Infertility can feel overwhelming, especially when couples are unsure where to start or have already been through testing without clear answers. In this episode of the Freedom to Flourish Podcast, Dr. Joel Miller and Dr. Tim Augustyniak walk through a complete guide to infertility, including the traditional medical roadmap, common labs, ovulation tracking, imaging, male fertility testing, and conventional treatment options such as ovulation medications, IUI, and IVF.
The doctors also discuss a root-cause and holistic perspective on fertility, emphasizing that fertility is often a reflection of overall health. They explore how thyroid dysfunction, estrogen dominance, progesterone imbalance, cortisol, insulin resistance, inflammation, gut health, nutrient deficiencies, infections, environmental toxins, mold exposure, stress, sleep, and lifestyle factors may influence reproductive health.
The episode encourages listeners to gather data, track cycles and symptoms, work with appropriate medical providers, and consider functional or holistic support when infertility remains unexplained. The overall goal is to help couples better understand the full-body factors that may affect fertility while supporting healthier pregnancies and long-term wellness.
This podcast transcript is provided for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult with a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health routine, diet, supplements, or treatment plan.
Welcome to the Freedom to Flourish podcast. Welcome to episode 109. That just sounds crazy to say that at this point infertility is the episode today. So we wanted to put together an episode that is a complete guide to all things infertility where we’re gonna walk through the the medical path that you can take with things, lots of lab markers, lots of tests and kind of what that process will end up looking like in our research and in our experience with dealing with patients who have been down that road.
And then from there, what more so the holistic path and the lifestyle change supplement, you know, the natural route with things and how we go about helping people as well as some successes that we have with patients going that route.
So it’s going to be a great episode. Dr. Joel, how are things going today? 0:48Speaker 2 Hey, good morning, So glad to be here. Things are going really well and I’m excited for this episode. I, as we were kind of preparing for it, you know, my hope was that this episode would be an amazing video made, amazing podcast episode for the, the lady that is dealing with infertility and has no idea where to start or, you know, possibly even the, the lady that’s been dealing with infertility has been seeing a lot of doctors and it’s just not really getting anywhere because I want to go through, we’re going to go through the basics of infertility, what doctors you see, what tests you have done, all these different things.
But then we’re going to talk about, Hey, what actually drives and causes infertility? And Dr. Tim, we have had a lot of really good success with patients with women that come in that are having issues with fertility. And so we’re going to use a lot of our experience in our knowledge there, I think, to be able to shed light on things that most doctors aren’t talking about, like what actually drives infertility.
There’s a lot of in quotes like unexplained infertility cases. And I’m really excited to talk about the actual answer of, Hey, here’s actually what causes these problems. So let’s jump in. All right, so First things first, definition of infertility.
2:02Understanding the Traditional Medical Roadmap for Infertility So, the definition of infertility. So essentially for those that are 35 years or younger, no pregnancy is achieved after 12 months of regular unprotected intercourse.
And then if you’re over 35 years old, infertility is considered no pregnancy achieved after six months of regular unprotected intercourse. Now, First things first in the traditional road map. OK, so if you are seeing your doctor and you’re like, hey, I’m having a hard time getting pregnant, what do we do?
So #1 they’ll recommend, you know, go see an OB-GYN or infertility specialist, which infertility specialist generally is somebody that is an OB-GYN, but they focus primarily on infertility compared to other hormonal issues. They’re going to start with blood testing.
I’m going to walk through what they’re likely going to check there just to give you an overview there. They might talk about ovulation tracking, might talk. They might actually look at the uterus with an ultrasound. We’ll touch on that.
They might do the fallopian tube test, which is called the HSG. It’s pronounced history salpingography, kind of a big one there. And then kind of one of the last pieces in the traditional model is they’re going to check the male hormones, so sperm counts, spermatility, stuff like that.
We’re going to touch on that. So let’s walk through these things and then we’ll get into, hey, there’s if you can’t get pregnant, there’s some main medical approaches that they want to that they would generally recommend. And then we’re going to get into all the holistic things that we need to know as well.
3:47Blood Work, Ovulation Tracking, Imaging, and Male Assessment So blood testing, let’s walk through this follicle stimulating hormone, OK, this is the main test that’s going to check basically your egg supply, OK? You do this on day three of your menstrual period and essentially you want to see that the follicle stimulating hormone is low.
If the follicle stimulating hormone is high, it means that your brain is pumping out this hormone trying to increase the overall egg production. So you want it to be less than 10. If it’s higher than 15, OK, that’s too high. That kind of points to your eggs reserve.
It is on the lower end. We have luteinizing hormones, OK. In general, you want to check this for overall hormone balance. But obviously, you know, luteinizing hormone is also the main hormone that’s going to surge right before, obviously.
So that’s what they’re checking with like ovulation test strips and stuff like that. Estradiol that’s E2 that comes from the ovary. So you just want to make sure that your ovaries aren’t producing too much hormone or not too little.
And we have progesterone. Progesterone is super, super important. It’s really important to check from day 19 to 21 of your cycle. Assuming like a 28 day cycle, my understanding is it’s going to be roughly 5:00 to 6:00-ish days, five to seven days after ovulation.
With that you want to check progesterone because of that number, you should see progesterone increasing during that time. Anti malaria and hormones. This is the blood test that’s going to essentially check also egg quantity. OK, So you want this number to be, I believe it’s one to three.
If it’s lower than that, it’s going to be too low. It’s going to indicate that your body just doesn’t have enough eggs. TSH slash thyroid panel. We talked about the thyroid on our podcast here. Most of the time they’re not running a full panel, so we’ll talk a little bit later how you want to do that, but you want to check out the thyroid prolactin.
If those levels are off, that can stop ovulation, androgenic hormones, things like testosterone, DHEA, if these numbers are high, that might indicate some kind of PCOS. So they’re going to generally go through all of these hormones and, and check things.
And again, I’m kind of assuming that the doctor’s kind of doing a thorough job here. And then Dr. Tim, next, of course, we have ovulation tracking. And then of course, like looking at the uterus. 6:08Speaker 1 Yeah. So when it comes to ovulation tracking, there’s a couple things that you can do.
And one of the easiest things is to use something like a ring or some sort of biofeedback mechanism where you can do basically body temperature measurements. So with using the OR ring, I find that a lot of my patients who do this can very easily track their body temperature because most ladies don’t want to be checking what’s your temperature every single day.
So, but all in all, whatever means necessary body temperature, keeping track of that. Then from there, there are ovulation test strips. So it’s pretty similar to a pregnancy test and a blood glucose monitor all in one. So there are these little tiny strips that you can basically pee on and then you put them in this little, little thing that looks like a blood glucose monitor and it gives you a measurement of how luteinizing hormone is either surging or not surging.
And so that helps let you know if you are ovulating appropriately. So there’s that one, but then from there, a bit more involved testing that’s not really at home is ultrasound. So via ultrasound, medical doctors or you know, whoever’s doing the testing can see if follicles are actually maturing appropriately throughout your cycle.
And then from there there are blood tests to see how progesterone and other hormones are spiking. So mid cycle when you get that ovulation surge, you should get progesterone surging, but you should also get luteinizing hormone going up.
And the only way to confirm for certain if progesterone is going up is blood tests. At that time of your cycle. There are urine tests and things like that that you can do as well that you can send in. But the easiest way to do that would be through blood testing.
So there’s the, I guess the lab testing and the hormone testing and different bio metrics as far as that goes that you can go through. But then from there there is actually just physically looking at the organs to see if things are looking good.
So in order for pregnancy to happen, you need to turn an egg into a follicle and then from there, once that is basically expelled into the fallopian tube and implantation can occur, you need to make sure that sperm has the ability to get up in there.
But then from there, there needs to be a healthy uterus to house everything. There needs to be healthy tubes, fallopian tubes, it needs to be a healthy uterus, it needs to be just healthy everything. OK. And so with visually looking at that stuff through ultrasound and various imaging techniques.
If there is some glaring problem like ovarian cysts that are disrupting follicles, if there’s obstruction of the fallopian tubes that therefore things can’t get through, if there’s endometriosis or or some sort of inflammation of the uterus, these are all things that can inhibit implantation and pregnancy.
And so the easiest way that you’re going to be able to look at all this stuff is through ultrasound. So there are ultrasounds that you can do externally, but then especially during pregnancy, there’s intravaginal ultrasounds where they can look at things as well.
And depending on whether you’re looking at ovaries, the uterus, you know, all the things it can be beneficial to do one versus the other. It just kind of all depends. That’s not exactly my expertise, but that is, you know, something that’s necessary to investigate when trying to figure out if there are problems.
So looking for things like if there is endometriosis, if there is endometrial tissue and scar tissue getting in the way, if the tubes are obstructed, if there’s cysts, you know, all of these things can lead to problems. So visually seeing that it is super necessary to make sure that there’s no problems.
But then from there there are things like histox, I can’t talk this morning, histoscopies not really done a whole lot, but when those are necessary, you know those will get done too. Same thing with checking for fallopian tube function.
So the hysterosalpingography, it’s a lot easier to say in your head than it is out loud. But with doing that, basically what that is, is it’s a test to see that the fallopian tubes are open. And so there’s basically dye introduced into the uterus and it is taken along with an X-ray to see if the dye is moving through the fallopian tubes properly.
So if there is some sort of obstruction due to maybe endometrial tissue leading to some scarring or just malformed fallopian tubes, you name it, there’s a lot of things that can happen and throw that off. And to just make sure that things are flowing properly.
Because if there is some sort of actual abnormal physical obstruction, that’s where, I mean, there needs to be something done about that. You know, we’d like to be as holistic with things as possible, and we’d like to talk about, yeah, if you fix your diet and lifestyle and all these things, you can fix things.
Unless we know through proper imaging that these things are not problems, then there’s no way to know for certain if what we can do to help patients is going to help. And that’s where by the time that patients come into our offices and have been down the road of infertility when they’ve had all these tests already, it just makes our job that much easier because we just don’t have to worry about, you know, is there some sort of physical obstruction, you name it.
So I’m totally on board with all the testing that’s done here, there’s, there’s not really any research that says that, you know, X-rays or anything like that. And small amounts are dangerous. And so same with ultrasound, you know, one of the safest imaging tools that we have.
So it’s super important to, to see what’s going on, get the proper things measured and, and make sure that there’s nothing seriously wrong before moving forward with stuff. But yeah, those are the biggest imaging things and, and ways you can check at home to see if things are functioning normally.
But then from there, you know, we kind of move into the male assessment. And so, you know, a lot of times fertility is just kind of pushed on the woman, but there is the other half of the equation. And so if there’s, you know, poor sperm count, poor sperm motility or low testosterone, things like that, sperm quality goes down.
And so there are means of assessing the quality of the sperm. And that’s where, you know, if you were to go to some sort of infertility Dr. or clinic, you know, they should investigate both sides of that equation. So yeah, totally.
Anyway, that’s all the testing and everything. Dr. Joel, do you want to get into maybe more conventional treatment options or do you have anything else to add on the testing side? 13:15Weighing Conventional Treatments Against Root Cause Solutions Yeah, no, that’s great.
That’s great. I, I, I do think the male testing, checking the sperm count, motility also, I think that’s something that generally doctors don’t really focus on. And I think that is super important. We could even possibly do a deep dive into that at some point talking about how that actually impeggs pregnancy and development.
And there’s some, some different things that I’ve, I’ve heard as far as it being related to like the overall nausea and stuff like that, that that women experience when they’re pregnant. But so you go through all these tests, go through all these tests, go through the imaging, things like that.
And let’s say you’re still having a hard time getting pregnant. So in the conventional kind of treatment model here, what they’re going to generally recommend is basically drugs that will induce ovulation. So there’s a drug called clomiphene and then letrozole.
These are the top 2 ones. So essentially what both of these do, clomiphene, what it does is it basically blocks the estrogen receptors in your brain, specifically the hypothalamus. It makes your brain think that the estrogen levels are low, which causes follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone to basically be secreted into surge.
And those hormones by kind of tricking the brain to make more of those hormones will lead to more growth and release of eggs from ovaries that’ll trigger ovulation. So a lot of women will do this. Letrozole is very similar except for it’s going to block an enzyme called an aromatase.
Aromatase, which basically is the enzyme that turns androsinidione or testosterone into estrogen. So it again kind of reduces the estrogen, which then tells your brain like, hey, we need to make more. So it surges follicles simulating hormones and luteinizing hormones from the brain.
So those are the main 2 drugs. And then the other two things that we’ll kind of get into here is intrauterine, intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization. So these are two ways where if you try the ovulation inducing drugs and you can’t get pregnant, they might do this.
So intrauterine insemination, insemination graciously, is where they basically place the sperm directly into the uterus. And so, the risks here are generally low. You, it’s possible that you could get twins or triplets. Of course you could get side effects like mood swings and tender breasts, things like that.
But generally with this, it’s fairly low risk with things. The cost can be from our research 500 to $4000 depending on kind of where and, and all that stuff. The in vitro fertilization is a little bit more intense because as in vitro, what that means, it basically means in a test tube or in a lab.
So what they do is they basically stimulate the eggs to be released, possibly using some of these drugs. They retrieve the eggs from the female, they retrieve the sperm from the male. They basically in a lab, combine them, fertilize the egg, and then they take this embryo and put it back into the uterus.
Yes, you can have side effects, headaches, mood swings, pain, that kind of thing, which, you know, generally women would rather be pregnant, of course, then worry about these side effects. I totally understand there are some risks as far as preterm birth, low birth weight, preeclampsia, stuff like that.
But one of the biggest things I think is the price. So IVF can sometimes cost anywhere from 12,000 to 25,000 depending on things. So Dr. Tim, I’m going to use this moment here on Segway because all the information that we provided here is just basic, you know, health, basic medical information.
If, if, if a female’s dealing with infertility, this is generally the route that they go. Now, all the things that we’ve talked about, nothing here is necessarily wrong per SE. Nothing necessarily is bad or extremely dangerous, right?
Women, if they’re dealing with infertility and couples, I’ll say couples when dealing with infertility, they want to have a baby. We totally understand that. And so we don’t want to, I don’t want to, you know, throw any of these things down.
But here’s kind of the main point, Dr. Tim. And this is where I really want people to understand this episode, the importance of this. Most people will kind of take a stance like this. They’ll say, if I can get pregnant through medicine or medical procedures without changing my lifestyle, nutrition or anything else, I just want to do that.
And here’s the problem. Fertility is a reflection of overall health. Still, if someone is dealing with infertility, there are health issues that need to be addressed so that number one pregnancy, they can get pregnant. That can be optimal, but the overall pregnancy can be optimal for mom and, and just better for mom so that the baby can develop as optimally as possible and then overall that the birth can be safe and quick and easy as possible.
And so what we’re saying again is that fertility is a sign of your overall health. And there’s actually a lot of things I was finding as I was researching Dr. Tim, that said the risks of doing these ovulation inducing drugs or IUI or IVF, the risks of these things is in a lot of ways, it’s not necessarily high.
But what women tend to notice is they tend to have a lot of problems throughout the pregnancy. And basically the theory is, well, the problems are happening because of whatever health issue was there before that was actually causing the infertility.
It basically is still there. OK, So if you have, let’s say, let’s use a very generic one, let’s say you have a ton of inflammation and that’s not allowing your body to be fertile. Well, if you use drugs and things to kind of manipulate things and then you get pregnant, praise God, that’s wonderful.
But you might experience a ton of nausea or terrible pain and things like that throughout the pregnancy. Maybe the birth is really, really difficult, in which case, you know, those things could have been addressed beforehand. They were there already, and that’s what was driving the fertility.
So again, what we want to emphasize is that fertility is a sign of health. And so if you’re having different issues there, there’s something in the body that we need to work on supporting so the body can restore itself. So Dr. Tim, as we jump into some of this kind of holistic side of things and that’s where I want to spend the majority of our time, what are some thoughts that you have with that?
19:57Beyond Standard Panels: Thyroid, Inflammation, and Micronutrients And of course we can then jump into like the additional labs we might recommend and then of course other health things you want to focus on when it comes from a holistic approach to fertility.
20:09Speaker 1 I think I’m going to follow up with maybe challenging, you know, our bullet point here that says most people’s stance is if I can just get through or get pregnant through medical intervention and not having to change lifestyle and diet and all those things, I just would like to do that.
I don’t necessarily believe that that’s normally a conscious thought. I mean, yes, it’s how things end up going most of the time, but I think it for the most part is just from a lack of patient education. You know, I mean, one of the things that I always, always harp on is the importance of true informed consent.
So when you are, you know, going through informed consent for any sort of medical procedure or health, you know, intervention, you name it, there needs to be a discussion of the risks, benefits, alternatives to what it is that you’re doing.
And so if you know you’re, you’re going to a fertility specialist and they’re like, yeah, your only option is to do IVF. Yeah, those other things don’t work. I truly believe that that is totally negligent when it comes to what your informed consent is.
Informed consent is not just signing a form, it’s being truly informed as to what the process is that you need to go through to, you know, fix your problem with whatever doctor that you’re at, whatever the means necessary is. But then from there, what are other things that you can do?
And so through this process and honestly, through a lot of processes that patients will go through before they come to see me in my office, I feel like there’s really a lack of, of talking about what else you could do. Because so many people come to me and they say, well, nobody’s ever listened to me.
Nobody’s ever said, you know, you can, you can do this and you can eat right, and you could exercise and you can deal with all these things and things will get better. And, and I don’t know if it’s a lack of understanding, if it’s lack of training or if it’s arrogance or whatever it is, but I truly believe a lot of doctors think they can fix everything and that they think that their way is the highway.
And I really, I mean, our, our way’s not the highway, you know, I mean, there’s a million docs that do so many good things to help people. But our goal, no matter what, is to fix underlying root causes of problems as opposed to treating symptoms.
And in the case of infertility, infertility, you know, it might be a common condition, but it’s not the root cause. You’re not just infertile because you’re infertile, you’re infertile because of down or upstream things that are contributing to disruption of hormones.
And so you need to figure out what’s going on there. Well, I really think back to my original point here. Most people’s stance probably is not that I want to do whatever. I mean, their stance is I want to do whatever I have to do. And whether or not they are informed on what whatever I have to do is, or I guess whatever they are informed on, on whatever that is, is what they’re going to do.
And so I, I truly believe it’s a lack of understanding when they don’t want to go about it any sort of other way. You know, some people, I think maybe, maybe a quick fix, but even looking at the price tag on that, you know, I mean, IVF costs upwards of ten, $20,000 a lot of times.
I mean, one of my good friends, you know, forked over a ton of money and they didn’t end up, you know, his wife didn’t end up getting pregnant with it. And so they just spent all that money for basically nothing at that point. And so it’s a, it’s, it’s a big price tag to just say, oh, yeah, I’m just gonna do that instead of looking at other options.
But if you’re told that’s the only option, what are you gonna do? You know, but our goal with this episode is 1, inform you of what, you know, things look like when you go through that process. But two, what are things that you can do to, you know, change lifestyle, nutrition, all those things.
And all things considered, if you’re spending even $1000 on supplements, which shouldn’t be the case, it’s still exponentially cheaper than IVF. And so if you can fix those underlying things by eating right, taking some supplements, exercising, doing all those things, you’re gonna be so much better off because not only are you going to fix problems and be healthier as a whole, but you’re gonna have a healthier pregnancy.
And then you’re not gonna be at risk for, you know, having triplets and quadruplets and, you know, octuplets or whatever multiples, you know, all the other ones in between because of them implanting or trying to implant so many eggs.
All these shows on TLC of families with eight kids all at once. It’s because of IVF that doesn’t happen naturally or it’s just so exceptionally rare. So anyway, that’s my soapbox on that. So let’s get into what we do with the holistic approach.
So with the holistic approach, you know, like I said, root cause, what’s going on? And so yes, some labs that we discussed previously and tests that we discussed previously, yeah, those are important to take a look at. So looking at follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, progesterone, estrogens, you know, all that stuff is great.
But at the same time, like you said, there’s not a full thyroid panel that’s done. And so with the thyroid TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone is not the only thing that is going to be off with some sort of thyroid dysfunction pattern.
And so a full thyroid panel is super, super important, you know, seeing your free versions of all of your thyroid hormones. So free T3, free T4, then from there, reverse T3 is a really good one to see, see if you have any sort of antibodies, so TPO antibodies or TGB antibodies, just to see if there’s any sort of thyroid autoimmunity going on.
All those things are super important to take a look at so you can see if there’s one autoimmunity 2. Conversion issues 3 functional hypothyroid potentially you need it. There’s a lot of different patterns that can show up and depending on what is showing up that kind of points you in a different direction as to is it just a nutrient deficiency thing?
Is it just a cortisol thing or is it a full blown autoimmune thing with lots of inflammation going on? You know, it helps us piece that together and get a good overall look at that. Then from there, you know, what sort of inflammatory things may be contributing to the thyroid being dysfunctional.
You know, there are general inflammation markers. You know, you can look at CRP, you can look at your ESR Erythrocyte sedimentation rate, You can look at, you know, fatty acid balances. So your mega threes, omega-6s, stuff like that.
But with inflammation, you can also look at your CBC with a differential, so you can see your different types of white blood cells and see how much work the immune system is doing and what it’s putting its effort towards. And so there’s a lot of different things that are going to fall under the inflammation category.
It’s kind of a big umbrella term that can mean anything from fatty acid imbalances to, you know, immune system function going rampant. And so you got to look at that stuff. But then from there, hormones even beyond estrogens, progesterone, all that stuff we want to see.
Do you have good estrogens? Do you have bad estrogens? Do you have, you know, some, you know, different ratios of things where you need, you know, most of your E2, which is your good estrogens versus estrone and other things aren’t quite as necessary or aren’t quite as effective for proper hormone function.
And then for their cortisol, cortisol, insulin, testosterone, all those things are super important to mention. So kind of reflecting on, you know, the whole, you know, talk about investigating what’s wrong with the reproductive organs, if there’s presence of cysts or endometriosis or, you know, fallopian tube obstruction, all these things.
A lot of those things are going to be attributed to one lifestyle habits and diet contributing to excess cortisol, excess insulin, depletion of resources to detoxify those. And when you have those problems, that’s where you’re going to get estrogen dominant symptoms like endometriosis, where you’re going to get testosterone symptoms from excess insulin.
Inhibiting aromatase. I’m sorry, yes, inhibiting aromatase. I had to think of, you know, which way it goes, but inhibiting aromatase in women produces more testosterone and that’s where you get dark hair growth, PCOS or CIS growth, irregular cycles, longer cycles, shorter periods and, you know, less good follicles.
And so investigating hormones to check all that stuff is super necessary. And then from there, checking cholesterol is super important. But then even beyond that, one of the biggest things is micronutrients. So where’s your iron at?
Are you anemic? You know, a lot of the nutrients that are necessary to, you know, kind of assess infertility are ones that can be tied to anemias. So B vitamins, your B6B9B12, iron, ferritin, things like that, zinc, magnesium, vitamin D3.
You know, a lot of ones that, I mean, I don’t know about you, Dr. Joel, but I give those out of my office just about every day to patients, whether you’re male, female, young, old, most people have some depletion of those resources because of lifestyle factors, because of genetic mutations these days, you name it.
And so most people need those things anyway. But All in all, that’s probably the gist of the labs that I would see as necessary. Maybe even beyond that, looking at things like insulin, lactic acid dehydrogenase or lactate dehydrogenase is really important that can assess blood sugar imbalance.
Same with carbon dioxide, if that ever goes low on labs that can also check blood sugar issues. So under our bullet of blood sugar here, I think that’s stuff super important to mention. So yeah, anyway, any other stuff that you would add to that?
29:49Estrogen Dominance, Cortisol, and Environmental Factors Explained No, that’s great. That’s great. Just yeah, couple clarifications is with the estrogen hormones, you want to check all three, E1E2 and E3 generally with, you know, remember when they check for iron, you want to check iron, which is the iron in the blood serum iron.
But you also want to check ferritin, which is the iron stored in the tissues. You want to check both of them. I find a lot of people only check one of those. A lot of docs only check hemoglobin, which is generally a good indication of iron, but it’s not necessarily that straight for there could be other issues there too.
So, but again, Dr. Tim, as you’ve kind of mentioned, we want to look at the system as a whole. And so we’re not just focused on estrogen, progesterone, we’re not just focused on the uterus, we’re focused on where’s inflammation, where’s blood sugar, where is cortisol and things like that.
So Dr. Tim, let’s kind of jump into maybe a little bit more of the foundational things, right? Like what do we find drives and causes infertility? I would probably for me, I would break it down into two things, Dr. Tim and I know you, you have a lot of great thoughts to add as well.
The two thoughts that I would break it down into is estrogen dominance and then basically like high cortisol, sympathetic dominance, right? So the estrogen dominance, if you have never heard of this, means that your estrogen is a little bit higher than it should be compared to progesterone.
That could mean that your progesterone is good and estrogen’s high. It could mean that estrogen’s good, progesterone’s low. But in most cases what happens is you have both, you have high estrogen and low progesterone. And Dr. Tim just mentioned a little bit about that.
But one little note that I’ll add is that if you have, you know, before getting pregnant or if you just look back at the last five to 10 years of your, of your life and, and with your hormones, if you have any, what we call premenstrual symptoms, which means right before your period, you get bloated, you get irritable, you get headaches, things like that, you get really tired.
These are all symptoms that you’re at that you have some level of estrogen dominance. Now we’ve made episodes on how to go about addressing this. You know, nutrition is going to be huge, Detoxing estrogen is going to be important. Supporting progesterone is going to be huge.
But one thing that I often will tie this into is that I find that your hormones will be off because of things like high cortisol, but a lot of times that’s tied into other things. So it’s either tied into your nutrition or it’s tied into your gut health.
So if you got infertility, but you also have chronic gut issues, that’s where from a holistic standpoint, you may consider some kind of stool test where it looks at the gut microbiome, things like that. Obviously in our office for Dr. Tim, you know, we are generally looking at jumping into the system with muscle testing and analyzing the body and kind of seeing what’s going on with the gut health, where these hormone issues are coming from.
But as far as a lab testing perspective, there’s some options here. Dr. Tim, I’m going to pass it back off in a SEC because I want your thoughts on this as well. But estrogen dominance, one of the tests that we often will recommend, it’s called a Dutch test.
It’s a urine test. You can just search it up. Dutch test, it basically checks all of your hormones and tells you exactly where they’re at in the balance. That can be a really good holistic test that you want to run. And then in general, when it comes to cortisol, one company that I’ll use from time to time, it’s called diagnose techs, diagnostic techs.
And what you want to check there is called the cortisol awakening awakening response test. So what this does is it checks your cortisol level right in the morning when you wake up kind of mid morning, in the afternoon and in the evening.
And it’ll show you a chart of where your cortisol levels are at the number one stress hormone, cortisol, it’ll show you where those levels are AT. And if that’s off, that gives you a huge insight into, you know, it could be cortisol problems that are, that are driving a lot of things.
So Dr. Tim, again, estrogen dominance, high cortisol issues, I find that these are some of the biggest things when it comes to infertility. What, what things do you see as well that are maybe tied to that or or anything else that that you want to add in there?
33:59Speaker 1 Yeah. So excuse me, yeah, the Dutch test is definitely going to be one of the best tests. Same with the adrenal test. So another name for that test from other labs is the adrenal salivary index. And so like you said, it’s it’s cortisol measure in the morning, mid morning or noon.
And then so 6:00 AM, noon, 6:00 PM midnight, that’s usually the increments that’ll be on the adrenal salivary index. And so that just tells you cortisol rhythm throughout the day. But to break it down, I guess hopefully simpler, in order to have issues with these, there has to be some sort of metabolic dysfunction, whether it’s secondary to inflammation, you name it, there’s going to be excess cortisol or insulin production.
And so when that’s the case, you’re going to steal resources from producing good hormones and push it towards cortisol. And whether or not in the short term that just causes a bottle deck and all things to be relatively high or longer down the road, things end up, end up being a little bit low because of the fatigue that comes with that.
The Dutch test is really good at helping you kind of assess where that’s at. But at the same time, like you said, we don’t necessarily just look at it from a lab value standpoint. Look, we look at it from guest labs, but also symptoms and the neurology.
And so we, I mean, at the end of the day, we are chiropractors, you know, that’s, that’s our, that’s our credentialing, that’s our doctorate. And so I think to neglect the nervous systems input into this would be totally contradictory to, one, what we were taught, but two, contradictory to what we see in practice, you know, And so with what we do with the applied kinesiology in the office, we can see if there’s neurologic irritation to the organs.
And so all in all, I guess the biggest umbrella term or the biggest general idea that organs experience when there is dysfunction even beyond just this issue is there’s something that’s disrupting the autonomic nervous systems input to that organ.
OK, there’s something that’s driving the sympathetic dominance. There’s something that’s driving it to be dysfunctional. And whether that’s inflammation, hormone issues, detox issues, nutrient deficiencies, you know, heavy metals, immune system stuff like the list goes on, there’s something that is contributing to neurologic dysregulation of that organ.
And so the way that I like to describe this sometimes, and I think it’s important to touch on with labs is, you know, say, say labs say, you know, estrogens are actually a little bit low. And that’s the problem. Well, when we see patients in the office, a lot of times what we’ll find is estrogens will test as being dysfunctional relative to say like the liver or the gallbladder or some sort of detox organ.
And that is in turn irritating the reproductive system. So some sort of lack of nutrients to detoxify things contributes to almost like a functional bottleneck of hormones in the liver or gallbladder. And then from there, the reproductive system doesn’t produce as much because the brain goes, oh, we’re struggling to get rid of this, so let’s slow down production.
And when that’s the case, you know, you can say, well, you know, it’s low, you just need more hormones. Well, your brain is having to push super hard on the gas to get things out of the liver. And so it’s struggling, you know, say you only have, you know, a finite number of resources to clear things out.
And yes, your body might be able to keep up, but it’s a, a factor of how hard your nervous system has to work to tell that organ what to do, you know, And so that’s kind of the, I guess the difference between just looking at labs and looking at it with the applied kinesiology as well.
Because I’ve had so many patients where we, you know, ladies will come in and they’ll, you know, get their testosterone pellets and like man, my testosterone is just always super low. But then I’ll find that, you know, testosterone is a problem.
You know, testosterone is an issue. And then we’ll provide the body with nutrients to get rid of excess testosterone or support getting rid of that. And then they’ll feel a ton better and hormones will start to normalize. And so it’s kind of a balance between the two.
You have to look at it from both sides because labs, although they are great, are not the above all and believe all you know, solution to the problem. You have to look at it from a couple different angles. So anyway, all that being said, you have to look at imbalance of the autonomic nervous system period.
That is the overall issue. You know, there’s some sort of neurologic dysregulation causing things and so you have to fix that. Things to consider with that, like I already said, are things like metabolic issues, inflammation, infections, you know, fatty acid imbalances, all of those things.
There can be emotional things that play into that for sure. Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen a lot of ladies where it’s a stressful thing, you know, they just, you know, work just super stressful, life stressful. And coordinating those things together just doesn’t work out all that well, you know?
But then from there, there are other things like environmental exposures like plastics, pesticides, mold, mycotoxins, all of those things that are known to be hormone disruptors that are contributing to problems. And so each generation, I think that goes on, you know, we’re having more and more issues with fertility because of the things that we are exposed to in our environment, one, but two, our, our foods are getting more processed.
You know, we’re getting further away from our roots with natural good foods and lifestyle. And so things are just kind of getting worse and worse. So we have to do what we can, you know, we got to, we got to try to eat organic. We got to try to exercise, sleep, like we should avoid excess blue light, avoid excess Emfs, you know, all the things that are kind of toxins in our world.
We have to do our best to avoid those because there’s some things that we’re not going to be able to avoid, you know, I mean, microplastics and stuff like that. How are we going to stay away from that? Pesticides, How are you completely going to stay away?
I mean, virtually all the crops grown in the United States are sprayed with glyphosate. You know, you can do your best, but still there’s going to be some exposure that’s there. So anyway. Plenty to get to on all that stuff. We have episodes where we talk about basically all of those things.
But when you’re looking at things that are going to irritate the reproductive system and autonomic nervous system, you really have to take into account the inflammatory side of things, which is immune system imbalance, fatty acids, all that stuff, you know, things that are driving all that stuff.
But then from there, the metabolic side. So you have to go about it from a diet standpoint, but then also a supplemental standpoint to calm the immune system and clear things out. 40:28Speaker 2 Yeah, that’s amazing, amazing stuff.
Everything that Dr. Tim just said, everything you just said to emphasize a couple of things, you know, with patients. I’ll find it as we jump in. Let’s say, you know, we go through our history, we do labs, we look at the labs, maybe they’re working with an OB-GYN or infertility specialist and they’re getting some things done there too.
That’s awesome. Essentially, we’ll jump in with the muscle testing and we’ll find, OK, there’s some inflammation over here. We need to work on nutrition a little bit. Like you mentioned, try to eat organic, focus on whole foods, try to avoid processed stuff.
I find that a lot of people deal with high omega-6s, which come essentially from seed oils. And so obviously don’t cook with seed oils like vegetable oil and kernel oil. But also make sure that when you eat out, make sure you understand what they’re using and try to avoid the seed oils.
Try to go find a place that uses beef tallow or coconut oil or something like that. And so all those things can drive inflammation. But one of the big ones that I’ll see is infections. I’ll find people have gut imbalances with either bacteria or fungus.
A lot of times I find people have parasites. And those issues will cause your body to kind of lean towards a fight or flight, kind of a sympathetic point, which naturally increases cortisol. And then not to mention, I know we kind of touched on this Dr. Tim, but there’s a number of women that I’ve seen that like they don’t necessarily feel safe in their home or in their marriage.
Well, yeah, your body is going to know that and your body’s going to feel that. And in the cortisol, it’s going to increase. Maybe it’s stress coming from work. Maybe it’s some other stressor in life. All those things are super important.
So what we want to do again is emphasize that, hey, this is your whole body that you need to consider, OK? It’s not just some of the hormones and it’s not just your period, OK? It’s also, you know, it’s also inflammation, it’s what you eat.
It’s also the health of relationships. It’s also stress from work, OK. It’s also stress from not getting enough sleep. It’s also stress from sitting around too much, not moving your body enough. So there’s a number of different things that could be related to gut health, your thyroid.
So again, the point here is not to overwhelm you. The point is to open up the picture and say, hey, there could be some other things. So if you’re still struggling, we want to tell you so that you can understand and you can run with this stuff.
42:52Nutrition, Mindset, Sleep, Stress, and Environmental Toxins And so of course, if you guys ever have any questions, feel free to reach out to us and use this as a resource. But we definitely recommend a doctor, Tim, I recommend, you know, seeing an OB-GYN if you’re dealing with infertility.
I think that’s a good idea. I think there’s a lot of great things that they’ll do and, and they get some good expertise, but I also highly, highly, highly recommend seeing someone that’s holistic, preferably someone that does apply kinesiology, the muscle testing to be able to test specifically like what is going on with your health, you know, is it, is it some kind of chronic bacterial issue, chronic viruses, chronic parasites that’s causing this inflammation and, and contributing these issues?
Or is it a lot of just deficiencies that you need to address that most infertility specialists, most OB-GYN doctors are not really considering or looking at. So I think it’s a great idea to work with both and to go to, you know, address the main things, but also make sure there’s no major issues.
But then also on the holistic side, really work to get to the bottom of things to allow your body to heal itself. So all right, Dr. Tim, maybe the last couple comments are like, hey, focus on this, you know, nutrition, maybe some supplements.
What are some little takeaways we can give there and then, and then we need to wrap up here in a minute. 44:09Speaker 1 Long story short, hopefully this episode didn’t come off as anything and everything is causing your problem. But the ability for just about anything and everything to be influencing your problem is for the most part there.
It’s hard to say, you know, it’s just this or it’s just this. But I guess the most important take away is internal reflection. So look at your diet, look at your lifestyle, look at those things that you can change and try to gather some signs and symptoms of maybe immune system function or inflammation that you can start to pay attention to.
So maybe start a journal of symptoms that you’re having, maybe start tracking your cycle. You know all of those things together, as much data on yourself as possible to start putting some pieces together and investigate what could be causing your problems.
And then from there, take steps forward to investigate different root causes a bit further. And so that’s over all the advice. And this is something that can be a little involved. And so I encourage you to find somebody near you or reach out to one of us to help you out with stuff.
And beyond that, if you’re dealing with this, I wish all of our listeners the best of luck because this is, this is a big, you know, it’s a big thing. You know, you want to, you want to not have infertility, you want to be able to have kids and, and do all that stuff.
So yeah, anyway. 45:31Speaker 2 That’s awesome. A couple last notes for me, I’d say really focus on nutrition, trying to optimize that, really getting good food in your body. A lot of times I think with infertility, there’s so much sadness, there’s so much like hopelessness and frustration.
And so I would encourage you really try to fight that through really focusing on gratitude, the things that God has given you that you can be grateful for, really focusing on those things and just really trying to remain remain hopeful and everything because I think that’s only going to help you, of course, mentally, but also physically and physiologically nutrition your mind.
And then of course, trying to really optimize sleep and stress, I think in and that’s kind of the big piece there. If you know you have an issue with mold, you need to dive down that hole and fix those things. If you know you have a lot of chronic gut issues and that tends to be tied in with your hormones, you need to look into fixing those things.
So there’s a couple, you know, individual things that you need to kind of investigate for yourself personally, but nutrition, mind, sleep, managing stress, all those things I think are really important and there is hope. We’ve seen patients, we’ve seen women that cannot get pregnant.
They’ve been to every doctor and we’ve been able to help them get pregnant for some patients, like I said, they’ve had chronic mold issues for another patient, they had parasites. And so it’s different for everybody. But control you can control.
And then just again, try to understand the big picture of the other components here. All right, to wrap up here, I’m Dr. Joel Miller. The practice here is called Freedom Health and Wellness in Flower Mound, TX. Our website is called DrJoelMiller.com.
You can find me there. You can e-mail me. You can text us if you guys need anything. We’d be happy to help and Dr. Tim any last thoughts and then share with our listeners how they can find you. 47:25Speaker 1 Let’s just wrap up.
My name is Dr. Tim Augustyniak. I’m here at Flourish Functional Wellness Center down Bentonville, AR. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, you can find me online at or flourishfwc.com. On there I have links to all the socials as well as all the contact info for the office, so feel free to reach out.
Let us know if you have any problems or need anything. Thanks everybody for listening. Hopefully you guys thought this was a great episode and we will see you guys in the next one.
