children, they need to feel all of that before they're going to entertain having sex. Right. All right. So that's more important. All right. The one time I use testosterone is when a woman says, I think about sex, I just don't have a feeling down there.

SPEAKER_03 28:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Okay. So then if it's if it's vaginal dryness, I'll use some kind of estriol cream or something. And then if it's not, if the clitoris, I hope I can say this on here, is not sensitive, then you put testosterone on the clitoris, and I feel like it brings blood to it, and so that the clitoris can become erect and sensitive, just like, just like in a in a man. So I use testosterone for that. I don't necessarily when a woman, when a woman says, I don't think about sex, but if I have sex, I enjoy it, then I'm thinking I'm trying to get her, like, hey, is her estrogen progesterone right? Whatever. I don't think, I don't think, I think testosterone does better with stimulation than it is with with sex drive. Okay, that's that's just how I look at it. And I found out that if I fix her stress and all of that, that all of a sudden she she feels good again. She wants she wants to have sex. I I one of my my adages are men have sex so they can relax.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Women have to be relaxed in order to have sex. So and that's where a lot of the fighting comes in because a woman is upset and the man says, Let's go have sex, you'll feel better. And that just makes her more angry. No, that's gonna make you feel better. It's not until we get this resolved, we're not going up in that bedroom. And and and and women, I mean, men need to understand that. Women understand it. Men need to understand that that sex is not a sex, it is sex is not a stress relief for women. It is a stress relief for men. So, you know, if you ever read the book Women Are From Mars and and Yes. Men are from Mars and Women Are from Venus, it very clearly lets you understand these differences. And uh, you know, if you don't understand them, you're just you're just asking for confrontation.

SPEAKER_03 30:29

That's so true. My husband and I help with the marriage ministry, and we talk about how men need sex to feel emotion and to be emotional and be emotionally connected, and women need that emotional connection to be physical. So it it's it's the yin and yang business.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:51

Back to the, you know, do you treat adrenal fatigue? And if so, you know, how do you how do you make the adrenals healthy again and things like that?

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Okay, so I I do it, I do it one of two ways, okay? Well one of three ways, really. So if I see a if I see a person who's just totally wiped out, they can't work, they can't do it, and I do the saliva test, and their morning cortisol is extremely, extremely low. I will actually give them five to ten milligrams of cortisol in the morning while I'm trying to rehabilitate their adrenal gland. Okay. And there's a book called Safe Uses of Cortisol, where 20 milligrams of actual hydrocortisone over the course of a day is not going to be harmful if they because they have enough corticosterobinding globulin to to buffer it. But I only do that if the saliva test is telling me it's low. All right? So that's that's one way to do it. And then after a couple of months, we take them off of that or we lower the dose because now their adrenals have recovered, and you can do a smaller withdrawal, and they feel fine. Because that's I don't want them to wait a month or two to feel better. All right. If it's not so bad, then we do two things. One, we use IV vitamin C with B5B6 and NAD, okay, to try and get the Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle, get it making ATP. So we put you know everything that we can in there. We call it a super energy IV. Usually we'll do that once a week for three weeks while they're taking our adrenal supplement.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

So usually after that, then we stretch out the IVs or they're doing fine or whatever. So that's that's our protocol. Really bad, cortisol while we're doing that. And that that's a that's a small number of pieces, okay? But most of them are either taking the adrenal supplement if it's not that bad, and then are and are they doing the vitamin, what we call a super energy IV.

SPEAKER_03 32:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Because the adrenal gland needs vitamin C, B5, B6, NAD, it needs some other things, but those are the those are the some of the limiting factors, especially NAD.

SPEAKER_03 32:56

That that's a zinger.

Delivery Methods And Testosterone Nuance

SPEAKER_03 32:58

I bet that would get you feeling better almost immediately.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Yeah. Yeah. We don't use much NAD, but it does. When people will say, Oh wow. After the first one, they'll say, Oh wow, I I felt better for at least two, three, four days, but then start to wear off.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Then the next time they come, it lasts longer. Next time it lasts longer. Uh-huh. And that's why we just do them three and then we stretch them out, or maybe they're doing fine or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 33:23

Yeah. Do you like to do you ever use supplement, a pregnenolone or DHEA?

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Do you think that I use I use pregnenolone some. There, I think there's some pregnantone in the in the adrenal supplement.

SPEAKER_03 33:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

I usually go right for the hormone that I measure. Sure. Okay. If you're not measuring, then yes, pregnenolone, and then let the body decide what to do with it. So I understand why people why people do that. But if I have the if I have the testing available, then I'm going to go right at it. Okay. And to try to get that. Because I feel like people need to feel something in the first two to three weeks.

SPEAKER_03 34:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

To really feel like you know what you're talking about. So that's why I say, hey, look, if your progesterone is low, I'm going to give you oral progesterone. And I don't say this. And then they they're surprised when they're sleeping the next night.

SPEAKER_03 34:15

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

You know?

SPEAKER_03 34:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

And so that, so for, you know, I always tell people the first thing I want to do is get you to sleep. Because when you sleep, your body, that's when it repairs itself. That's recovery. So I know you have a bunch of symptoms, but the first thing I want to do is get you to sleep. So that's why I look at progesterone and I look at cortisol. Because those are the two things that can cause a problem that other people aren't going to look for. And so I tell people, I tell them if you have trouble going to sleep, you've probably got a progesterone issue. If you can get to sleep, but you wake up at two or three o'clock in the morning, it's because your cortisol curve is not letting you get into a deep sleep. That's why you're waking up at two or three o'clock in the morning. And I use a supplement, it's called serene calm, but it's phosphatidyl serine because that seems to lower that cortisol. So I get tell them to take it with their evening meal, and it seems to calm them. And I'll tell you right now, that's probably one of the best-selling supplements because everybody is stressed out. And serene calm helps to helps to people to sleep or whatever. So but I always look at that. Is that progesterone and cortisol? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_03 35:23

And that supplement you mentioned, uh serene calm, is that what you called it? That can replace a glass of wine or something else that people need to kind of wind down. So, Dr. Taylor, do you the standard of care for so many years has been if you don't have a uterus, if it if you've had a hysterectomy, you don't need to take progesterone. What what's your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 35:50

You want me to pull my hair out narrowly. It's already coming out on his own, but I that oh that really, that really just, you know, there's something you call there's there's things that are simplistic, and then there's things that are simple. Okay, if you don't have a uterus, you don't need progesterone. That's simplistic. Everybody can remember that. But simple is that progesterone is used all over the body, the cardiovascular system, the brain. So this. So I used to, when I used to lecture, I'd say, hey, look, if that's true, if you want, you don't need progesterone if you don't have a uterus, then you're also going to have to do a total brain ectomy.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Okay?

SPEAKER_00 36:34

You're gonna have to do a kidney ectomy because it it it controls our I said, you're going to the cardiovascular system, it it it uh relaxes smooth muscle. So that's that's simplistic and it's it makes it where you don't have to think. When I started this, I read a book by John Maxwell called Thinking for a Change.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 36:54

Okay, and it just means if you keep thinking the same way you've always been thinking, you're always gonna so if you if you keep thinking that blood is telling you something, and the women keep saying, My hormones, my my my blood tests are normal, but I still feel awful, if you keep doing that, there's there's still so we gotta we have to think for a change. We cannot, I think it was Socrates or whatever said you cannot, or Einstein said you cannot solve your problems with the same thinking you use to create the problem. That's right. So we've got to think differently from blood, and that's why I say, hey look, you may not think that saliva testing is 100% accurate, but I can tell you that the blood test is almost 100% inaccurate.

SPEAKER_03 37:37

Inaccurate, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Inaccurate, yes, and we know it. It's always normal when you're pre-menopausal, it's always low when you're post-menopausal, even though you may have hormonal access excess symptoms. So you've got to say, is it a problem with the testing? Is it a problem with are the patients lying? Do you think every patient is is is lying to you? Or is your testing faulty? And and even if you don't like saliva testing, look for something else. I guess the Dutch test is better than than than other things, but it's according to what you want to find. If you want to know what metabolites are, and in breast cancer, the metabolites are really important. So I'm not saying that so it's always what are you looking for? Are you looking for the total amount of hormone? Then go to the blood. If you're looking at what's going in the tissue, then look in the saliva. If you want to know what the metabolites are and do we have the right metabolites and sending it down the right pathway, then use the urine. That's all I'm saying. All of these tests are fine to answer a specific question. But not one test answers all the questions. Right. Saliva testing doesn't tell me what's in the blood, and it doesn't tell me what the metabolites are. So just know what tests are used for what you're trying to accomplish. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying anything's bad or good. I'm not saying estrogen or progesterone are bad or good. Balance is good, imbalance is bad.

SPEAKER_03 38:59

So, Dr. Taylor, let's talk about your practice and your website ageless-blueprint.com. Tell us how you know you've done brick brick and mortar practice, you still practice?

SPEAKER_02 39:15

Yeah, yes, we do.

SPEAKER_03 39:16

And if anyone wanted to come see you travel to Atlanta, you certainly would are are you accepting new patients in that way? Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Now my practice is Taylor Medical Group.

unknown 39:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Taylor Medical Group.net. Taylor Medical Group.net. Ageless Blueprint is something I created really two years ago, really trying to deal with what is the blueprint in order to live a good life. Okay. And a lot of that is ageless. You know, that's why I was talking about how ancients looked at really what sparked this. I went to Egypt in 2024. And you start to see how advanced these ancient civilizations were, and you see that on YouTube and stuff now. And you start to figure out that, hey, they figured out some things a long time ago that we have forgotten. And if we would go back and we would, we would understand our history, you know, our human history, we would find that, hey, look, these guys figured it out a long time ago. And our problem now is we are built for a world that is different from that we're living in now. And that's why we're so stressed. We don't go outside, we don't connect with people, we don't do any of those things. So that's why I started Ageless Blueprint is to let you know. Because there's a lot of things that I would like for my patients to know that I don't have time for in a 30-minute visit, you know, two, three times a year. So some of the other things that I feel like would help them, because a lot of the things that we are medicating and all that, if we lived by this ageless blueprint, we would need a lot less of it. If we walked more, if we, you know, it's all kinds of things. Uh so that's where Ageless Blueprint came

Progesterone After Hysterectomy Myth

SPEAKER_00 40:58

out. And so then what happened was I started that, and then I was like, wow, a lot of these people, they have a hard time moving forward in their lives because their hormones and their stress are so, it's disrupting their life so much. They can't advance. And so I'm like, okay, if we can get your hormones to stress, now you would have the capabilities to live out the rest of your life like you would like. Because I see these 40 and 50-year-old women who have all these problems and nobody can solve them, and they feel like I'm gonna be like this for the rest of my life. And that's what's so scary. And, you know, I even had this uh executive that had a baby, it was in the Nick U, so and she had to go through infertility, so she had a lot of stress or whatever. And then postpartum, she had postpartum depression, and she couldn't work. I mean, she was a highly uh high-up executive in a in a multi-billion dollar company. So anyway, she was distraught after the after the pregnancy because she was so stressed out and she couldn't sleep, whatever. And so we did a saliva test. What happened? Cortisol was high and her progesterone was low. So we treated that, gave her some IV therapy, we gave her progesterone, and I really believe that a lot of the postpartum depression, at least the postpartum blues, is due to when you deliver the placenta, the progesterone, placenta was making progesterone throughout the whole pregnancy. That's why it's called progesterone. It promotes gestation. And so you ever wonder how can a woman who is weighing 60 pounds more has this big thing in her belly? How can they be so happy? I believe because the progress because the placenta is pouring out progesterone, all right? So then you remove it, and now that GABA, that the allopregnenolone that it was converting, it's all gone. So you get those postpartum blues. I believe that supplementing with progesterone postpartum would help with that tremendously. You know, that's just and that's that's what I'm looking at, is just basic physiology. Okay, what was the placenta providing that that you know when the baby was born we took away? Progesterone, right? And uh, and and the other thing that I tell pregnant women is that the reason why you can hear the baby in the middle of the night when this is and your husband can't, is because if you look at postpartum, your body, or the maternal instinct, I guess, does that, raises the nighttime cortisol so you don't get into a deep sleep, so that you can hear the baby. Now, the your husband does not have a maternal instinct. So he doesn't hear that baby. When he says he didn't hear the baby, he's not lying. He did not hear the baby, okay? He didn't hear the baby. All right. You heard the baby because your maternal instinct allows you to do it. So, you know, a lot of times if people just understand what is my body doing, they they like, okay, now I can make the adjustment that I need to make, or now I understand it, so I don't have to worry about it anymore. That's what I think women are looking. For. Just give me an explanation. Even if you don't fix it, just give me the explanation. That's all I'm asking for. Right.

SPEAKER_03 44:07

What a good service. And so it's ageless-blueprint.com.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:14

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Uh-huh. And there's you can email me at dr taylor at ageless dash blueprint.com. Okay. And I try to answer emails. I have a podcast called Ageless Blueprint Podcast. You can go to that.

SPEAKER_03 44:27

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

And I'm the Hormone Doctor on TikTok and Instagram. I'm the Hormone Doctor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:33

Awesome. And and you can you there's something called the Hormone Clarity Quiz that they could take on the blueprint dot agelessblueprint.com.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Yep. And it's just to give to try and give them clarity. You know, one of the things I said, just because you're on hormone replacement doesn't mean you have hormone clarity. A lot of people own a lot of things and they have no idea why they're on it. I like to ask people who say they have PCOS. I say, hey, explain that to them. What is PCOS?

SPEAKER_03 44:58

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

I don't know. I just know I have it. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. You get these labels and the labels stick and nobody really understands

Resources Ageless Blueprint And Closing

SPEAKER_00 45:08

the labels. They don't know how you got it. They don't know how you, you know, relieve it. But uh yeah. So that that's why I'm trying to help women understand so that they can make good decisions. That's what I'm trying to do.

SPEAKER_03 45:21

So if someone did reach out to you but they're unable to come to Georgia, uh, you would still offer them some guidance and help and direction to to maybe request of their own physician. Is that right? Is that correct? Right.

SPEAKER_00 45:34

That's yeah. So that's why we have I have a school group called Ageless Blueprint where you can come in. It has like uh some lessons in there, it has a chat GPT where you can ask your questions, all of that. Where I put all of my information, the books and everything in there.

SPEAKER_01 45:49

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

Also, the two books you can download the books. It's an e-book, it's uh we have an ebook, we even have an audio book, and you can download however you like to consume it, you can download it there. Now there is a charge for that, but we do the whole bundle for like 15 bucks. And if you want to listen to it, read it, put an ebook, however you want to do it.

SPEAKER_03 46:09

And they get they get to all those uh assets through the Agelus Blueprint website.

SPEAKER_00 46:17

Yes, you can do that. Just message me or it's there. I'll guide you through it. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 46:22

Okay. And the as a reminder, the books are called Are Your Hormones Making You Sick? And the other book is The Stress Connection. Yes, ma'am. And by Dr. Eldred Taylor and Dr. Ava Bell Taylor. And I your wife offers holistic psychiatry. I mean, I bet I bet you guys are a super team. Yeah. Because she could work on the brain.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Well, let me tell you what why my wife joined me, because she was doing regular psychiatry, just like I was doing over Gwen. And then she took five years off to raise our second daughter. And during that time, she kind of healed herself. Okay, because she was a man. I tell people the only reason why I'm doing this is because my wife has like every endocrine problem, you know, hormone problem known to a man. She had cortisol issues. She had so anyway. So what happened, she took five years off, and that's when we kind of transformed ourselves. And then she realized, she said, you know, now I look back, and all of these women who came to me in their 40s and 50s, and I labeled them as bipolar, she's like, they were going through peribenal, they had hormone issues. Right. So that's when she was like, Wow. I she she said, now she calls herself a reproductive psychiatrist. It's to say, I'm gonna look at how these hormones are affecting your brain. Now, I'm not telling you that there's not severe schizophrenia and all that kind of stuff, but a lot of times people, women especially, if they're labeled bipolar in those 40s and 50s, look at the hormones before you put that label on them. Because again, the patient gets that label and then she starts telling everybody she's bipolar, and everybody treats her that way.

SPEAKER_02 48:03

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

And uh, so that's that's why it's important, I said, you know, to understand what the full scope of hormones are. It's just not progesterone because you have a uterus. That overall balance is what's important.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

Right. I think that that was a very important message that you just spoke, that women get labeled certain things and given band-aid approaches, you know, through Prozac and things like that. You you're, you know, all it's so nice that that your wife is offering the chance to let's really look at your endocrinology right now and your hormones and see if there's something else going on before we slap that label on you. I think that that probably happens way too much. So, Dr. Taylor, you definitely are a hormone hero, and we've been so honored to have you share all your wisdom with us. Is there any last thoughts you'd like to leave with us today?

SPEAKER_00 48:58

No, the it, you know, uh again, just I'm trying to teach basic physiology. I think a lot of times we get caught up on the new study and the new discovery and all this. There's an ancient blueprint, okay? Estrogen progesterone. So just don't go after the next new discovery, okay? Let's learn the basics, and then we can base our decisions on the basics and not what the new fad is that's going around in women's hormones. So that's all I uh uh that would be my final word. Let let's let's go to fifth grade health class. Learn that. The mistral cycle. I'm telling you, if you if you learn that, it'll it'll solve a lot of your problems and it'll allow you to teach your daughter. That's what I want this to be the last generation of hormone confusion. So my goal is to end hormone confusion. So that's my last thought.

SPEAKER_03 49:50

And I think that you're doing a great job. Thank you, Dr. Taylor. We appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 49:56

Thanks for listening to Hormone Heroes. Take a moment to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. While you are there, help us spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. If you would like to share your bioidentical hormone story or need help finding a physician in your area, please email us at drkelly at hormoneheroes.org. That's D R K E L L I at H O R M O N E. H E R O E S dot org. We want you to be a hormone hero.