#266 Why Conventional Gynecology Misses Midlife Health And What To Do Instead

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Hey, welcome to the Fast of Faith podcast.
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I just wanted to jump on here and say hello.
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There are so many new faces.
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I'm so excited that you found me.
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Maybe you found me through the Candace Cameron Beret podcast episodes, and you have heard of my pain to purpose story.
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I was an OBGYN and I burnt myself out.
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And it wasn't until I went on my own health journey, faith journey, and healed myself with Jesus that I really figured things out.
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God has given me so much wisdom around our body and how we're supposed to care for it and nourish it and where the medical system is really going wrong and setting us up for chronic disease and misery.
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So I really wanted to share this interview that I did for my midlife reset summit recently.
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That summit is still available if you want to have it for an entire year.
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The link is in the show notes.
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But this interview is necessary for every single woman to hear.
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This is what I learned as I studied functional medicine and what I realized I didn't know as an OBGYN.
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So we're just asking the wrong people for help.
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And if you listen to this interview, you will understand why your doctor is giving you the answers they're giving you.
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And you'll really stop feeling so frustrated and you'll start to see the solutions appear.
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So I hope this episode blesses you.
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I hope you share it with every woman that you know.
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My good friend Kirsten Lindquist interviewed me for why conventional gynecology and OBGYNs are just getting it wrong and where we need to go to get answers and really thrive in this next season of our life.
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So enjoy.
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Shoot me your comments.
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I want to hear what else you want to listen and understand.
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I'm here for you.
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I love you, and I'll see you next week.
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Before we dive in, I want to tell the audience just a little bit about Dr.
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Tabitha Barber because we are so honored and blessed.
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I fell in love with her truly.
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I had her on my podcast, and from then on, the Lord was like, You will work with this woman because she is amazing.
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She's a triple board certified OBGYN.
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I'm talking about you like you're not here, but that's okay.
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She's a menopause and functional medicine physician who has dedicated her life to helping women reclaim their health in midlife and beyond.
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Her journey is one of true faith grit and transformation from being a teenage mom and a high school dropout to one of the most sought-after voices in women's health today.
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She's got this best-selling book, Fast to Faith.
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She has her podcast, Coaching Academy, the National Virtual Practice, where she sees so many clients and helps women gain tangible advice and move the needle in their lives.
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Dr.
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Tabitha helps women heal from stubborn weight, low energy, gut issues, and hormone imbalance and addresses really the root causes in body, mind, and soul.
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She's very passionate about exposing the gaps in conventional medicine and showing women that midlife is not the beginning of the end, but it's the start of your healthiest, most vibrant years yet.
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And that's why we're here, Doctor.
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Gosh, I love that so much.
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I hope everybody watching is just pumped up and excited because this is going to be super juicy.
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This is not your grandma's menopause and midlife transition.
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We are women on a mission who, you know, we're doing big things in the world, whether it's you're trying to be a stellar mom or run a business or run a home or lead a nonprofit, whatever is happening.
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Or maybe you're caring for your aging parents and you're just in a rough situation in this season of your life.
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Like we have got you covered.
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So I'm really excited and I wanted to kick off this whole entire week just debunking hormone myths, talking about hormones, and helping women understand that hormones are not the entire picture, right?
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Yeah, and I think that that's a perfect place to start because when we're talking about what is going on in midlife and stubborn weight and anxiety and hormonal issues and what we need to do as whether you're seeing that yet or you want to get into this season of your life, just the best and most fit version of you, I think one of the places we start is with conventional medicine because unfortunately it has failed us in the past, which is why we need a summit like this, which is why we need to learn from these experts.
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So, in your perspective, Doctor, what are the biggest gaps that you're seeing right now?
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And how is how's your own journey kind of influenced that perspective?
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I'm so glad we're starting here, Kirsten.
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So I like I said, I am a conventionally trained OBGY, and I spent a couple decades dedicating my life to what I thought was the answer, what I thought was God's plan for me to help women be healthy and live fruitful lives.
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But when I was in the thick of it, I burnt myself out.
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I destroyed my own health because I was caring for everybody else, putting everyone else first, thinking that is what God called me to do.
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And I got to the point where I was falling asleep at my desk.
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I couldn't even eat lunch.
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I was so busy.
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Or if I would eat, it would be on the way to a delivery while I was running down the hospital hallway, leaving dinner with my children to go and do a delivery and not coming back until three or four in the morning.
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And I got to this point where I was in such chronic back pain that I could no longer function.
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I couldn't sit on the bed and help a woman push when she was in labor.
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And one night I couldn't walk away from the OR table after I did an emergency C-section.
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So you can imagine how scary that was, right?
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And I went to the orthopedic surgeon like a good doctor.
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And all I knew was like, okay, I just need to go to the surgeon.
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And I had back surgery.
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I thought it was the only way.
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I took six weeks off to heal, which I thought the whole world was gonna fall apart because we as women were carrying everything, right?
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We're like, the world will fall apart if we take a break.
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But I did it.
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I was obedient.
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And my third night back on call, I re-injured and I couldn't move.
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I just cried out to God, like, why, God, why?
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And I didn't really get an answer.
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So I went back to the surgeon and he said, back surgery is like lay's potato chips.
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You can't have just one.
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Well, just put some rods and screws in your back.
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You might herniate above and below and need more surgery, but it's okay.
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Like you're gonna be fine.
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I do this all of the time.
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And something deep down within me said, This is not the right answer.
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And so I did the unthinkable.
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I took four months off of work and I went on this healing journey.
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And I what I found, Kirsten, was this whole world I knew nothing about health and wellness and diet and alternative medicine and white, what it matters what you're sleeping and your lifestyle and processing your relationships.
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Like none of this made any sense to me as a doctor.
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And what I realized was I was in this world of disease and diagnoses and despair.
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And so I didn't even know that wellness existed.
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I didn't know you were supposed to feel good and have energy.
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Like it was a foreign concept to me.
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So, like, you know, once your eyes are opened, you can't go back.
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And so I went on this path, and now I'm here.
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I'm on a mission to help women understand there is another way.
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Conventional medicine is a band-aid approach.
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I only had two tools in my toolbox as a conventional OBGYN medications like birth control and surgery, remove the offending organ.
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Those aren't actually healing your body, those are just covering up symptoms, those messages from your body.
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And so we need to know that there is another way to do this.
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And unfortunately, you have to step outside of conventional medicine, out of your what's covered by insurance, and your typical way of approaching health, because we're not talking about disease management.
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We're talking about getting healthy and thriving, right?
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So the conversation looks totally different.
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And I think that we have to stop there and put kind of an exclamation point on that, because this is everything you're gonna hear in this summit is gonna be a mindset shift for somebody and maybe for all of you.
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And that first mindset shift is my insurance should pay for all of it.
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The doctor knows best, and I just have to go and take the pill or get the surgery.
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And it used to be, friends, it used to be that way.
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But we have so much at our fingertips now and so much research and so much more information that we can not necessarily just have a band-aid approach.
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We can be proactive.
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And that means you're going to have to get a second, a third, or fourth opinion.
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That means you're gonna have to go out of pocket to get the best care in many situations.
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But you are worth it.
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And I want you to take that away.
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You are worth it.
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Your health is worth it because you can't help anybody else if you're not healthy.
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And what Dr.
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Tabitha is talking about right now is stepping outside of what you've always learned and opening your mind to these new things that you're gonna learn and how they're gonna help you be well, like she is, as opposed to stay sick.
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Yeah.
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Oh my gosh, that is that's everything.
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So we are gonna talk about mindset shift and really believing in your body's ability to heal, like getting the hope back.
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Because when women come to me, that's what they say.
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You're my only hope.
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Like, if this doesn't work, I'm done.
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I've tried everything else.
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And that breaks my heart, but it's also really exciting because it's such an opportunity for me because I know what I'm gonna help them with works.
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Like I healed myself, and I would love to just share the fact that I did not stay in my broken life.
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That life was killing me.
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Even though I thought God was calling me to help women and serve women and be a doctor, he wasn't calling me to do it that way.
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And one of the aha moments I had was he said to me, Yeah, you told me, let's go.
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I'm all in on doing what you're calling me to do.
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But then you left me back in the delivery room when you were 17 years old and you had your baby and you did it on your own for 20 years.
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And that's why you burnt yourself out because you did not invite me in on the journey.
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You did not ask for my help.
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You did not lean on me and ask me to carry those burdens.
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You carried it all yourself until you broke your back.
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And so I hope I know that's hitting somebody right in the heart today.
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Like you needed to hear this, that God is waiting for that invitation.
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He's waiting for you to say, please, Lord, come and help me.
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And maybe this is the answer, right?
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Maybe this is the answer.
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So and how and and knowing you as I have for the last year or so, it's a continual decision you have to make.
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It's not like you turned 37, you had this aha moment, and you're like, oh, you're right, God.
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You've had to go back and say, Oh, yeah, that's right.
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I'm following you.
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This is not of me.
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I'm gonna rededicate my life to following you because life gets hard.
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And let me remind everybody when when Dr.
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Tabitha went through this, she was, I think, what we would all consider still young.
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Like you were in your 30s.
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So the the hormone situation maybe wasn't at its peak.
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And right now it does seem that hormonal imbalance is at the root of so many midlife struggles.
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Why do you think that women are experiencing this at such alarming rates?
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And why is it often so overlooked?
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Yeah, oh my gosh.
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This summit is gonna tackle all the root causes of your hormone imbalances.
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And I'll tell you, while I was going through that chronic back pain and herniated discs and failed surgeries and raging Hashimoto's thyroid disease, I also started to have really heavy periods.
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One night I finally wasn't on call and I went out with my girlfriends for a wine about winter where you walk around downtown in the snow and you drink, you know, wine and visit the shops, and I had this big fluffy white coat on.
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I just I was so happy to be with my friends and not be on call.
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And we're all standing there talking, and all of a sudden I just felt a gush.
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And I had bled through my pants, and all I could think about was this beautiful white coat that I had on.
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And what am I gonna do?
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And it got real for me at that moment because my girlfriends were laughing at me.
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You're an OBGYN.
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Why are you bleeding through your pants?
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Just have an ablation, just get an IUD, just have a hysterectomy.
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And in the back of my mind, I was like, heck no, know the truth about all of that stuff.
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I'm not signing up for any of it.
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And so thankfully, when I went on this health journey to fix my back and studied functional medicine through the Cleveland Clinic and learned all of these root cause reasons, I was able to balance my hormones and get rid of my heavy periods naturally.
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And I never went on to do that stuff.
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So I just want you to realize like I was afraid of those procedures because I know the risks that are involved, yet we act like it's no big deal and we offer it to women all of the time.
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And then you're left with the sequelae of that, the ramifications, the you know, the complications or the side effects that come from that.
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I did try an IUD, Kirsten, and I was so suicidal within a week that I took my IUD out myself at home.
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Is that yes?
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But it was that scary to me.
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I was that was another moment.
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I was like, what are we doing to women?
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I'm sitting here telling them it doesn't cause anxiety or depression, and I'm thinking about jumping out of this window right now.
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I just got this IUD.
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So, like, God has shown me so much revelation about our health as women, and I just am passionate about sharing it with you guys because you need to know the truth about what birth control is doing to you, what these synthetic hormones are doing to you.
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And I know you're being dismissed, I know you're being gaslit, and it's not okay with me.
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Like it stops this week.
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I'm really excited because I feel like the women watching this summit are gonna know more than their doctor about their body by the end of the day.
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Absolutely.
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And that's a gift to be able to have this much information at our fingertips these days, especially when it comes from experts who you can trust.
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Because I will tell you, Dr.
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Tabitha and I have vetted everybody to make sure that you're getting good quality, science-backed and biblically backed principles and ideas in the summit.
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So you kind of touched on it though, Doctor.
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How does how does the functional medicine approach to hormones differ from conventional gynecology?
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Yeah, so like I mentioned earlier, conventional medicine, I think of it like band-aid medicine.
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You want to stop the hemorrhaging, you want to stop the bleeding, kind of clean up the mess.
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That is really where conventional medicine came from is healing ruptured appendix, taking someone to surgery, fixing a broken elbow or a leg.
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It's like this acute care situation.
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They are going to keep you alive, hopefully, and help you be okay.
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But there's a huge gap between disease and wellness.
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The absence of disease does not equal health and vitality.
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And so they don't understand how to help your body operate at a nice high level, slow down the aging process and actually feel amazing.
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Have your brain working, have your body sleeping for eight hours a night, have you being able to do all your activities of daily living without feeling exhausted and drained?
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Like those things, that is a whole nother level.
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And that's where functional medicine thrives because it doesn't take care of the symptom, it takes care of the root cause reason causing that symptom.
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So I heard this story actually yesterday that I think I should share.
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You're standing at the river, you're standing with a couple of friends, and there's bodies floating down the river, which is kind of morbid, right?
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And you're pulling them out, and some are still alive, and you're resuscitating them, and some didn't make it, and you need to take care of them and bury them.
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And this just keeps happening, and more bodies keep floating down the river, and so you're working harder to pull the bodies out and resuscitate them or bury them.
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And at one point, I'm thinking, let me walk up the river and see what is causing all these bodies to go into the river.
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And that is functional medicine.
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We go upstream and we find out why is this happening?
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We ask the deeper questions, why?
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Why are you having heavy periods?
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Why have you suffered from depression since you were 10 years old?
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Why have you been labeled with irritable bowel syndrome and chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia?
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There is a reason.
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I truly believe the more I study the Bible and talk to God, he did not create our bodies to fail us.
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He did not like create them in a way that they just cannot handle things.
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That is not true.
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And that is the narrative that we hear when we go see the doctor, and the doctor's gonna heal you, and the doctor has all the answers.
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And it's just not true.
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Your body has an incredible innate intelligence, it's fully equipped to take these tasks on.
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We just need to know what it's saying to us.
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These symptoms are not to be covered up.
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We are supposed to listen to them and put them together like a puzzle.
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Like, what are all these pieces?
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You know, my periods, my migraines, my Raynaud's syndrome, my numbness and tingling, like you name it, we're suffering from it.
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And if you take all those pieces, all those symptoms, and you get to see the picture, the upstream reason of why it's happening, then you can actually shift and get healthy.
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So that's where functional medicine shines.
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And that's why this summit is different.
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So much goodness, so many stories, too, that you're gonna hear.
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Like I'm thinking of myself and symptoms, and for which, you know, for instance, cold shoulder or frozen shoulder that some of you might have as you go into perimenopause and menopause.
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Like you could go to physical therapy, you could go get a shot, or you could also go and look at, hey, maybe it's because I had maybe what's exacerbating the pain is inflammation from the glass of wine or the excess sugar that I had yesterday.
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I see that in myself.
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And if we can get you to look upstream and have the research to see how your body reacts to things, your body can stay well longer.
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A little bit of a turn because I know we're gonna hear a lot about this in this summit, but could you quickly just touch on hormone replacement therapy?
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There is so much fear and misinformation about it.
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What is your take and why do you believe that that fear is really outdated?
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Yeah, this is this is something essential.
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I hope every woman watches this first interview because I want women to understand that although our hormones do make us who we are, they give us our personality and they make us feel good and function well.
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They are not usually the end-all be-all answer to helping you feel better in midlife.
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I promise you, I see women in my virtual medical practice every day from around the country, not just where I live in Michigan, from California, Maine, Hawaii, everywhere.
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They're saying the same thing.
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Okay, I got on hormone replacement therapy.
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It felt good for a couple months, and now I'm struggling again.
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And that is because you still have root cause issues that you need to address upstream.
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HRT or BHRT is another band-aid, and it's a great band-aid.
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Like I promise you, the day I didn't want to get off the couch, I didn't want to be married anymore, I didn't want my business anymore.
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That was a devastating day.
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I was so depressed, I was like checked out of life, and it took me three days to realize I didn't have any estrogen flowing in my body.
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So being on an estrogen patch is real for me.
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This is how I function, and progesterone is how I sleep.
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So those band-aids are very helpful, but I had to do all of the other stuff too.
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My stress was out of control during that time, and so it drove my early menopause.
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And so I needed to go upstream and address why I was having so much stress.
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And part of it was trying to run three businesses and grow things, but part of it was I had gut infections that I wasn't dealing with, and I wasn't living the life that my Hashimoto's thyroid disease needed me to live.
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And so this is a journey, you guys.
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You got to give yourself grace.
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But the more that you start to understand how all these pieces fit together, the better off you're gonna be.
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And let me just speak to hormone replacement therapy because I think it's a gift from God.
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You know, people say, well, it's a natural process.
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Doesn't God want us to just go into menopause and deal with it?
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Um, our society has advanced so quickly in the past hundred years that our physiology and genetics have not caught up yet.
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We are still going into menopause at 50 or 51.
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Yet, in our new society, that is when women are like just coming into their own.
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Their businesses are taking off, they're at the height of like running the PTAs or doing their philanthropy work, like they're just getting started.
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You know, when my grandma went to menopause, she was on the porch knitting, she made dinner on Sundays, but that was about it.
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So I really want us to realize that God uses really smart people, He uses science, He uses technology to help advance and make our lives better.
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And so I'm all for bioidentical hormone therapy, but there's a safe way to do it and a not so safe way to do it.
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And 2002 women's health initiative study really destroyed us because this study was stopped early and the media ran with this narrative that estrogen causes breast cancer.
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And I promise you, estrogen does not cause breast cancer.
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It took 20 years, but the publishers and creators of that study finally admitted we were wrong.
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That is not what the data said.
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We didn't stop that narrative from happening.
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We allowed it to continue on because we didn't want to support hormone replacement therapy for women.
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So they came back and they admitted all of this.
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But unfortunately, the damage was done because overnight doctors stopped prescribing hormones and they were afraid to be sued.
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Patients were afraid of dying and they panicked and they went off of their hormones.
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And what we have seen over the past 20 years since that happened is a huge rise in obesity, in heart disease, in osteoporosis, in fractures, in early death, in dementia, all because we just like stopped hormone therapy.
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So, what is the truth about that study?
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The truth is there were two parts.
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There was women taking estrogen only because they didn't have a uterus, and then there were women taking estrogen and a synthetic progestin.
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The synthetic progestin group was showing a not even a statistically significant increase, but a potential increase in breast cancer over the placebo group of people not taking anything, and so that's why they stopped the study.
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So there were eight extra breast cancer cases in the estrogen plus progestin group out of 10,000, every 10,000 women.
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So it was a very small increase.
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It wasn't the estrogen, it was the synthetic progestines, and we have made a mess of it for 20 years.
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And the saddest part is that the progestins are what's in all of our hormonal birth control.
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So we're gonna talk about that in some of these episodes during the summit of like, what is a progestin and how is it different than progesterone?
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And why are women so confused and still suffering?
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So I just want women to realize like there are safe ways to do hormone replacement therapy.
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Yeah.
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So much learning, so much information.
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And your doctor, conventional doctor, gets about six minutes, 15 if you're lucky.
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So the fact that you can sit down in these days, in these episodes, and we're gonna talk about ways for you to be able to keep these episodes for a year to come so you can come back and listen more before you go to the doctor.
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But the fact that you can get all of this information and and be able to go to your doctor and talk to them about it and make that that all that all-important informed consent piece of it, you're getting that right here, which I think is great.
00:28:39.230 --> 00:28:40.829
Before we let you go, Dr.
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Tabitha, for the woman who's watching who maybe feels dismissed by doctors or over-medicated, that's a big one.
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Too many chronic diseases, too many band-aids at the same time, too many specialists they're going to, and really unsure where to turn.
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What is the first step that they need to advocate for themselves to get real answers?
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My goodness, the first step.
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Watch these interviews.
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Okay.
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You signed up, you registered for this summit, but now you need to consume the information, and then you need to talk to God to try and figure out and get some discernment around what is important in my health right now.
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What do I need to focus on?
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And ask God to show you the full picture of what you have been going through.
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That is one of the coolest things I learned through the Cleveland Clinic is functional medicine practitioners, they make you fill out like a 30-page intake form.
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But what they do is they create a timeline of your life, of everything that has happened to you.
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Did you grow up on a farm?
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Were you sexually abused?
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When did you start having babies?
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Like, where have you traveled to?
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What have you potentially been exposed to in your gut?
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Like parasites, yeast, different things like that.
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We look at everything and we write out this timeline so that we can see you as a full entity of yourself.
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Like, were you raised in the church?
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Do you have spiritual beliefs?
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What are your beliefs about your yourself in this universe?
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Like all of these things actually determine your health and well-being.
00:30:25.069 --> 00:30:32.509
And so if you can start to piece together your picture, your timeline of oh my gosh, that makes so much sense.
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This happened, and then I got mono, and then I got chronic fatigue, and now I have cancer.
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Like, if you can start to put that timeline together, everything's gonna be able to shift because then you're gonna know what your next steps need to be.
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So that would be my recommendation is take in the information, try not to feel overwhelmed.
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You can just like pick and choose if you really are focused, but invite God into this conversation with you.
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Ask him for guidance on this of what you should be doing and who you should be watching and listening to.
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Take notes.
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I I love the VIP because you can get the written transcripts.
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Like that to me is so powerful to just have it written down because you know, I went through medical school, I had to consume a lot of information, and the first time it's like drinking from a fire hose.
00:31:27.470 --> 00:31:37.389
And then you go back and you look at your notes or you listen to the lecture again, and then it starts to like sink in, and then you focus in on a couple things.
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And then the third time you look at your notes and you listen to the lecture, then it starts to solidify into something real.
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So that would be my recommendation for how to use this summit to your advantage.
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We've created this for you.
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Yeah, so true.
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Let me do that for you right now.
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That most important key, which is invite the Lord in.
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Let's invite him in.
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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for every single person who is watching.
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Watching this and listening.
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I pray that you open their our eyes, their hearts, their minds to what you have to say and the truth behind their health and who they are in you.
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Lord, help heal people through this next week.
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We thank you so much for bringing all these people together and we thank you for Dr.
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Tepp.