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The inflammation is the precursor for all illness, right? And it can look different on each of us. Some of us may show cognitive inflammation. Others may show more joint inflammation. Some people have gut-based inflammation. But at the end of the day, that cortisol loop is leading to inflammation, which in turn leads to disease.
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Welcome to the Thyroid and Hormone Fixer podcast. If you've been told everything is fine, but you're gaining weight despite doing all the right things, struggling with brain fog, mood swings, low libido, or feeling like a stranger in your own body, you're in the right place.
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I'm Dr. Amy, the Thyroid Fixer, and I want you to know right now, I see you, I believe you, and you don't have to figure this out alone anymore. We're going to do this together. But I'm also not here to play nice with bad medicine or empty promises. This show is meant to disrupt the entire health space. We're gonna challenge the status quo, connect all the dots other providers miss, and give you real practical science-backed tools you can use today.
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You're not going to get any more recycled biohacking advice, just truth, strategy, and hope. Let's get you back to feeling like the badass human you're meant to be. She was 28 years old, a practicing ER doctor, losing hair in clumps.
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gaining weight, she couldn't explain. Does that sound familiar? Joints aching, acne erupting, and six specialists, six, looked her in the eye and told her she was just stressed, not sleeping enough. Here's an antidepressant. Have you maybe tried yoga?
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The last doctor she saw, a hair loss specialist, handed her a prescription, told her she'd be bald by 30 if she didn't take it, and didn't bother to check that the medication would tank her blood pressure. She took it, went to the gym, and nearly died.
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That is the woman I'm sitting across from today. And if you've ever walked out of a doctor's office holding a piece of paper that said, your labs are normal, while your body was screaming that something is very, very wrong, then buckle up. Because Dr. Taz didn't just survive medical gaslighting. She built an empire to burn the system down. So let's go.
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Dr. Taz, I am so excited to have you on the show because through our conversations and recording for your podcast and what I know about you, I'm like, oh my gosh, I think we are soul sisters. Yes, we are. For sure. Such a similar journey and such a similar journey to so many of my listeners as well. So I really want to start there because I think your story is so impactful and I'm
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You were dealing with a crashing thyroid, with PCOS. You were bounced between specialists as well, but you were practicing medicine. And so you were actually in the conventional system getting tossed around by the conventional system. So can you please share your beginnings, your pain-to-purpose story?
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Definitely. I mean, I think it was a surprising and unexpected one. I was in the conventional system. I was working in the emergency rooms. And prior to that, of course, I've been in residency, medical school, all the things. And I think there was just this slow decline in my health and I didn't catch it or realize it until...
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you know, things become super obvious and other people are making comments. So for me, the symptoms were, you know, pretty extensive hair loss, weight gain, brain fog, which, you know, is very unlike me, and then just being tired, you know, just having that change over the course of probably 10 to 12 years. And so when it finally caught my attention, really because the people around me, like my husband, we were dating at the time, and my mom were just like, okay, you need to figure this out. Something's different.
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And so, you know, I was like, okay, I'm going to take time out, you know, to get to go down this journey, which in itself is an issue, right? A lot of people are like, I don't want to deal with this right now. I'm going to hope that this goes away. So that's sort of the space I was in. So I started going to doctors and do the usual primary care who thought I was stressed or just having anxiety. So it was going down more of the anxiety, stress, depression route.
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Then had appointments with endocrinologists, with rheumatologists, multiple doctors. I think it was about probably eight to 10 doctor visits over 18 months or so. And the last one was a hair loss specialist because it was obvious. It was like people in the ER would be staring up here because this whole area, I know your listeners can't see it, but this whole kind of crown area was very open, right? So people would just be looking up here.
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And, you know, it was just very disconcerting. And finally, the last one who was a hair loss specialist, like young lady, you know, I was 28. He was like, if you don't take this medication, you're going to be bald by the time you're 30. You know, so, you know, he prescribed a medication. At this point, I'm just like kind of beaten down. You know, I'm tired. I'm beaten down. I'm like, fine. You know, let me just let me just do what he says.
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And on a particular day, I went and I did my thing. I worked out. I took the medication. I had worked maybe the night before or whatever. And the medication, the side effect, which, again, wasn't explained to me. I probably should have dug into it myself, and I didn't, so that's my fault. But it drops your blood pressure. Yeah.
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And so after like all of these different things that had happened this morning, I basically had a vasovagal episode where I passed out while I was driving. And that led to, of course, me getting into a crash, thankfully not hurting anybody other than the car, but more so just like, okay, this isn't working. It was literally at the end of my rope. I'm like, this isn't working. I've got to start, you know, or stop playing the victim and try to figure this out on my own. So that led me down.
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this whole world of medicine that I didn't even know existed, somehow found, this was like barely when Google was, you know, a thing, right? Like I'm dating myself, but like we didn't have social media. We barely had Google, but I start looking around and I find sort of these weekend conferences and holistic medicine. I'm like, okay, well, let me go to that. And so I go to the, this conference, my husband actually came with me and it was like, I remember coming back and being like, they're
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leaky gut and like nutrients and all these words that I hadn't like heard before in my conventional medical training. But one of the things it did is it opened me up to Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. So I started to pursue those. Those actually started to turn things around for me where I was able to figure myself out a little bit better. And then finally, as I'm learning, you know, once you start this journey of learning and healing and
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You want more, right? So I saw the fellowship in integrated medicine with Dr. Andy Weil. I finally finished that fellowship. And that really gave me the courage, I think, and the confidence to put these things together in a way that could actually help somebody other than myself.
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And so in 2009, my husband was graduating dental school and he encouraged me, you know, he had been watching this entire journey now for five years or so. And he was like, you know, I think you've got something. You got yourself better. Your hair is back. You feel amazing. You know, you've got all this energy. And.
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Maybe you need to share this with other people. So just do something tiny. Do it at the back of my office And you don't have to worry about anything. You don't have to worry about overhead You don't have to worry about you know, this is not a pressure cooker type thing This is just so we can help people and i'm like, okay, that sounds easy enough And so, you know, we set up in the back of his dental office I had one child and literally the day we closed on our space. I found out I was pregnant again and so I remember being like, oh my god, how are we going to do this and and
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At the end of the day, as we put all of this into motion, I was working the ER, he was doing his dental practice, I started my practice. One of the things we both realized very quickly was that this was just not my story. This was a story about so many people having the exact same experience, right? Like having symptoms or having conditions where they weren't getting the full picture information.
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They weren't getting answers. They were getting sort of these very blanket, like take this or do this type advice that wasn't really serving them well. And so what I had thought and what he had thought was gonna be just this very tiny like hobby turned into something much, much bigger very quickly. And I think it took me a year or two, but at some point,
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I was like, okay, this has to be bigger than a hobby, and I have to grow it into something more. So that started my journey, which really turned into everything. I never meant to do anything other than ER or ICU-type medicine. That's the type of doctor I was. It was a very accidental journey, but it got me to where I am today. And unfortunately, I've been in the field now for almost 20 years, and I've been in the field now for almost 20 years.
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It's still the same story. You know, even though we've had the explosion of information, right, an explosion, right, between social media and all the different experts and influencers and everybody that's around, there is still not that practical delivery to the patient that is happening on a consistent basis. So it continues to be my mission.
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to make holistic health, you know, where we're bringing it all together, functional, integrative, conventional, we put it all together to personalize plans for the patient. So that's how I started. And this is where I've ended up. And it's been crazy and lots of twists and turns along the way, but really, really fulfilling work at the end of the day.
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Well, and I love that it really is driven by your own pain, by your own experience. Because like you said, hair loss for women, that's devastating. I mean, that actually steals our identity. Very much. So, and it really does consume your thoughts every single day. I mean, you and I have patients right now.
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dealing with that hair loss piece. And that's what they're focused on. So for you, what was that root cause? Once you unpacked it and you started looking at your situation more holistically, what was it going on?
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So it's so interesting because it took a minute for me to figure all this out because remember, I'm getting interpretations from different people. So in Chinese medicine, they were saying my liver was off and my chi was bad. That's sort of their interpretation. But if you take that information and then you start applying it to some of the other lab work that I was doing on myself, basically, I have PCOS. It's been a huge player in my life and it's in our family. And I think once I found out that
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That was an issue for me. We realized very quickly had been an issue for all the women in our family and now even for my daughter. So PCOS is the main one, but connected to that was hypothyroidism. And so the PCOS and the hypothyroidism was causing the hair loss, the weight gain, the brain fog.
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the achy joints, right? The just general, I'm a super high energy person, but all of a sudden for a few years, it was like just pushing through fog to do kind of some of the basic things that I'm used to doing. So I think it affected all those different aspects and changed who I was for a period of time. So the minute I figured it out though, and was able to start to put pieces together, it was the Chinese and Ayurvedic folks that had talked about my gut and my liver being bad. So I was doing some work around that.
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Figured out that I needed a little bit of thyroid hormone, so was able to go on like a T3, T4 combo thyroid hormone, so started that. For my PCOS, I never went on birth control. Instead, by working on the gut and the liver and the thyroid, many of the androgen symptoms of PCOS started to go away on their own.
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And I use some herbal remedies to help that as well. But within about a year of putting all of that together, my hair started to come back, you know, and it started to come back. It's still not maybe what it was in high school, right? But it started to come back where this whole area filled back in.
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And, you know, to this day, and this is the other, my other pet peeve about PCOS in general, to this day, if I'm excessively stressed, if I forget my routine, right, I forget to take my thyroid, I forget to take my supplements. I mean, I've had moments, you're a businesswoman too, that have been so stressful that I have walked back by our supplement cabinet.
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I literally walked by it and been out of stuff here at the house, but forget to take it or pick it up from my practice on our shelves, right? So a month of that, and boom, my hair starts to fall out again. And even shifting from going into postpartum and then going into perimenopause and now menopause, each of those are androgen spikes for me. And I have to manage the PCOS component of that and my thyroid along the way.
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For me, it's been a blessing in a way because even though it happened in my 20s, I've been able to navigate my 30s and 40s and now my 50s in a much better way. And for anyone watching on YouTube, you can see my face. I'm covering my mouth and I'm laughing because it just blows me away how similar we are when we start talking. Yeah.
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First of all, PCOS. Very, very common to see those two go hand in hand. We see that hypothyroidism, polycystic ovarian syndrome combination in so many women. My diagnosis came years after. Yours came close together. But same thing with the hair loss. And I had acne that I looked like a 14-year-old boy at the time. I grew up in acne, yep.
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Like what's happening here? And then there's the supplement thing. Girl, I walk by that pantry full of supplements, like top to bottom. And some days I look at it and go, I just can't. Like I get supplement fatigue the same as our patients do. So listen, we get it. We get it. We know on the one hand they're vital for supporting our body and helping us avoid those symptoms that we really don't want, like hair loss. But it's just a struggle. It really is.
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Then we add on stress, right? So you're an entrepreneur, you're a mother, you're a doctor, and at the time you're working night shifts. I love how you, and here's another similarity with us. I love this. You talk about the cortisol loop.
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And, you know, we all hear our female listeners or our patients go, I know I'm high cortisol. I'm high. I know I'm high cortisol. I know I have adrenal burnout. I'm totally in the gutter. I have adrenal. I know my cortisol is low. And we go, well, maybe, or maybe you're both, maybe it's going up and down. So can you talk about that in more greater detail? Because I think so many people want to grab onto the cortisol adrenal problem. And there's a lot more going on there.
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Yeah, it's been interesting because I've been practicing now for almost 20 years. And I will say everybody wants to hang on one piece of the puzzle, especially as women. We are interconnected beings where we can't think linearly about ourselves, you know, and to a certain extent men can't either. I mean, they can get away with it.
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But we definitely cannot because we have so many different hormones at play. We have so many different factors at play in terms of just our burden and what we manage on a day-to-day basis, right? So I see a lot of people talking about cortisol. I love that the word is out there. Okay, so that wasn't even out there, right, before. So the word is out there. People know what adrenal fatigue is now. They know what burnout is now. They're using these terms. But the problem is if we just fixate on cortisol, right?
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And we don't pay attention to all the other variables attached to it, which means, okay, yes, your cortisol may be off, but where are some of your other hormones, right? Where's progesterone and estrogen in your thyroid? You know, what's happening with gut health? What's happening with your sleep?
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You can just treat cortisol in a box, right, by itself, but you're not going to break the loop. And the loop is the interconnectedness of all of this stuff. And most of us, if we think about just a running cycle, we are on a loop of some kind. And that loop for a lot of women today is the cortisol loop, where cortisol is high. Because of high cortisol, they crash their progesterone. Because they're crashing their progesterone, they're also gradually crashing other hormones and their gut health as well.
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That high cortisol, if we go the other way, can crash your thyroid. You know that more so than anyone. And so we stay in sort of this thing where we might take an herb to help cortisol, right? Or we might do something for cortisol, but we're not treating kind of these other spokes on the wheel at the same time. And that keeps us kind of humming along in this sort of low-grade cortisol, higher cortisol state,
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which over time leads to inflammation. And inflammation is the precursor for all illness, right? And it can look different on each of us. Some of us may show cognitive inflammation. Others may show more joint inflammation. Some people have gut-based inflammation. But at the end of the day, that cortisol loop is leading to inflammation, which in turn leads to disease. My whole thing with
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patience is to say, hey, can we step ahead of this? Or can we break the cycle? Because if we can break the cycle, then we can really, really shift your outcomes, not just today, but even 10, 15, 20 years from now. Oh my goodness. And thank you so much for saying that. I think it really helps the listener to hear things from other people outside of the host, outside of just me saying it over and over again. Yeah.
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When it's backed by someone, it's not like we planned this out beforehand, right? This is a real interview. I'm actually asking Dr. Tass for opinion.
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And when you say things, it just drives the point home. And it gets women out of that. Speaking of loops, it gets them out of that loop of looking on Instagram, seeing that there's some kind of adrenal fairy dust program and thinking that that's going to be the only answer that they need. Because if I just fix my adrenals, my entire life will get better, right? And it's not just one thing. We can't put any of these systems in a box.
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in by themselves. Like we can't put thyroid in a box and just treat thyroid. That's why we look at hormones. That's why we look at your gut. That's why we look at insulin and cortisol all together. And I love your focus on the gut because obviously on this show, I talk about how that T4 to T3 conversion, the inactive thyroid hormone to the active thyroid hormone and reverse T3, it's, it's very much reliant on a healthy gut.
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and the diodinase enzymes that are produced in the gut and the liver that help us convert that inactive to active thyroid hormone. Can you talk more about how deep you go in working with patients at looking at and healing their gut? And then how do you do that in a protocol? Are you doing that maybe at the same time you're addressing thyroid hormones? Are you just doing the gut first and then you're kind of bringing in the hormone replacement? How do you do your order of treatment?
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So I think those are all really great questions. Some of it's very personalized, right? It really depends on, you know, and a lot of what we're trying to do in practice at Whole Plus is identify like your weakest link and really target that one first. But when we are thinking about, you know, building these protocols and building these frameworks for healing,
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Essentially, and this is what I'm walking away with from my Chinese medicine and sort of Ayurvedic training, is that they would not do anything, nothing, without first treating the gut. They believed that the gut was ground zero. They believed that everything began there, kind of ended there as well. And before you dumped a lot of stuff on a patient, right, you really needed to make sure that was working well first.
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And their definition 5,000 years ago of a healthy gut were things like good elimination, good digestion, no bloating, no reflux, none of those symptoms. And then also stress management was a part of it because both systems of medicine believed that if you had a lot of Pitta, for example, in Ayurveda, or a lot of yang energy in Chinese medicine...
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both of those types of energy would essentially crash the gut. So they were always measuring, like, where is somebody kind of in this Pitta-Yang, aka cortisol, you know, sort of situation, and what is their vulnerability to having gut dysfunction? So, you know, for us in our practice, like, a lot of the methodology begins in the gut and looking at the gut. Now, the really fun thing is that you fast forward now.
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And we have so much great research on the microbiome, the role of the microbiome in the whole process of inflammation, and then what the hormones do to the gut and vice versa when it comes to the gut hormone connection. We've got tons and tons of research articles on all of this stuff that we can dive into. But if we pull back for a second and try to get the main idea out of all of this, essentially this is what all of it is saying. It's saying basically there is a very...
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tight gut hormone connection that when a hormone shifts, the gut also shifts. And when the gut shifts, the hormones shift at the same time. And it's very important patient to patient to understand the nature of that bidirectional shift. And what we mean by that, for example, when progesterone levels go down in women over the course of years, but whether it's in your 20s to your 30s to your 40s and then into menopause,
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One of the very common gut patterns that we see over and over again is a flare of candida or an overgrowth of yeast. So that's a classic sort of example of a gut hormone shift there. We also know that as women move into menopause, one of the things we see in their microbiome is a decrease in good bacteria. So less lactobacillus, right, which is a healthy bacteria, less bifidobacteria, less acromantia. These are all strains of bacteria.
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So bottom line, whether we look at modern day research or we go back 5,000 years, the gut is always the starting point for almost every single patient I work with. And that might mean that, you know, it may not be a huge fancy protocol. It may be like we are just dialing into you are not digesting well. You need to start digestive enzymes, right? Your bile function is down. Your gallbladder function is down.
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Or we need to start a probiotic if we can try to match which strain of bacteria has shifted the most directly or most dramatically because of whatever's going on with your hormones. But we're always doing something around the gut first. So if I had to say this is what I do first, it would be that if I'm going to generalize.
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But then what we will do after we've had a week or two maybe of starting a gut protocol of some kind, if somebody is severely deficient in thyroid hormones or progesterone or estrogen or any of these things, we'll start to layer them on. And the reason we don't layer them on right away is...
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is because, as you know, if you put a hormone on somebody with a sluggish gut and a bogged down liver, that hormone is not going to behave the way it's supposed to. Either it won't be enough and you'll need higher and higher and higher doses, or it's simply not going to work.
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So what we want to do is to give the hormones a fair chance because the goal is always not to overdose. The goal is, you know, how much can we get away with just to optimize what you're already doing on your own? So it's always gut work first. And then it's sort of going into, all right, what is the hormone that needs support and how do we support it? What is the best way to do that? Now, that question.
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could be a hormone, but it could also be things like nutrients, right? We know, for example, and I've seen this and I'm sure you have too, that simply giving some patients iodine, right, improves their thyroid function if they're able to absorb that iodine to begin with, right? Right. Giving somebody magnesium seems to improve progesterone function. Doing methylated B vitamins, for example, helps with estrogen metabolism overall and,
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So they get rid of that estrogen dominance where they're holding on to estrogen in their tissue and in other areas that's working against them. So again, it's bidirectional. It's usually gut first, maybe liver next, then getting into what the hormones are doing, and then trying to support those hormones first naturally if we can. But if somebody's got like a three alarm fire where their thyroid is bottomed out to the ground, I'm not going to sit there and do a lot of herbs and supplements, right?
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Same thing with progesterone. If it's so low that, you know, someone's waking up between three and four o'clock in the morning or having a lot of anxiety or heart palps or some of these type of things, we're going to give you bioidentical progesterone. But it's all given in sort of this laddered approach so that the hormone, the actual hormone or the actual medication is oftentimes not the first move unless it's very clear on a history or lab work or an exam or something along those lines that's
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that it would make sense because somebody is suffering so much and the time it takes to rebuild the body is a little bit slower. So let's help them, but do the rebuilding at the same time.
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That just makes my heart sing. And one thing I want to point out that you said specifically is that you'll do the gut healing protocol not for six months, nine months, while that person hangs in the wings going, oh my gosh, I'm suffering so badly. And the scale just went up another 10 pounds. I love that you said, you know, we'll hit it for like a week or two.
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And then we'll bring in the hormones to give them some relief because quality of life is so important. And you're giving people back their quality of life while you're doing the healing internally as well. And they don't even realize it because they're feeling better. And that's what's important. I think you and I probably practice very similarly.
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So there's that middle road, right? There's like this one road that's like, okay, never take a medication, never do any of this, do everything very naturally. There's this other road of like medication only. What are you talking about? All this other stuff doesn't matter, right? But there's a middle path. And that path is very much of bringing everything together and saying, okay, this is the journey that you need to go on versus your friend versus your sister versus like, you know, somebody at work. This is the journey you need to go on.
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So I think it's really important to understand that two things can happen at the same time. You can be on a medication, but also doing some of the things that work to reverse the body as well. They can happen together because ultimately when you do that type of work, you're going to find that, you know, some of the questions I get asked all the time, like, do I have to be on this forever? Or how do I know when it's...
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You know what? I'm going to need more. If you're doing both legs of this journey, a lot of times you don't need more and more and more. Like you can kind of hold steady at a lower rate or a lower dose of hormones or medications or any of the things that are out there right now.
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Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things that is very unique to you that I really do want to unpack because I've just started looking at this from a me perspective and then, of course, from a patient perspective, because that's normally what we do is we look at ourselves first and go, this might help other people, is you are tying in the throat chakra, which I find fascinating. I love this stuff. Yes. Yes.
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The concept that we as women don't speak up, you know, think about the throat, your thyroid, your ability to voice your opinion, to speak up and stand up for yourself, to be empowered with your voice as a woman, to be a patient advocate for yourself is tied into thyroid disease. Can you expand on that?
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Definitely. I'm going to take you down a little bit of an abstract road, but hang in there with me for just a second. So I've done this, like I've said, for a while. And when you have the opportunity to do this over and over again, you have a lot of patient experiences adding up over time.
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And one of the things that somebody who's matured through the years, one of the things I've come to realize is that it's not just about the physical body. It's not just about our lab numbers. It's not just about our organs. It's not just about our hormones.
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that there are other factors at play. And as future doctors, and what I would love to train the next generation of doctors on, is can we, in a tangible way, understand this? So where I've landed currently is,
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is that there are five bodies. There's a physical body that you and I are very used to dealing with and talking about and dissecting and all the other things. So there's a physical body. There's a mental body, which is our cognitive health and our ability to think and focus and plan and all the other things we do. There's an emotional body, which is wired and on its own circuitry, which is how we feel, what brings us joy, what makes us sad, all of those things.
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And there's an energetic body, which is a layer, you know, that's a little bit harder to access a little bit harder for somebody like me. I don't know how you feel about this for somebody like me to diagnose or to touch or to be able to tell somebody this is what's going on. But I know it's there. And then there's the community body, which is like our life and our relationships and where we live and all the other things.
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When we think about the energetic body, this is not new. This is the chakra system from Ayurveda. This is the meridian system from Chinese medicine. There are a few other systems out there. But for years, people have understood that there is circuitry at play that is not just related to our physicality. So the chakra system, for example, tied every organ to a chakra. And...
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and sort of tied every emotion to a chakra as well, and layered on top of the physical body. So I almost tell people, think of an accordion, right? You have the physical body and the chakra system is lying on top of that. So the throat chakra is considered one of the chakras that directly impact
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the thyroid. And for women that suppress their emotions or are afraid to speak up, many of those women at first, it's just, okay, it's just an emotional issue or an energetic issue. They don't express their emotions. They don't speak up. So they might have a little bit of anxiety or depression that goes along with that. But over time, it turns into a physical issue.
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which is something going on with their thyroid. So again, connecting the dots. We can use that same analogy to sort of the solar plexus or the sacral plexus, which kind of sits down in the pelvic area and in the stomach area. That's very much about security and grounding and healing.
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kind of being sure of yourself. If you are having a lot of issues with sort of where you stand in the world and what your purpose is, again, that pitta or that yang energy that's held down in those particular chakras, that translates medically into stomach aches, you know, a lot of pelvic floor dysfunction, a lot of those type of issues that we see kind of show themselves in the exam room.
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So what does that mean kind of for the future doctor? It doesn't mean that we're like, okay, you're having these issues in the chakra. Therefore, I don't need to do anything. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that to really round it out for somebody, you want to treat the thyroid, but you also want to address what the emotional blockages might be and what the energetic blockages might be. And if you, like I, don't feel gifted enough physically,
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to access that world while finding the partners that can help you do that so that you can have that whole complete healing journey. But at the end of the day, it's all interconnected. And it's so fascinating to me that the people that came before us kind of knew that without the technology and without the data and all the science and stuff like that. And that is how they set about healing people.
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That's amazing. And I think there's such wisdom looking back at Chinese medicine and ancient medicine, because now that we've moved into the world of pharmaceuticals, and I was just having this conversation with my husband the other day, I said, nature holds healing.
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We know that there are cures in nature, but the powers that be, whether, you know, Carnegie's, Rockefeller's, the whole stories of how the pharmaceutical industry came to be. And you and I have very similar views of pharmaceuticals. We use them. Like you said, we're not all in this camp of like, let's just give you 10,000 supplements and sprinkle fairy dust on you and heal you.
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There's use for medications, but we are anti-Band-Aid medications. I really do believe that there's such healing when we look at nature, at our ancestors, that they were so wise and we've lost that wisdom along the way. We've lost that connection to our body, to our throat, to our voice, whatever the chakras are that lead to that disease state.
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We've disconnected ourselves. I also think we've lost respect for ourselves as humans. You know what I mean? I mean, the human body continues to fascinate me because it is capable of a lot. It's actually capable. You know, I was watching my dog the other day. He's on a self-cleaning cycle. We joke, right? Every morning, he's like...
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you know, cleaning his paws and like doing his thing. And I'm like, you're in a self-cleaning cycle again, aren't you? But he has this like innate wisdom as how to take, I didn't teach him that. He knows how to take care of himself, right? Right. We have the same inner wisdom. You know, we are just so blocked in,
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in terms of listening to it and understanding how to go about doing the things we need to do for ourselves, that's why we get into trouble. But I've seen the body repair. I've seen the body recover. I've seen diseases turn around. I've seen people get pregnant that were supposed to not be pregnant. We've seen people go through transitions like perimenopause and menopause beautifully and not have all the drama and the hysteria that's supposed to go with it.
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But I think the culture teaches us that something is wrong with the body. Something is wrong with us as humans. And I think we just need to shift that thinking. And the thinking needs to be more of, okay, what resources do I need to tap into my own innate space?
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self-healing, self-regulating, self-cleaning cycles. And I think if we can do that and kind of steal from medicine of the past and merge it with the technology of the future, you really have a winning formula. Oh, I so agree. That's so beautifully said. You know, the other very unique aspects, I'm gonna keep going with your unique takes on things, the power types. Oh, I love this. I have to do it.
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Oh, so much fun. Okay. So you've coded women into five power types. We got the boss lady, the earth mama. I love these names. The gypsy girl, nightingale, and savvy chick. And each one has a predictable hormone failure pattern. I love this. Walk us through the two or three that you see crash the hardest. And what are the early warning signs? Take us through all the power types because I love it.
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Okay, so this was my 2017 book, Superwoman Rx. And this book came about because my daughter, who was, I can't remember how old she was at the time. She was young, but she was like, Mom, everyone keeps calling you a superwoman. Why don't you write a book so other women could be a superwoman too? And I'm like-
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That's such a great idea. I love that. So that's where it was born. But basically, it literally came to me one day in a patient room that if I took the Meridian, because we do this in practice, we'll do a Chinese medicine diagnosis, an Ayurvedic diagnosis. We look at hormones, obviously. We look at nutrients.
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And we're spending a lot of time with people, so we know kind of their emotional and personality sort of traits. So it just came to me that there were types, that people that were of a certain meridian were also of a certain dosha and Ayurveda, also had a similar hormone pattern, also had a similar personality sort of footprint. And so I was like, oh, my gosh, what if we could gift women with hormones?
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kind of a formula of identifying themselves and then being able to know what strengthens them and what weakens them so that they can have the energy and do the things that they're supposed to do in the world. So that's how the whole idea came about. The power types, there are five. They are each rooted in knowledge from all of those different areas of medicine. So if we start, for example, with the gypsy girl, the gypsy girl to me was the woman who's very much the artist, right? They're
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You know, Dr. Taz, I'm like a night person. I like to stay up at night. That's where I do my best creative work. I write music. I write books, whatever it is. But they always had an issue with their cortisol levels. And they typically always had an issue with their thyroid. Those were the two kind of hormones I kept seeing show up as being off in those women. They were very Vada and physical.
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Ayurvedic medicine, which means they had a lot of air, they needed a lot of grounding. So a lot of their treatment planning was around how do we ground them? How do we regulate their sleep cycle? How do we support cortisol and thyroid? What do we need to do there, whether it's through food or supplementation or actual hormones? So that was the first one. The next one was the boss lady, and we had a ton of those. You know, it just shows kind of where we are as women right now. I think that was the dominant type. They were very Pitta and Ayurveda. They were very Yang dominant in Chinese medicine.
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had a lot of liver issues, had a lot of gut issues in general. The hormone that we were seeing, again, we were seeing a lot of cortisol issues with them, some thyroid issues, but we were also seeing their progesterone levels drop dramatically because they were burning the candle usually at both ends, you know, in a very aggressive way.
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And then the merge of the two types, the gypsy girl and the boss lady was the savvy chick. So they had both. They had both hormone sort of blind spots. They had both strengths of each of those types. They had the weaknesses of each of those types, too. So they were part creative, part go-getters. You and I are probably falling in that category more than likely. But that's kind of where they fit into the picture.
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Moving on, you have the Earth Mama. And the picture that always came to my mind with those was my mother-in-law of just nurturers. Like, they were the nurturing members of a family. It was always about everybody else. It was never about themselves. But sure enough, as amazing as they are, and as much as they sort of held up communities and families...
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You know, they were what we call sort of kapha in Ayurveda, which means their metabolism was a little bit slower. They were way more sensitive to sugar, which meant if you translated that high insulin, a lot of insulin resistance, a lot of diabetes, a lot of lipid metabolism issues, a lot of weight gain in that particular group of women. So for those women, it was a lot about helping them eat in a way to balance blood sugar,
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manage their movement, manage their boundaries, right? Because it was never about themselves and trying to heal them and put them on that journey. And then the last one was the nightingale and the nightingale was interesting. I didn't mean for it to be someone who was so crashed out, but it was literally, we think of Florence Nightingale, someone who was just selfless and
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in terms of mission work or humanity work or service work of some kind. But the blind spot there was they had truly crashed out the majority of their hormones. They were getting sick all the time. They had a lot of sort of inflammatory autoimmune type conditions and symptoms that went along with that after a period of time.
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So with them, we were literally trying to rebuild them, gut up, right? Gut nutrients, hormones, build them all the way back up so that they could get into sort of more of a healing mode. So it was fun. I would have to say that might have been one of my favorite books so far because it was fun.
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People were getting together in groups and trying to type themselves and figure out which one they were. It was a little ahead of its time because I don't think in 2017 we were still talking that much about other systems of medicine. But to this day, it's still one of my favorite books. And I love bringing that methodology into the practice and helping our patients understand kind of where they are in the context of these power types.
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Oh, listen, I'm going to recommend that every woman listening get that book because, number one, like you said, it's fun. It's fascinating, but it's very enlightening to see where you fall. And even as you're describing the types, I'm kind of like nodding my head. I'm thinking of myself. I'm thinking of other patients, of course. Oh, yeah, she fits into this one for sure. And that just gives another layer of healing. It's not...
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You and I are of that same belief where it's not just one answer. It's not one size fits all. It really has to be. This all comes under that personalization umbrella that is so lost right now as we're moving more into women's health.
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and a spotlight on women's health. Like we talked about on your show, thank goodness that we're having celebrities out there talking about their perimenopause and menopause experience, but we're not personalizing that aspect. And I think those power types really shine a light on how personalized every single approach needs to be, whether we're dealing with thyroid, gut, hormones, whatever it is, it has to be personalized to you.
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It definitely does. And I think, too, you know, now that you brought it up, I think they're more relevant for today because the noise in our industry has increased so greatly. And I think many people are just lost in terms of where I mean, there's something about having no information, but there's also something about having too much information.
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So many people are just lost. They're like, I don't know where to start. This is too much. I have no idea where to start. And so the other thing those power types do is, again, if you're just not sure where to begin, it's a starting point. And if you can identify which power type is most dominant...
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you already have a roadmap to begin to work towards healing. So that was really the intention of that book. And I think it continues to benefit women today. And I hope it will continue to for many years to come. My daughter actually is about to graduate. And so I'm doing this whole thing for her on like all about me. I was telling my husband, it'll be like all about me. And in it, I'm going to put her power type, which she needs to know, along with like,
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all the other fun things, right? Like her human design pattern, her Enneagram, all this other stuff and be like, okay, here's your guide to your life. You know, hopefully you won't get into any health roadblocks at least along the way. And at least she has you as her mom to help her with those health roadblocks along the way. But right, the more you know about yourself at an early age, the more you can navigate. You can absolutely navigate. And you're so right. When we look back, oh my goodness. So nine years ago,
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Just like you said, the amount of information that we now have at our, it's too much. It's too confusing. Now we have AI. Now we don't even know what's real. My friends have sent me a couple of videos that they found on Instagram with like millions of followers. And it's a fake person talking about hormones. It's a fake person.
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So that brings me into kind of staying along the lines of personalization. You and I talked about this on your show as well. And I know we both have the same annoyance factor with this, the pop-up hormone clinics where things are not personalized. So yes, now we have all the spotlight on women's health.
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All of these pop-up hormone clinics where women can get their hormones all the same in a little box sent to them for $129 a month. I joke about it. Yeah. What is your take on what's happening now? So now the women have access to the hormones, but they're not personalized.
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I fundamentally am against it. Look, I went down a route where someone actually pitched that idea to me and they're like, oh, my God, you can make so much money. You know, we can set up this online thing. People just fill out this questionnaire and then boom, you know, we can have a prescribing arm to it and they can get shipped their stuff. And I was like, I philosophically cannot get behind this.
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I don't care how much money is available to be made. And I think that people are just taking advantage of a gap in the market. But the gap is actually the lack of personalized, holistic care when it comes to your health, your hormones and health.
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everything in between. The pop-up clinic may provide you access to an actual hormone, but is not thinking all the way through how that hormone is going to interact with your particular body. We all have different genetic factors, different genetic SNPs. We have different stressors in our lives. We have different nutrient profiles. You know, we have different environments we live in. We have to understand those. I've had so many patients who,
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go on hormone replacement therapy, whether it's a pellet, a patch, a pill, whatever it is, and tell me the same story over and over again. Like, okay, I felt good at first, but then I started to gain 20 pounds or I got super foggy or, you know, my breast started to hurt or I started to bleed, like all these other things that are happening. And I think the same thing is true, by the way, of the GLP-1 medications, right? Right now you can order those medications, you know, at the drop of a hat anywhere. And,
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but you're not thinking all the way through on that one either. You know, there's something called hormone tolerance, which nobody wants to talk about, which is your body's ability to handle a load of hormones, whether they're your own or whether somebody's giving them to you. So no one's talking about that. No one's talking about metabolic resilience, which is what are the metabolic factors that have led to an issue where you may be holding onto weight or storing fat or some of those types of things. Those are conversations that,
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that let you win the long game, right? Versus getting a short-term result with more long-term problems. And so I have a problem with it. I don't know how else to say it. I have a problem with it. It was pitched to me a couple of years ago. I walked away from that then. I'll continue to walk away from it because I fundamentally, philosophically cannot get behind anything where we say, oh, fill this out, take this, we got you covered. It's simply not true. Yeah.
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Oh, same, same, same, and same. I pushed away from the same offer and I saw the algorithm. I was shown the algorithm behind the scenes and I said, that's the problem. It's an algorithm and female are not algorithms and it's going to fail someone. And that can be detrimental. Actually, it's not just, oh, Susie is going to gain an extra 10 pounds. It can be Susie develops cancer because she was treated as an algorithm instead. Right.
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Okay. So you brought up the GLPs. We got to talk about it. Yeah. Okay. We got to go there. My bad. No, I love it. I love it because I've been talking a lot about them on the show and I've done episodes where I go into the benefits, especially with microdosing, the liver, the brain, all those great stuff.
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And then I've done shows with the dark side of GLPs. So you and I are both in that microdosing camp. Tell me kind of how you landed there and what you are still seeing in your practice with women using and possibly overusing GLPs.
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Definitely. I mean, I'll be honest and say when they first came on the scene, I was like, what is happening? You know, and it took me a minute to get behind it. And then I still, I know why I felt that way, because I think anything that promises rapid weight loss without really addressing the core metabolic issues is a problem.
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But over time, when we are able to be creative and flexible with some of this stuff, you truly do see some benefits. And so for the person who is truly obese, right, which is not the majority of GLP-1 users, by the way, but for the person who's truly obese, which we define as a BMI of over 30, and then there's your in-between population whose BMI is somewhere between 25 and 30,
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The GLP-1s have been a game changer because sort of the risk benefit when we look at sort of what happens when you gain a lot of weight in terms of cardiovascular health and inflammation in general. Yes, it's a win if they're given the GLP-1 maybe at the standard doses until they get that weight down. But for everybody else, right, who's trying to lose under 20 pounds, there's a lot of GLP-1 abuse, first of all. Secondly, there's a lot of GLP-1 abuse.
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GLP-1 medications at the standard dose for the non-obese patient has a side effect profile that we cannot ignore. And that side effect profile includes changes in gut function, a loss of muscle mass, hair loss, right, to name a few, vision changes. You know, there's a lot that's not being talked about. And so, you know, where's the happy spot with this thing? So first of all,
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You know, some of the patients that we've put on GLP-1 medications in these smaller doses have reported, you know, no changes in weight, but they just feel better. It's like their energy is better. Their mood is better. So I think for those patients, it was a change in their inflammatory load because there is an anti-inflammatory component.
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to a GLP-1 medication at the right dose. So for those patients, it's a win. For other patients though, they have the side effects and they can't tolerate the medication. So when we are now prescribing this medication, I usually almost always, unless I have a patient profile that changes my mind,
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I'm usually always prescribing the microdose and very low dose. And I'm always prefacing that with our intention is to get you off this medication. Right now you're saying you're going to be on this for the rest of your life. We're saying no. If we do it this way, you're not going to be because we're going to deal with metabolic resilience, which means you're going to have a gut plan that goes with this, a nutrient plan that goes with it, a diet plan that goes with this to maintain your protein and your muscle mass.
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There's an exercise or movement component that you have to do alongside of this. And if we can do those different things along with making sure your hormones are where they need to be, then this GLP-1 will not be a long-term deal for you. It'll be a short-term deal to get you out of sort of this metabolic heaviness that you might be sitting in right now. And once that BMI comes down, and then we're also measuring things like leptin and insulin and all that stuff, A1Cs.
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Once some of these numbers start to correct back, then we start to space this medication out further and further. So I've got patients who only take it once a month or take it once a quarter, you know, or can tell when they start to slip again and will bring it on for a few weeks and then come back off of it. But that idea of flexibility and creativity with the medication is something that we've seen really work for our patients. And, you know, we're talking about GLP-1s, but...
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To a certain extent, with all the medications, there can be a level of flexibility with some of these medications so people don't experience side effects in such horrific numbers. I think everyone thinks that once they're on a medication, like that's the end of the story, whether it's a thyroid medication, a cholesterol medication, a blood pressure medication, you're married to this medicine for life. It's simply not true.
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If you can get the body to kind of move into a healing mode, you'll need less and less and less of that particular medication. So we have all kinds of creative medication strategies going on in the practice that work for the patient and minimize side effects.
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Absolutely. And I'm starting to wonder too, if these GLPs will become the next Band-Aid medication. Someone said to me the other day, they're like, well, if you would have gone to those six doctors through your misdiagnoses with that 25 pound weight gain, you might've gotten a GLP. Absolutely. Instead of digging into what was the root cause. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Oh my goodness. I could talk to you for hours. Like the best.
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We need to do a part two because we're short on time. We have to. We have to. You're just a wealth of knowledge, and I just love picking your brain. So we need to leave listeners with one thing. I love doing something a little bit disruptive. We have a segment on the show where every guest shares a take that's going to make people just a little bit uncomfortable. So what's something the wellness or hormone world has accepted as gospel that you flat out disagree with?
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Ooh, the wellness or hormone world. Oh, there's so many. Goodness gracious. That you need more than five supplements, that everyone needs to go on the same form of HRT, that pellets are a good option with HRT. Yep. Those are probably my three top.
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Those are great. Those are amen. Absolutely. I completely agree. Completely agree. So Dr. Taz, can you please tell people you have an amazing community and I think healing has to happen in community, especially these days we're disconnected with social media or becoming more disconnected with AI. Yeah. So community is becoming more and more important. So can you tell listeners about the community that you have, the holistic community you've built?
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and then how they can find you and possibly work with you. Absolutely. So, you know, as I've worked with patients and realized that a lot happens after the exam room, they walk into their real lives and have to do real things, and they need support just beyond what we tell them we formed.
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what we call the Whole Plus Circle, which is our community coming together to really support one another. And within that community, I'm on there every week doing Q&As and talking to folks, but we also have added content from other practitioners. Like we had our neuromuscular person on talking about some of her techniques. We do things like sound baths and meditations, but really an opportunity for people to enter sort of this world of healing and charting their own healing journeys with us as their guides.
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So they can check out more information on that if they go to wholeplus.co. It's H-O-L-P-L-U-S.co backslash circle. And there's a lot more information about that. Would love to see people there. So that's one place you can join. And if you're just ready to learn more about holistic health and how we bring functional and integrative and conventional medicine all together, then definitely head on over to our website. You can always follow me on Instagram. I'm at DrTazMD.
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Amazing. Amazing. So we'll definitely be bringing her back. No worries. I know you're going to absolutely love this episode and you're going to want to hear more. So thank you for listening to the Thyroid Fixer podcast. And as always, subscribe, share this episode because there's women in your life that needs to hear this and that needs to know what power type they are as well. Thank you once again for coming on the show. Thank you.
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The inflammation is the precursor for all illness, right? And it can look different on each of us. Some of us may show cognitive inflammation. Others may show more joint inflammation. Some people have gut-based inflammation. But at the end of the day, that cortisol loop is leading to inflammation, which in turn leads to disease.
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Welcome to the Thyroid and Hormone Fixer podcast. If you've been told everything is fine, but you're gaining weight despite doing all the right things, struggling with brain fog, mood swings, low libido, or feeling like a stranger in your own body, you're in the right place.
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I'm Dr. Amy, the Thyroid Fixer, and I want you to know right now, I see you, I believe you, and you don't have to figure this out alone anymore. We're going to do this together. But I'm also not here to play nice with bad medicine or empty promises. This show is meant to disrupt the entire health space. We're gonna challenge the status quo, connect all the dots other providers miss, and give you real practical science-backed tools you can use today.
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You're not going to get any more recycled biohacking advice, just truth, strategy, and hope. Let's get you back to feeling like the badass human you're meant to be. She was 28 years old, a practicing ER doctor, losing hair in clumps.
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gaining weight, she couldn't explain. Does that sound familiar? Joints aching, acne erupting, and six specialists, six, looked her in the eye and told her she was just stressed, not sleeping enough. Here's an antidepressant. Have you maybe tried yoga?
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The last doctor she saw, a hair loss specialist, handed her a prescription, told her she'd be bald by 30 if she didn't take it, and didn't bother to check that the medication would tank her blood pressure. She took it, went to the gym, and nearly died.
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That is the woman I'm sitting across from today. And if you've ever walked out of a doctor's office holding a piece of paper that said, your labs are normal, while your body was screaming that something is very, very wrong, then buckle up. Because Dr. Taz didn't just survive medical gaslighting. She built an empire to burn the system down. So let's go.
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Dr. Taz, I am so excited to have you on the show because through our conversations and recording for your podcast and what I know about you, I'm like, oh my gosh, I think we are soul sisters. Yes, we are. For sure. Such a similar journey and such a similar journey to so many of my listeners as well. So I really want to start there because I think your story is so impactful and I'm
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You were dealing with a crashing thyroid, with PCOS. You were bounced between specialists as well, but you were practicing medicine. And so you were actually in the conventional system getting tossed around by the conventional system. So can you please share your beginnings, your pain-to-purpose story?
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Definitely. I mean, I think it was a surprising and unexpected one. I was in the conventional system. I was working in the emergency rooms. And prior to that, of course, I've been in residency, medical school, all the things. And I think there was just this slow decline in my health and I didn't catch it or realize it until...
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you know, things become super obvious and other people are making comments. So for me, the symptoms were, you know, pretty extensive hair loss, weight gain, brain fog, which, you know, is very unlike me, and then just being tired, you know, just having that change over the course of probably 10 to 12 years. And so when it finally caught my attention, really because the people around me, like my husband, we were dating at the time, and my mom were just like, okay, you need to figure this out. Something's different.
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And so, you know, I was like, okay, I'm going to take time out, you know, to get to go down this journey, which in itself is an issue, right? A lot of people are like, I don't want to deal with this right now. I'm going to hope that this goes away. So that's sort of the space I was in. So I started going to doctors and do the usual primary care who thought I was stressed or just having anxiety. So it was going down more of the anxiety, stress, depression route.
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Then had appointments with endocrinologists, with rheumatologists, multiple doctors. I think it was about probably eight to 10 doctor visits over 18 months or so. And the last one was a hair loss specialist because it was obvious. It was like people in the ER would be staring up here because this whole area, I know your listeners can't see it, but this whole kind of crown area was very open, right? So people would just be looking up here.
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And, you know, it was just very disconcerting. And finally, the last one who was a hair loss specialist, like young lady, you know, I was 28. He was like, if you don't take this medication, you're going to be bald by the time you're 30. You know, so, you know, he prescribed a medication. At this point, I'm just like kind of beaten down. You know, I'm tired. I'm beaten down. I'm like, fine. You know, let me just let me just do what he says.
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And on a particular day, I went and I did my thing. I worked out. I took the medication. I had worked maybe the night before or whatever. And the medication, the side effect, which, again, wasn't explained to me. I probably should have dug into it myself, and I didn't, so that's my fault. But it drops your blood pressure. Yeah.
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And so after like all of these different things that had happened this morning, I basically had a vasovagal episode where I passed out while I was driving. And that led to, of course, me getting into a crash, thankfully not hurting anybody other than the car, but more so just like, okay, this isn't working. It was literally at the end of my rope. I'm like, this isn't working. I've got to start, you know, or stop playing the victim and try to figure this out on my own. So that led me down.
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this whole world of medicine that I didn't even know existed, somehow found, this was like barely when Google was, you know, a thing, right? Like I'm dating myself, but like we didn't have social media. We barely had Google, but I start looking around and I find sort of these weekend conferences and holistic medicine. I'm like, okay, well, let me go to that. And so I go to the, this conference, my husband actually came with me and it was like, I remember coming back and being like, they're
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leaky gut and like nutrients and all these words that I hadn't like heard before in my conventional medical training. But one of the things it did is it opened me up to Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. So I started to pursue those. Those actually started to turn things around for me where I was able to figure myself out a little bit better. And then finally, as I'm learning, you know, once you start this journey of learning and healing and
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You want more, right? So I saw the fellowship in integrated medicine with Dr. Andy Weil. I finally finished that fellowship. And that really gave me the courage, I think, and the confidence to put these things together in a way that could actually help somebody other than myself.
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And so in 2009, my husband was graduating dental school and he encouraged me, you know, he had been watching this entire journey now for five years or so. And he was like, you know, I think you've got something. You got yourself better. Your hair is back. You feel amazing. You know, you've got all this energy. And.
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Maybe you need to share this with other people. So just do something tiny. Do it at the back of my office And you don't have to worry about anything. You don't have to worry about overhead You don't have to worry about you know, this is not a pressure cooker type thing This is just so we can help people and i'm like, okay, that sounds easy enough And so, you know, we set up in the back of his dental office I had one child and literally the day we closed on our space. I found out I was pregnant again and so I remember being like, oh my god, how are we going to do this and and
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At the end of the day, as we put all of this into motion, I was working the ER, he was doing his dental practice, I started my practice. One of the things we both realized very quickly was that this was just not my story. This was a story about so many people having the exact same experience, right? Like having symptoms or having conditions where they weren't getting the full picture information.
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They weren't getting answers. They were getting sort of these very blanket, like take this or do this type advice that wasn't really serving them well. And so what I had thought and what he had thought was gonna be just this very tiny like hobby turned into something much, much bigger very quickly. And I think it took me a year or two, but at some point,
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I was like, okay, this has to be bigger than a hobby, and I have to grow it into something more. So that started my journey, which really turned into everything. I never meant to do anything other than ER or ICU-type medicine. That's the type of doctor I was. It was a very accidental journey, but it got me to where I am today. And unfortunately, I've been in the field now for almost 20 years, and I've been in the field now for almost 20 years.
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It's still the same story. You know, even though we've had the explosion of information, right, an explosion, right, between social media and all the different experts and influencers and everybody that's around, there is still not that practical delivery to the patient that is happening on a consistent basis. So it continues to be my mission.
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to make holistic health, you know, where we're bringing it all together, functional, integrative, conventional, we put it all together to personalize plans for the patient. So that's how I started. And this is where I've ended up. And it's been crazy and lots of twists and turns along the way, but really, really fulfilling work at the end of the day.
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Well, and I love that it really is driven by your own pain, by your own experience. Because like you said, hair loss for women, that's devastating. I mean, that actually steals our identity. Very much. So, and it really does consume your thoughts every single day. I mean, you and I have patients right now.
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dealing with that hair loss piece. And that's what they're focused on. So for you, what was that root cause? Once you unpacked it and you started looking at your situation more holistically, what was it going on?
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So it's so interesting because it took a minute for me to figure all this out because remember, I'm getting interpretations from different people. So in Chinese medicine, they were saying my liver was off and my chi was bad. That's sort of their interpretation. But if you take that information and then you start applying it to some of the other lab work that I was doing on myself, basically, I have PCOS. It's been a huge player in my life and it's in our family. And I think once I found out that
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That was an issue for me. We realized very quickly had been an issue for all the women in our family and now even for my daughter. So PCOS is the main one, but connected to that was hypothyroidism. And so the PCOS and the hypothyroidism was causing the hair loss, the weight gain, the brain fog.
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the achy joints, right? The just general, I'm a super high energy person, but all of a sudden for a few years, it was like just pushing through fog to do kind of some of the basic things that I'm used to doing. So I think it affected all those different aspects and changed who I was for a period of time. So the minute I figured it out though, and was able to start to put pieces together, it was the Chinese and Ayurvedic folks that had talked about my gut and my liver being bad. So I was doing some work around that.
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Figured out that I needed a little bit of thyroid hormone, so was able to go on like a T3, T4 combo thyroid hormone, so started that. For my PCOS, I never went on birth control. Instead, by working on the gut and the liver and the thyroid, many of the androgen symptoms of PCOS started to go away on their own.
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And I use some herbal remedies to help that as well. But within about a year of putting all of that together, my hair started to come back, you know, and it started to come back. It's still not maybe what it was in high school, right? But it started to come back where this whole area filled back in.
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And, you know, to this day, and this is the other, my other pet peeve about PCOS in general, to this day, if I'm excessively stressed, if I forget my routine, right, I forget to take my thyroid, I forget to take my supplements. I mean, I've had moments, you're a businesswoman too, that have been so stressful that I have walked back by our supplement cabinet.
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I literally walked by it and been out of stuff here at the house, but forget to take it or pick it up from my practice on our shelves, right? So a month of that, and boom, my hair starts to fall out again. And even shifting from going into postpartum and then going into perimenopause and now menopause, each of those are androgen spikes for me. And I have to manage the PCOS component of that and my thyroid along the way.
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For me, it's been a blessing in a way because even though it happened in my 20s, I've been able to navigate my 30s and 40s and now my 50s in a much better way. And for anyone watching on YouTube, you can see my face. I'm covering my mouth and I'm laughing because it just blows me away how similar we are when we start talking. Yeah.
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First of all, PCOS. Very, very common to see those two go hand in hand. We see that hypothyroidism, polycystic ovarian syndrome combination in so many women. My diagnosis came years after. Yours came close together. But same thing with the hair loss. And I had acne that I looked like a 14-year-old boy at the time. I grew up in acne, yep.
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Like what's happening here? And then there's the supplement thing. Girl, I walk by that pantry full of supplements, like top to bottom. And some days I look at it and go, I just can't. Like I get supplement fatigue the same as our patients do. So listen, we get it. We get it. We know on the one hand they're vital for supporting our body and helping us avoid those symptoms that we really don't want, like hair loss. But it's just a struggle. It really is.
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Then we add on stress, right? So you're an entrepreneur, you're a mother, you're a doctor, and at the time you're working night shifts. I love how you, and here's another similarity with us. I love this. You talk about the cortisol loop.
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And, you know, we all hear our female listeners or our patients go, I know I'm high cortisol. I'm high. I know I'm high cortisol. I know I have adrenal burnout. I'm totally in the gutter. I have adrenal. I know my cortisol is low. And we go, well, maybe, or maybe you're both, maybe it's going up and down. So can you talk about that in more greater detail? Because I think so many people want to grab onto the cortisol adrenal problem. And there's a lot more going on there.
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Yeah, it's been interesting because I've been practicing now for almost 20 years. And I will say everybody wants to hang on one piece of the puzzle, especially as women. We are interconnected beings where we can't think linearly about ourselves, you know, and to a certain extent men can't either. I mean, they can get away with it.
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But we definitely cannot because we have so many different hormones at play. We have so many different factors at play in terms of just our burden and what we manage on a day-to-day basis, right? So I see a lot of people talking about cortisol. I love that the word is out there. Okay, so that wasn't even out there, right, before. So the word is out there. People know what adrenal fatigue is now. They know what burnout is now. They're using these terms. But the problem is if we just fixate on cortisol, right?
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And we don't pay attention to all the other variables attached to it, which means, okay, yes, your cortisol may be off, but where are some of your other hormones, right? Where's progesterone and estrogen in your thyroid? You know, what's happening with gut health? What's happening with your sleep?
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You can just treat cortisol in a box, right, by itself, but you're not going to break the loop. And the loop is the interconnectedness of all of this stuff. And most of us, if we think about just a running cycle, we are on a loop of some kind. And that loop for a lot of women today is the cortisol loop, where cortisol is high. Because of high cortisol, they crash their progesterone. Because they're crashing their progesterone, they're also gradually crashing other hormones and their gut health as well.
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That high cortisol, if we go the other way, can crash your thyroid. You know that more so than anyone. And so we stay in sort of this thing where we might take an herb to help cortisol, right? Or we might do something for cortisol, but we're not treating kind of these other spokes on the wheel at the same time. And that keeps us kind of humming along in this sort of low-grade cortisol, higher cortisol state,
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which over time leads to inflammation. And inflammation is the precursor for all illness, right? And it can look different on each of us. Some of us may show cognitive inflammation. Others may show more joint inflammation. Some people have gut-based inflammation. But at the end of the day, that cortisol loop is leading to inflammation, which in turn leads to disease. My whole thing with
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patience is to say, hey, can we step ahead of this? Or can we break the cycle? Because if we can break the cycle, then we can really, really shift your outcomes, not just today, but even 10, 15, 20 years from now. Oh my goodness. And thank you so much for saying that. I think it really helps the listener to hear things from other people outside of the host, outside of just me saying it over and over again. Yeah.
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When it's backed by someone, it's not like we planned this out beforehand, right? This is a real interview. I'm actually asking Dr. Tass for opinion.
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And when you say things, it just drives the point home. And it gets women out of that. Speaking of loops, it gets them out of that loop of looking on Instagram, seeing that there's some kind of adrenal fairy dust program and thinking that that's going to be the only answer that they need. Because if I just fix my adrenals, my entire life will get better, right? And it's not just one thing. We can't put any of these systems in a box.
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in by themselves. Like we can't put thyroid in a box and just treat thyroid. That's why we look at hormones. That's why we look at your gut. That's why we look at insulin and cortisol all together. And I love your focus on the gut because obviously on this show, I talk about how that T4 to T3 conversion, the inactive thyroid hormone to the active thyroid hormone and reverse T3, it's, it's very much reliant on a healthy gut.
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and the diodinase enzymes that are produced in the gut and the liver that help us convert that inactive to active thyroid hormone. Can you talk more about how deep you go in working with patients at looking at and healing their gut? And then how do you do that in a protocol? Are you doing that maybe at the same time you're addressing thyroid hormones? Are you just doing the gut first and then you're kind of bringing in the hormone replacement? How do you do your order of treatment?
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So I think those are all really great questions. Some of it's very personalized, right? It really depends on, you know, and a lot of what we're trying to do in practice at Whole Plus is identify like your weakest link and really target that one first. But when we are thinking about, you know, building these protocols and building these frameworks for healing,
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Essentially, and this is what I'm walking away with from my Chinese medicine and sort of Ayurvedic training, is that they would not do anything, nothing, without first treating the gut. They believed that the gut was ground zero. They believed that everything began there, kind of ended there as well. And before you dumped a lot of stuff on a patient, right, you really needed to make sure that was working well first.
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And their definition 5,000 years ago of a healthy gut were things like good elimination, good digestion, no bloating, no reflux, none of those symptoms. And then also stress management was a part of it because both systems of medicine believed that if you had a lot of Pitta, for example, in Ayurveda, or a lot of yang energy in Chinese medicine...
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both of those types of energy would essentially crash the gut. So they were always measuring, like, where is somebody kind of in this Pitta-Yang, aka cortisol, you know, sort of situation, and what is their vulnerability to having gut dysfunction? So, you know, for us in our practice, like, a lot of the methodology begins in the gut and looking at the gut. Now, the really fun thing is that you fast forward now.
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And we have so much great research on the microbiome, the role of the microbiome in the whole process of inflammation, and then what the hormones do to the gut and vice versa when it comes to the gut hormone connection. We've got tons and tons of research articles on all of this stuff that we can dive into. But if we pull back for a second and try to get the main idea out of all of this, essentially this is what all of it is saying. It's saying basically there is a very...
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tight gut hormone connection that when a hormone shifts, the gut also shifts. And when the gut shifts, the hormones shift at the same time. And it's very important patient to patient to understand the nature of that bidirectional shift. And what we mean by that, for example, when progesterone levels go down in women over the course of years, but whether it's in your 20s to your 30s to your 40s and then into menopause,
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One of the very common gut patterns that we see over and over again is a flare of candida or an overgrowth of yeast. So that's a classic sort of example of a gut hormone shift there. We also know that as women move into menopause, one of the things we see in their microbiome is a decrease in good bacteria. So less lactobacillus, right, which is a healthy bacteria, less bifidobacteria, less acromantia. These are all strains of bacteria.
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So bottom line, whether we look at modern day research or we go back 5,000 years, the gut is always the starting point for almost every single patient I work with. And that might mean that, you know, it may not be a huge fancy protocol. It may be like we are just dialing into you are not digesting well. You need to start digestive enzymes, right? Your bile function is down. Your gallbladder function is down.
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Or we need to start a probiotic if we can try to match which strain of bacteria has shifted the most directly or most dramatically because of whatever's going on with your hormones. But we're always doing something around the gut first. So if I had to say this is what I do first, it would be that if I'm going to generalize.
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But then what we will do after we've had a week or two maybe of starting a gut protocol of some kind, if somebody is severely deficient in thyroid hormones or progesterone or estrogen or any of these things, we'll start to layer them on. And the reason we don't layer them on right away is...
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is because, as you know, if you put a hormone on somebody with a sluggish gut and a bogged down liver, that hormone is not going to behave the way it's supposed to. Either it won't be enough and you'll need higher and higher and higher doses, or it's simply not going to work.
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So what we want to do is to give the hormones a fair chance because the goal is always not to overdose. The goal is, you know, how much can we get away with just to optimize what you're already doing on your own? So it's always gut work first. And then it's sort of going into, all right, what is the hormone that needs support and how do we support it? What is the best way to do that? Now, that question.
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could be a hormone, but it could also be things like nutrients, right? We know, for example, and I've seen this and I'm sure you have too, that simply giving some patients iodine, right, improves their thyroid function if they're able to absorb that iodine to begin with, right? Right. Giving somebody magnesium seems to improve progesterone function. Doing methylated B vitamins, for example, helps with estrogen metabolism overall and,
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So they get rid of that estrogen dominance where they're holding on to estrogen in their tissue and in other areas that's working against them. So again, it's bidirectional. It's usually gut first, maybe liver next, then getting into what the hormones are doing, and then trying to support those hormones first naturally if we can. But if somebody's got like a three alarm fire where their thyroid is bottomed out to the ground, I'm not going to sit there and do a lot of herbs and supplements, right?
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Same thing with progesterone. If it's so low that, you know, someone's waking up between three and four o'clock in the morning or having a lot of anxiety or heart palps or some of these type of things, we're going to give you bioidentical progesterone. But it's all given in sort of this laddered approach so that the hormone, the actual hormone or the actual medication is oftentimes not the first move unless it's very clear on a history or lab work or an exam or something along those lines that's
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that it would make sense because somebody is suffering so much and the time it takes to rebuild the body is a little bit slower. So let's help them, but do the rebuilding at the same time.
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That just makes my heart sing. And one thing I want to point out that you said specifically is that you'll do the gut healing protocol not for six months, nine months, while that person hangs in the wings going, oh my gosh, I'm suffering so badly. And the scale just went up another 10 pounds. I love that you said, you know, we'll hit it for like a week or two.
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And then we'll bring in the hormones to give them some relief because quality of life is so important. And you're giving people back their quality of life while you're doing the healing internally as well. And they don't even realize it because they're feeling better. And that's what's important. I think you and I probably practice very similarly.
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So there's that middle road, right? There's like this one road that's like, okay, never take a medication, never do any of this, do everything very naturally. There's this other road of like medication only. What are you talking about? All this other stuff doesn't matter, right? But there's a middle path. And that path is very much of bringing everything together and saying, okay, this is the journey that you need to go on versus your friend versus your sister versus like, you know, somebody at work. This is the journey you need to go on.
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So I think it's really important to understand that two things can happen at the same time. You can be on a medication, but also doing some of the things that work to reverse the body as well. They can happen together because ultimately when you do that type of work, you're going to find that, you know, some of the questions I get asked all the time, like, do I have to be on this forever? Or how do I know when it's...
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You know what? I'm going to need more. If you're doing both legs of this journey, a lot of times you don't need more and more and more. Like you can kind of hold steady at a lower rate or a lower dose of hormones or medications or any of the things that are out there right now.
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Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things that is very unique to you that I really do want to unpack because I've just started looking at this from a me perspective and then, of course, from a patient perspective, because that's normally what we do is we look at ourselves first and go, this might help other people, is you are tying in the throat chakra, which I find fascinating. I love this stuff. Yes. Yes.
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The concept that we as women don't speak up, you know, think about the throat, your thyroid, your ability to voice your opinion, to speak up and stand up for yourself, to be empowered with your voice as a woman, to be a patient advocate for yourself is tied into thyroid disease. Can you expand on that?
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Definitely. I'm going to take you down a little bit of an abstract road, but hang in there with me for just a second. So I've done this, like I've said, for a while. And when you have the opportunity to do this over and over again, you have a lot of patient experiences adding up over time.
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And one of the things that somebody who's matured through the years, one of the things I've come to realize is that it's not just about the physical body. It's not just about our lab numbers. It's not just about our organs. It's not just about our hormones.
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that there are other factors at play. And as future doctors, and what I would love to train the next generation of doctors on, is can we, in a tangible way, understand this? So where I've landed currently is,
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is that there are five bodies. There's a physical body that you and I are very used to dealing with and talking about and dissecting and all the other things. So there's a physical body. There's a mental body, which is our cognitive health and our ability to think and focus and plan and all the other things we do. There's an emotional body, which is wired and on its own circuitry, which is how we feel, what brings us joy, what makes us sad, all of those things.
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And there's an energetic body, which is a layer, you know, that's a little bit harder to access a little bit harder for somebody like me. I don't know how you feel about this for somebody like me to diagnose or to touch or to be able to tell somebody this is what's going on. But I know it's there. And then there's the community body, which is like our life and our relationships and where we live and all the other things.
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When we think about the energetic body, this is not new. This is the chakra system from Ayurveda. This is the meridian system from Chinese medicine. There are a few other systems out there. But for years, people have understood that there is circuitry at play that is not just related to our physicality. So the chakra system, for example, tied every organ to a chakra. And...
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and sort of tied every emotion to a chakra as well, and layered on top of the physical body. So I almost tell people, think of an accordion, right? You have the physical body and the chakra system is lying on top of that. So the throat chakra is considered one of the chakras that directly impact
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the thyroid. And for women that suppress their emotions or are afraid to speak up, many of those women at first, it's just, okay, it's just an emotional issue or an energetic issue. They don't express their emotions. They don't speak up. So they might have a little bit of anxiety or depression that goes along with that. But over time, it turns into a physical issue.
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which is something going on with their thyroid. So again, connecting the dots. We can use that same analogy to sort of the solar plexus or the sacral plexus, which kind of sits down in the pelvic area and in the stomach area. That's very much about security and grounding and healing.
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kind of being sure of yourself. If you are having a lot of issues with sort of where you stand in the world and what your purpose is, again, that pitta or that yang energy that's held down in those particular chakras, that translates medically into stomach aches, you know, a lot of pelvic floor dysfunction, a lot of those type of issues that we see kind of show themselves in the exam room.
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So what does that mean kind of for the future doctor? It doesn't mean that we're like, okay, you're having these issues in the chakra. Therefore, I don't need to do anything. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that to really round it out for somebody, you want to treat the thyroid, but you also want to address what the emotional blockages might be and what the energetic blockages might be. And if you, like I, don't feel gifted enough physically,
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to access that world while finding the partners that can help you do that so that you can have that whole complete healing journey. But at the end of the day, it's all interconnected. And it's so fascinating to me that the people that came before us kind of knew that without the technology and without the data and all the science and stuff like that. And that is how they set about healing people.
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That's amazing. And I think there's such wisdom looking back at Chinese medicine and ancient medicine, because now that we've moved into the world of pharmaceuticals, and I was just having this conversation with my husband the other day, I said, nature holds healing.
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We know that there are cures in nature, but the powers that be, whether, you know, Carnegie's, Rockefeller's, the whole stories of how the pharmaceutical industry came to be. And you and I have very similar views of pharmaceuticals. We use them. Like you said, we're not all in this camp of like, let's just give you 10,000 supplements and sprinkle fairy dust on you and heal you.
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There's use for medications, but we are anti-Band-Aid medications. I really do believe that there's such healing when we look at nature, at our ancestors, that they were so wise and we've lost that wisdom along the way. We've lost that connection to our body, to our throat, to our voice, whatever the chakras are that lead to that disease state.
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We've disconnected ourselves. I also think we've lost respect for ourselves as humans. You know what I mean? I mean, the human body continues to fascinate me because it is capable of a lot. It's actually capable. You know, I was watching my dog the other day. He's on a self-cleaning cycle. We joke, right? Every morning, he's like...
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you know, cleaning his paws and like doing his thing. And I'm like, you're in a self-cleaning cycle again, aren't you? But he has this like innate wisdom as how to take, I didn't teach him that. He knows how to take care of himself, right? Right. We have the same inner wisdom. You know, we are just so blocked in,
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in terms of listening to it and understanding how to go about doing the things we need to do for ourselves, that's why we get into trouble. But I've seen the body repair. I've seen the body recover. I've seen diseases turn around. I've seen people get pregnant that were supposed to not be pregnant. We've seen people go through transitions like perimenopause and menopause beautifully and not have all the drama and the hysteria that's supposed to go with it.
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But I think the culture teaches us that something is wrong with the body. Something is wrong with us as humans. And I think we just need to shift that thinking. And the thinking needs to be more of, okay, what resources do I need to tap into my own innate space?
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self-healing, self-regulating, self-cleaning cycles. And I think if we can do that and kind of steal from medicine of the past and merge it with the technology of the future, you really have a winning formula. Oh, I so agree. That's so beautifully said. You know, the other very unique aspects, I'm gonna keep going with your unique takes on things, the power types. Oh, I love this. I have to do it.
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Oh, so much fun. Okay. So you've coded women into five power types. We got the boss lady, the earth mama. I love these names. The gypsy girl, nightingale, and savvy chick. And each one has a predictable hormone failure pattern. I love this. Walk us through the two or three that you see crash the hardest. And what are the early warning signs? Take us through all the power types because I love it.
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Okay, so this was my 2017 book, Superwoman Rx. And this book came about because my daughter, who was, I can't remember how old she was at the time. She was young, but she was like, Mom, everyone keeps calling you a superwoman. Why don't you write a book so other women could be a superwoman too? And I'm like-
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That's such a great idea. I love that. So that's where it was born. But basically, it literally came to me one day in a patient room that if I took the Meridian, because we do this in practice, we'll do a Chinese medicine diagnosis, an Ayurvedic diagnosis. We look at hormones, obviously. We look at nutrients.
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And we're spending a lot of time with people, so we know kind of their emotional and personality sort of traits. So it just came to me that there were types, that people that were of a certain meridian were also of a certain dosha and Ayurveda, also had a similar hormone pattern, also had a similar personality sort of footprint. And so I was like, oh, my gosh, what if we could gift women with hormones?
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kind of a formula of identifying themselves and then being able to know what strengthens them and what weakens them so that they can have the energy and do the things that they're supposed to do in the world. So that's how the whole idea came about. The power types, there are five. They are each rooted in knowledge from all of those different areas of medicine. So if we start, for example, with the gypsy girl, the gypsy girl to me was the woman who's very much the artist, right? They're
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You know, Dr. Taz, I'm like a night person. I like to stay up at night. That's where I do my best creative work. I write music. I write books, whatever it is. But they always had an issue with their cortisol levels. And they typically always had an issue with their thyroid. Those were the two kind of hormones I kept seeing show up as being off in those women. They were very Vada and physical.
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Ayurvedic medicine, which means they had a lot of air, they needed a lot of grounding. So a lot of their treatment planning was around how do we ground them? How do we regulate their sleep cycle? How do we support cortisol and thyroid? What do we need to do there, whether it's through food or supplementation or actual hormones? So that was the first one. The next one was the boss lady, and we had a ton of those. You know, it just shows kind of where we are as women right now. I think that was the dominant type. They were very Pitta and Ayurveda. They were very Yang dominant in Chinese medicine.
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had a lot of liver issues, had a lot of gut issues in general. The hormone that we were seeing, again, we were seeing a lot of cortisol issues with them, some thyroid issues, but we were also seeing their progesterone levels drop dramatically because they were burning the candle usually at both ends, you know, in a very aggressive way.
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And then the merge of the two types, the gypsy girl and the boss lady was the savvy chick. So they had both. They had both hormone sort of blind spots. They had both strengths of each of those types. They had the weaknesses of each of those types, too. So they were part creative, part go-getters. You and I are probably falling in that category more than likely. But that's kind of where they fit into the picture.
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Moving on, you have the Earth Mama. And the picture that always came to my mind with those was my mother-in-law of just nurturers. Like, they were the nurturing members of a family. It was always about everybody else. It was never about themselves. But sure enough, as amazing as they are, and as much as they sort of held up communities and families...
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You know, they were what we call sort of kapha in Ayurveda, which means their metabolism was a little bit slower. They were way more sensitive to sugar, which meant if you translated that high insulin, a lot of insulin resistance, a lot of diabetes, a lot of lipid metabolism issues, a lot of weight gain in that particular group of women. So for those women, it was a lot about helping them eat in a way to balance blood sugar,
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manage their movement, manage their boundaries, right? Because it was never about themselves and trying to heal them and put them on that journey. And then the last one was the nightingale and the nightingale was interesting. I didn't mean for it to be someone who was so crashed out, but it was literally, we think of Florence Nightingale, someone who was just selfless and
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in terms of mission work or humanity work or service work of some kind. But the blind spot there was they had truly crashed out the majority of their hormones. They were getting sick all the time. They had a lot of sort of inflammatory autoimmune type conditions and symptoms that went along with that after a period of time.
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So with them, we were literally trying to rebuild them, gut up, right? Gut nutrients, hormones, build them all the way back up so that they could get into sort of more of a healing mode. So it was fun. I would have to say that might have been one of my favorite books so far because it was fun.
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People were getting together in groups and trying to type themselves and figure out which one they were. It was a little ahead of its time because I don't think in 2017 we were still talking that much about other systems of medicine. But to this day, it's still one of my favorite books. And I love bringing that methodology into the practice and helping our patients understand kind of where they are in the context of these power types.
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Oh, listen, I'm going to recommend that every woman listening get that book because, number one, like you said, it's fun. It's fascinating, but it's very enlightening to see where you fall. And even as you're describing the types, I'm kind of like nodding my head. I'm thinking of myself. I'm thinking of other patients, of course. Oh, yeah, she fits into this one for sure. And that just gives another layer of healing. It's not...
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You and I are of that same belief where it's not just one answer. It's not one size fits all. It really has to be. This all comes under that personalization umbrella that is so lost right now as we're moving more into women's health.
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and a spotlight on women's health. Like we talked about on your show, thank goodness that we're having celebrities out there talking about their perimenopause and menopause experience, but we're not personalizing that aspect. And I think those power types really shine a light on how personalized every single approach needs to be, whether we're dealing with thyroid, gut, hormones, whatever it is, it has to be personalized to you.
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It definitely does. And I think, too, you know, now that you brought it up, I think they're more relevant for today because the noise in our industry has increased so greatly. And I think many people are just lost in terms of where I mean, there's something about having no information, but there's also something about having too much information.
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So many people are just lost. They're like, I don't know where to start. This is too much. I have no idea where to start. And so the other thing those power types do is, again, if you're just not sure where to begin, it's a starting point. And if you can identify which power type is most dominant...
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you already have a roadmap to begin to work towards healing. So that was really the intention of that book. And I think it continues to benefit women today. And I hope it will continue to for many years to come. My daughter actually is about to graduate. And so I'm doing this whole thing for her on like all about me. I was telling my husband, it'll be like all about me. And in it, I'm going to put her power type, which she needs to know, along with like,
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all the other fun things, right? Like her human design pattern, her Enneagram, all this other stuff and be like, okay, here's your guide to your life. You know, hopefully you won't get into any health roadblocks at least along the way. And at least she has you as her mom to help her with those health roadblocks along the way. But right, the more you know about yourself at an early age, the more you can navigate. You can absolutely navigate. And you're so right. When we look back, oh my goodness. So nine years ago,
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Just like you said, the amount of information that we now have at our, it's too much. It's too confusing. Now we have AI. Now we don't even know what's real. My friends have sent me a couple of videos that they found on Instagram with like millions of followers. And it's a fake person talking about hormones. It's a fake person.
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So that brings me into kind of staying along the lines of personalization. You and I talked about this on your show as well. And I know we both have the same annoyance factor with this, the pop-up hormone clinics where things are not personalized. So yes, now we have all the spotlight on women's health.
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All of these pop-up hormone clinics where women can get their hormones all the same in a little box sent to them for $129 a month. I joke about it. Yeah. What is your take on what's happening now? So now the women have access to the hormones, but they're not personalized.
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I fundamentally am against it. Look, I went down a route where someone actually pitched that idea to me and they're like, oh, my God, you can make so much money. You know, we can set up this online thing. People just fill out this questionnaire and then boom, you know, we can have a prescribing arm to it and they can get shipped their stuff. And I was like, I philosophically cannot get behind this.
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I don't care how much money is available to be made. And I think that people are just taking advantage of a gap in the market. But the gap is actually the lack of personalized, holistic care when it comes to your health, your hormones and health.
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everything in between. The pop-up clinic may provide you access to an actual hormone, but is not thinking all the way through how that hormone is going to interact with your particular body. We all have different genetic factors, different genetic SNPs. We have different stressors in our lives. We have different nutrient profiles. You know, we have different environments we live in. We have to understand those. I've had so many patients who,
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go on hormone replacement therapy, whether it's a pellet, a patch, a pill, whatever it is, and tell me the same story over and over again. Like, okay, I felt good at first, but then I started to gain 20 pounds or I got super foggy or, you know, my breast started to hurt or I started to bleed, like all these other things that are happening. And I think the same thing is true, by the way, of the GLP-1 medications, right? Right now you can order those medications, you know, at the drop of a hat anywhere. And,
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but you're not thinking all the way through on that one either. You know, there's something called hormone tolerance, which nobody wants to talk about, which is your body's ability to handle a load of hormones, whether they're your own or whether somebody's giving them to you. So no one's talking about that. No one's talking about metabolic resilience, which is what are the metabolic factors that have led to an issue where you may be holding onto weight or storing fat or some of those types of things. Those are conversations that,
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that let you win the long game, right? Versus getting a short-term result with more long-term problems. And so I have a problem with it. I don't know how else to say it. I have a problem with it. It was pitched to me a couple of years ago. I walked away from that then. I'll continue to walk away from it because I fundamentally, philosophically cannot get behind anything where we say, oh, fill this out, take this, we got you covered. It's simply not true. Yeah.
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Oh, same, same, same, and same. I pushed away from the same offer and I saw the algorithm. I was shown the algorithm behind the scenes and I said, that's the problem. It's an algorithm and female are not algorithms and it's going to fail someone. And that can be detrimental. Actually, it's not just, oh, Susie is going to gain an extra 10 pounds. It can be Susie develops cancer because she was treated as an algorithm instead. Right.
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Okay. So you brought up the GLPs. We got to talk about it. Yeah. Okay. We got to go there. My bad. No, I love it. I love it because I've been talking a lot about them on the show and I've done episodes where I go into the benefits, especially with microdosing, the liver, the brain, all those great stuff.
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And then I've done shows with the dark side of GLPs. So you and I are both in that microdosing camp. Tell me kind of how you landed there and what you are still seeing in your practice with women using and possibly overusing GLPs.
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Definitely. I mean, I'll be honest and say when they first came on the scene, I was like, what is happening? You know, and it took me a minute to get behind it. And then I still, I know why I felt that way, because I think anything that promises rapid weight loss without really addressing the core metabolic issues is a problem.
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But over time, when we are able to be creative and flexible with some of this stuff, you truly do see some benefits. And so for the person who is truly obese, right, which is not the majority of GLP-1 users, by the way, but for the person who's truly obese, which we define as a BMI of over 30, and then there's your in-between population whose BMI is somewhere between 25 and 30,
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The GLP-1s have been a game changer because sort of the risk benefit when we look at sort of what happens when you gain a lot of weight in terms of cardiovascular health and inflammation in general. Yes, it's a win if they're given the GLP-1 maybe at the standard doses until they get that weight down. But for everybody else, right, who's trying to lose under 20 pounds, there's a lot of GLP-1 abuse, first of all. Secondly, there's a lot of GLP-1 abuse.
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GLP-1 medications at the standard dose for the non-obese patient has a side effect profile that we cannot ignore. And that side effect profile includes changes in gut function, a loss of muscle mass, hair loss, right, to name a few, vision changes. You know, there's a lot that's not being talked about. And so, you know, where's the happy spot with this thing? So first of all,
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You know, some of the patients that we've put on GLP-1 medications in these smaller doses have reported, you know, no changes in weight, but they just feel better. It's like their energy is better. Their mood is better. So I think for those patients, it was a change in their inflammatory load because there is an anti-inflammatory component.
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to a GLP-1 medication at the right dose. So for those patients, it's a win. For other patients though, they have the side effects and they can't tolerate the medication. So when we are now prescribing this medication, I usually almost always, unless I have a patient profile that changes my mind,
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I'm usually always prescribing the microdose and very low dose. And I'm always prefacing that with our intention is to get you off this medication. Right now you're saying you're going to be on this for the rest of your life. We're saying no. If we do it this way, you're not going to be because we're going to deal with metabolic resilience, which means you're going to have a gut plan that goes with this, a nutrient plan that goes with it, a diet plan that goes with this to maintain your protein and your muscle mass.
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There's an exercise or movement component that you have to do alongside of this. And if we can do those different things along with making sure your hormones are where they need to be, then this GLP-1 will not be a long-term deal for you. It'll be a short-term deal to get you out of sort of this metabolic heaviness that you might be sitting in right now. And once that BMI comes down, and then we're also measuring things like leptin and insulin and all that stuff, A1Cs.
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Once some of these numbers start to correct back, then we start to space this medication out further and further. So I've got patients who only take it once a month or take it once a quarter, you know, or can tell when they start to slip again and will bring it on for a few weeks and then come back off of it. But that idea of flexibility and creativity with the medication is something that we've seen really work for our patients. And, you know, we're talking about GLP-1s, but...
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To a certain extent, with all the medications, there can be a level of flexibility with some of these medications so people don't experience side effects in such horrific numbers. I think everyone thinks that once they're on a medication, like that's the end of the story, whether it's a thyroid medication, a cholesterol medication, a blood pressure medication, you're married to this medicine for life. It's simply not true.
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If you can get the body to kind of move into a healing mode, you'll need less and less and less of that particular medication. So we have all kinds of creative medication strategies going on in the practice that work for the patient and minimize side effects.
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Absolutely. And I'm starting to wonder too, if these GLPs will become the next Band-Aid medication. Someone said to me the other day, they're like, well, if you would have gone to those six doctors through your misdiagnoses with that 25 pound weight gain, you might've gotten a GLP. Absolutely. Instead of digging into what was the root cause. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Oh my goodness. I could talk to you for hours. Like the best.
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We need to do a part two because we're short on time. We have to. We have to. You're just a wealth of knowledge, and I just love picking your brain. So we need to leave listeners with one thing. I love doing something a little bit disruptive. We have a segment on the show where every guest shares a take that's going to make people just a little bit uncomfortable. So what's something the wellness or hormone world has accepted as gospel that you flat out disagree with?
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Ooh, the wellness or hormone world. Oh, there's so many. Goodness gracious. That you need more than five supplements, that everyone needs to go on the same form of HRT, that pellets are a good option with HRT. Yep. Those are probably my three top.
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Those are great. Those are amen. Absolutely. I completely agree. Completely agree. So Dr. Taz, can you please tell people you have an amazing community and I think healing has to happen in community, especially these days we're disconnected with social media or becoming more disconnected with AI. Yeah. So community is becoming more and more important. So can you tell listeners about the community that you have, the holistic community you've built?
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and then how they can find you and possibly work with you. Absolutely. So, you know, as I've worked with patients and realized that a lot happens after the exam room, they walk into their real lives and have to do real things, and they need support just beyond what we tell them we formed.
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what we call the Whole Plus Circle, which is our community coming together to really support one another. And within that community, I'm on there every week doing Q&As and talking to folks, but we also have added content from other practitioners. Like we had our neuromuscular person on talking about some of her techniques. We do things like sound baths and meditations, but really an opportunity for people to enter sort of this world of healing and charting their own healing journeys with us as their guides.
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So they can check out more information on that if they go to wholeplus.co. It's H-O-L-P-L-U-S.co backslash circle. And there's a lot more information about that. Would love to see people there. So that's one place you can join. And if you're just ready to learn more about holistic health and how we bring functional and integrative and conventional medicine all together, then definitely head on over to our website. You can always follow me on Instagram. I'm at DrTazMD.
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Amazing. Amazing. So we'll definitely be bringing her back. No worries. I know you're going to absolutely love this episode and you're going to want to hear more. So thank you for listening to the Thyroid Fixer podcast. And as always, subscribe, share this episode because there's women in your life that needs to hear this and that needs to know what power type they are as well. Thank you once again for coming on the show. Thank you.
