Optimizing Mind and Body: Interview with Dr Mike Fortunato

0:00Welcome to Christian Natural Health with Natura Pathic, Dr Lauren Deville. Christian Natural Health is the podcast on how to get and stay healthy. God's way. You'll hear topics on nutrition, exercise, sleep, avoiding toxicity, meditating on Scripture, what supplements to take, stress management, defeating anxiety and worry, how to reconcile Eastern medicine approaches with Christianity and a whole lot more. Now here's your host, Dr Lauren. Do you ever want to spend more time in God's Word, but the day just gets away from you? Bible League International created a free guide called Nine Tips to Get More of God's Word in Your Life. It's filled with practical ideas to help you build a simple rhythm in Scripture, plus a 30-day Scripture writing challenge to keep you going. That's when we spend time in God's Word, something wonderful happens. Clarity grows and joy deepens.

1:00Get your free copy today. Just text more to 948-78. It is God who directs our paths. I'm Christi Graham, host of the show on the ground with Samaritan's Purse. I recently talked with Franklin Graham, my father-in-law and president of Samaritan's Purse. He talked about how he sees grounded as we respond to man-made and natural disasters that seem to grow increasingly more frequent and more intense over the years. If we lose the sight of our purpose, you get discouraged. And what I mean by our purpose, we are there to help people but to do in Jesus' name. We want people to know about God's un-Jesus Christ. So that's our focus. And if one person gets saved and we're able to help one family, if we can help one group of people, then they're squirted. To hear this encouraging conversation, listen to this episode of All the Ground with Samaritan's Purse, wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's All the Ground with Samaritan's Purse.

2:07Welcome back to another episode of Christian Natural Health. Today, I'm very pleased to have Dr. Mike Portionato with us. Dr. Mike spent nearly two decades in conventional medicine, ultimately as a board-certified anesthesiologist trusted with life or death decisions every single day. But behind his career, his own life was quietly unraveling. His body was breaking down, chronic pain, shingles, a severe ulcer. Like many of the patients he now works with, he looked functional on the outside while internally feeling exhausted, disconnected, and unlike himself. After realizing the medical system, it failed him as a patient, too. Dismissed despite very real symptoms because his labs came back normal. Mike began restoring his hormones and rebuilding his physical health. But physically improving didn't solve the deeper disconnection he still felt from him from himself and his life. Today, Dr. Mike works with both men and women at a rare intersection. Most physicians never speak about openly. The connection between biology, emotional health, identity, and the way people show up in relationships, work, and everyday lives. Patients come to him when everything else is failed.

3:08What follows is rarely just physical improvement. It's people reconnecting with the version of themselves that was always there, just waiting to be found. Welcome, Dr. Mike. Do you like to be called Dr. Mike or Dr. Fortunato? No, no, Dr. Mike's fully fine. Or Mike, I'm super easy. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us your story. That sounds like quite a journey. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm a board certified anesthesiologist. My path has been always a little off the beaded path. I started college late. I was bartending and doing things like this. I was kind of a typical young man lost, not sure what to do. I was definitely ran punctures as you would, my wife would say. One evening I got into a fight and I had my face broken. I had to go to the hospital and deal with the years of surgery. That was the first kind of shift in my life that showed me the compassion of the healthcare

4:10professionals, the nurses and the doctors. And really how they didn't know me, but they were so willing to be there for you. I thought that was such a beautiful thing. And they really made an impact in my life at that time. And so I said, I'm going to go back to school. This is what I'm going to do. And of course, I think it was 24. Everyone I knew thought it was crazy. I went back to college. I majored in philosophy, all the weird stuff and met my wife in college and progressed. I went to medical school and then I decided I wanted to do anesthesia because it was like the physiology and the instant gratification of seeing the reactions and helping people through surgeries. I just love the quick pace of it. Through medical school, medical school is very difficult. I think it's probably so much of the military. You're just trying to keep up. You're listening to what they tell you. You don't really question much. And so it was a difficult time. But when I get into residency, I really started to see that the medical system wasn't exactly

5:14what I had hoped it was. And from the time of where I thought I was going to become a doctor, now it's already spanned eight, nine years for all the education stuff. The landscapes completely changed in many ways. Less autonomy. I saw patients were sick or disconnected from even their own health. They were just coming in, having surgeries and all these things that were based on their habits. And they weren't really interested in changing it. And the doctors were kind of jaded because we're just so exhausted of working all the time. It was just a tough time. And I was at that time that I learned the power of the mind. I really went into a dark place. I talked to myself into depression for over a year, every day, saying things to myself, listening to a narrative that was just made up. And I got to a really dark place. And luckily for, you know, I really don't know why most of my journey has had shifts.

6:21I started to think, well, if I can talk to myself in, I can talk to myself out of it. And I started to go there just to kind of bounce ideas off of them. But mostly it was just really every day switching my narrative, right? Telling myself something different than I was telling myself. And first it started out with just lying to myself. My situation was not what I wanted, but I would tell, make little, little tweaks and convince myself is I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to continually do this. I have little rubber bands on my wrist that I would snap to remind me if I went negative to, you know, all these tricks, right? And it really helped. It's, I got easier every week, every month until the fog kind of lifted. And it was really good. It was really a major turning point in my belief system. Right. Then I got out of residency and you know, residency are exhausted, but you figured out because I'm working all the time, this is normal, right? Right. I got a residency and I'm working much less, but I'm feeling terrible. And now I'm in my early mid 30s. I'm married, we have a small child, but I'm just exhausted all the time.

7:24And I just don't feel like myself. I feel disconnected. I feel no motivation. I'm just, I just, you know, I have no libido, nothing in my early 30s. So I go to my colleagues, I go to friends and, you know, they, at the time, they just looked at the labs and said, now, everything's normal, right? On the labs, you're just, you know, it's a doctor you get used to it. This is life, right? And that caused me years, right? I, I struggled through that. And I said, no way. This is not normal. There's no way. And so I'd research the internet and I, and I, at that time, hormones were not very common, right? People don't understand that you think, well, in medicine, we should know about all these things. But it's really not taught well in medical school, in residency. I have colleagues who are endocrine doctors. This is specifically what they do. And from a hormone replacement standpoint, they do not, even they do not know well about it. And so I had to scour the internet. I scoured the internet at the time and read books. And I found a clinic that did do it.

8:25They would do it once a week. It was really bad. It gave me a science of improvement when I used it. I said, wow, I do. I feel like this is, this is definitely, this is definitely working. And it took a while for that to really hand out over a year or so. And I started to feel like myself again. And it was fascinating. I was like, wow, I feel great. And then, then all the deeper stuff that I had pushed away to, you know, all the things in my head, all the things you see in residency. You know, as doctors, you're taught, you got to be present for the patients, right? You have to be there during the events. So you really detach from the emotion of it. You have to, right? You can't be losing your, you can't be emotional to the fact that what you're seeing is horrible and be effective as a physician, right? And we learn the better we are at that, the better we become at being a doctor. But in many ways, we lose that connection to people, right? And I think it does, the relationship, a disservice, but it does us a terrible disservice

9:29as a human beings because we get used to, well, if you don't feel something, we don't like, we just push it away, right? And so I continually did that. And you know, I had, I had been really erupted during, during COVID, prior to COVID. I started having really bad back pain. There's no really physiological reason for it. I led into shingles, right? Stress and all this mental anguish I was dealing with, all this anger. And then it led to full-done ulcers, gastric ulcers, right? Now, and I was drinking, to be sure I was drinking heavily at that time. And so I was going back into the same patterns that I went through in residency. In residency, I was very spiritual. I was meditating every day. But it didn't, it didn't help, right? It didn't help. I still talk to myself in the depression. Now I see I fixed my biology. And I'm still going down now, the rather whole, because now my body's breaking down, because I'm really not dealing with these underlying emotions and feelings that I didn't really want to deal with.

10:31And it got to a point where I was ruining my marriage. I was, I was ruining my relationship with my children. And I just said I can't, and the pain was excruciating every day. I couldn't, I couldn't eat. I was drinking a local, a lidocaine, which would help numb my stomach every day. It was a disaster. And I was smart enough spiritually enough to know that, you know, the signs are telling me something is wrong. With deeper level. My body is telling me, right? But I did not want to deal with it until it was, until it broke me down. It broke me down to where I couldn't handle anymore. And I just told, one day I was in the tub and I was just like, I, I, you to take me or you help me. I'm willing to work, but I cannot tolerate this anymore. Yeah. From there, my life went on just an amazing journey of self reflection, but I was told, you know, you have, you know, you have to be vulnerable. You have to get, you have to get vulnerable with everything in your life. You have to, you have to dissect where your thoughts are coming from.

11:34What are these beliefs you hold? Are they real? And you know, oftentimes they're not. And most of the things I just had to dice, just like peel back everything and then get to the source of it and then release it, learn to release, learn to, I worked with spiritual coach for two years, learn to forget myself and then forgive others. And it was, it was a very difficult experience because as a man, especially vulnerabilities like something we never want to touch. We never want to touch that. We think it's weakness, right? We think, no, men don't do this. But it wasn't until I dove into that that I really became whole. And so, you know, it took a long time. Luckily, my wife stayed with me through all that mess, you know, it was a told mess. But I came out so much better, more complete. And I lived my life, you know, and through that I decided, hey, I'm going to help people with these hormones. It's not being done right. And through that I can help them with, with my learning, my journey teaching them certain

12:34things that maybe will impact some help along the way for them. And that's what I do now. Yeah, awesome. So going back to that moment in the tub where you said, take me or show me something. Show me what I need to do next. Exactly. So what were the steps that came to you? Is this like, you know, your spiritual awareness of need to go do this, this, this, was there? What was the next step after that? Well, that was a very surreal and, you know, experience in and of itself. Most people would say it's, they may not even believe it. You know, I had been reading, but I always read. I love reading. And I was searching the internet for something on Amazon. And I flew through and I, and I accidentally clicked onto something I didn't intend to, right? As I was scrolling down and I took me to a book. And before I, before I switched back to what I was doing, I read the title. I was like, wow, this is interesting. And I read it and I saw, I'm going to buy this book. I don't know why it sounds very interesting. So I bought this book and it was written by a nurse at the time and who later became

13:36my spiritual coach, right? And so she wrote about this, this technique about how we all are connected to our higher self. I believe that. And we all have the ability to tap into that and get guidance and get support and help, right? We have, we have this available to us. And so all we have to do is ask, right? Because we live in a free world and there's, we have to consent to these things. And so simple, I wrote a book. So you can just take a simple, simple time, just be quiet. Follow yourself, do some breathing exercises and really just ask yourself as your higher self, ask for some guidance, ask for some help. And so I was doing that in the tub that day and that's where I said, help me, you know, and you know, yeah, yeah. And what happened was it was crazy. So and it said, just ask questions, right? And so you know, listen to your mind. You can hear your voices in your mind when you have your inner dialogue. And so I was asking myself stuff and I was hearing it in my own thoughts, my own voice,

14:39right? And as I was asking more and more questions that I did not know the answer to, I was getting deeper philosophical answers to my life situations, why things were happening, why this occurred, then why was behaving like I was? And it just went deeper and deeper. But it got to the point where as I was asking, before I would even get out the full sense in my mind, the answers were coming to me, right? And now this went on for 30 minutes and my wife came home and she saw me and she, you know, I had been drinking, I've been drinking, I've been drinking problem. I was not drinking this day. And I was disoriented. I felt disoriented. And as I was getting out of the tub, I was wobbly, I was not stable. And she just assumed I had been drinking. She's like, you've been drinking or you can't understand that. But I was it. This was just from this experience. And from that experience unfolded days of just this feeling of peace. I decided this peace because I knew, I think I was shown like how, how if I live a certain

15:44way, this is how I would feel, right? That just general peace. And it was amazing few days. It was just beautiful. And I would see things, I would think of certain scenarios and I would see little things pop up that were associated to what people call it synchronicities and things like this. I was seeing all these things and all connected. And it was so cool. It was just so cool for those days. I was like, wow. And I think it was a gift to say listen, if you go through the work, I was shown with the end product would be like many people don't get to see what the end will be, right? Like they go for a goal, but they don't really know what that goal is going to achieve. You know, when they get there, they're still unsure what that would mean. But I was shown that day. I was shown that day. And so I dove into it. I read stuff from that woman. I ultimately had her on as a coach. We went deep, deep, deep, I exercised for six months every day, peeling back everything.

16:45And as there's so much things, we don't realize that we carry. We all do. And most of it's not from us, right? It's from our parents. It's from what society tells us. We take a certain thought into us. And then we live by it, belief systems from religion and institutions, right? And it changes our life. And oftentimes those beliefs are not ours. We don't want them. They were not in our best interest. And yet we carry them. Right. And so that exercise for years was just releasing and really getting to the core of who I was. Right. And so you mentioned that this was started like the part of the pivot point was during COVID. So I was during that point, you were still in the traditional medical system. Yeah. Assuming now you're not like that you're more independent. How did that end up making a difference? Because if you go right back into overwork, it's pretty hard for you to totally, you know, spend the day with the recovery, right? This is the, this is the tricky transition. And I went through all this with my coach.

17:45I, at the time, I was the chief of anesthesia of the hospital. So that's the head anesthesia person for the entire hospital, right? And so that was my role. I was immersed into the system. And you know, COVID was a disaster in every way. It did not, it did not, to me, it was not about people's autonomy, which is crucial. I believe in people's free will more than anything. It was more about dictating out of fear, right? We didn't, we avoided real science. We avoided real critical thinking and debate. And then I turned into this like the most ugliest of ugliest things. And I swanched it. I saw it. And it just, it made me really, really, at the time. And this was as my, this is right prior to all of the explosion. My mother-in-law died. I couldn't visit her in the hospital as a physician as someone who was at that hospital all the time. I got escorted out of my security because I went to see my father-in-law who was in the

18:47hospital. And they literally called security on a physician that had credentials at the hospital. It works in the operating room, but I couldn't go to the floor. It was just, it was just really horribly animalistic, right? It was just, it was like the worst thing I could imagine. And it, it just, it's something to aspire on because I said this, I can't be part of this. This is not who I am. This is not what, what medicine was to me. And so that's when I started to say, I wasn't among my spiritual, luckily I collapsed much sooner after that into this space with my, with my coach. And then I just said, I'm going after a new direction. And so I, I started getting educated on hormones. But I was still in it, right? I'm still doing the work. I'm not wanting to be there. I feel disconnected. I don't, I mean, I despise being there in so many ways. And yet that was a good lesson though. Because many people go to work. They go to places they don't want to be, right? And we can't just quit, right? People have responsibilities, they have things.

19:49So I had to learn how to, how do I be in these situations? How do I control my emotions? How do I see what's going on and try to, try to use everything I'm seeing as a mirror to me to reflect back something I need to work on, right? And that's why coach taught me. So I saw something that triggered me. Okay, what is that telling me about me? Because everything is about us, right? And so instead of pointing fingers at what's wrong outside, point, identify it and say, well, what is that showing me that I need to work on, right? Because I can control that. I can't control this external madness, right? And so while I was doing other deep work, this was like the training. Okay, I'd be in a safe place with the coach, talk about stuff. Okay, now tomorrow you're going back to the place you don't want to be. And now you're going to have to practice what we're actually teaching, right? Exactly. And so for me, and we called it like Jedi training. She's like, okay, you're in your intense Jedi training. And anybody can do this. I talked to my patients, my patients now, the same way.

20:51I say, you know, what a gift, right? Because you're going to an environment. If you're not in war, you're not at risk of dying, right? So you're going to a place that you don't want to be there. It's hostile to you in many ways, but not physically. So you know, you're going to go there. You're not in danger, but now you get to practice these things. And it's going to teach you and show you in a safe environment what you need to work on, right? Because you go somewhere that's always happy. What do you learn, right? You know, you're not going to learn much if you have stuff to work on. Now once you work through everything, I choose happier places now. Yeah, yeah, totally. Don't leave you alone. But at the time, at the time, this was the process. And so yeah, then it moved. And slowly, I'm removed myself from hospital institutions. And I went into just private anesthesia locally while I was bridging myself to what I do now. Now I do anesthesia one day a week now because I do like it. But I do it in a private setting. You know, it's plastic surgery.

21:52I work with a guy. No, it's a different thing. But I did have to remove myself and my practice now, it's not compatible with the medical system, right? And I don't mean to, I'm not trying to bash the system per se. What I would say is it was built a certain way. It was built as a sick care system, right? And people went there when they were sick to get, we were taught to get them back to baseline. We never taught people. We were never taught. We're going to get you better than we found you. Right. Right. There was no such thing, right? So if someone came in and wanted to be better than they were, we'd go, well, you know, go exercise and diet, I guess. Yeah. We don't know what to do with you. And they still don't know what to do with patients, right? So the space where I think people are moving towards is like, how do I live healthier, happier now? And then prevent the disease later. And modern medicine doesn't have that as it's not they're concerned. And most of medicine sadly has become corporate, right?

22:52It's become big business, big money. And even though the physicians may be genuine, they're in a system that won't allow, won't allow you to do the things you need to do. Things I need to do require medications that are not on formularies. They're compounded medications. They're natural occurring medications. The big pharmaceutical companies want synthetic medications, things that they can patent and make profit off of, right? I understand it. But that's not what I do. It's not what I need. And my clients can't get it. So they have to go outside. So mine's a purely cash practice because that's the only way I could treat them. Sure. Yeah. So somebody who's been in the system and now is largely out of the system looking back, what do you think would need to happen in order to change the way that medical education is done to actually change what's been taught? Okay. So just to put it in perspective, medical school has four years. First you use your heavy books and then the next two are you do rotations while you're

23:53learning. So you do surgery and that's not. And then you pick a specialty and then you go off to your residency training, which is still training in that specialty. So for anesthesia, it's four years. So during those two years, it's like a fire hose of information. You go to college and what you learn really at four years of college, you learn in less than a semester in medical school, right? It's just crammed in there. Of all, in those four years, in all those lectures, we had one lecture on nutrition, not a semester. One person that came in and gave an hour long talk on nutrition, right? So you can see how there's the scope of what's priority. It's all about disease. It's all about what's the medications of pharmacology treat the disease? How do we identify the disease, right? You would have to have a huge paradigm shift in medicine. And for me, I think modern medicine for the most part is slowly going away. The concept of it. Really? So yeah, because I believe the system has failed in so many ways, right?

24:57Think about the cost of medicine in this nation. It's astronomical, right? And think about when you look at patients year after year, would you say patients are getting healthier? Are they getting sicker? Now, I've seen it. So I know the answer. Decade after decade, year after year, they're getting infinitely sicker, right? And they're getting infinitely less coverage by their insurance companies, right? So they're paying more. They're getting less. Physicians are getting paid less. They're getting more patients with more restrictions and less autonomy, right? We went at the medicine because you said, hey, I want to help people. But I love the fact that I'm the detective and I have, I have set guidelines. But then I can look at this medicine and say this medicine, even though it's written for this, it has all these other things that may work here. You talk with your patient and this is how we did medicine. That's no longer the case. The insurance company says, this is what you use. You use this first and this and this and this. There's no thinking anymore. It's all portaclyzed, right?

25:58And so you'd say, okay, that's fine. It must be perfect if we've portaclyzed it, right? If we did that, we found the formula. We've not found the formula before from it. And so for me, I think the new space is opening up. Optimization will be the health of the future. I believe it's about how do we make sure that patients are living? Not just a healthy life now, but they're engaged, right? They're engaged in their health. They are taking ownership, right? Accountability. Right. Because it's important to know, right? No more dictating. No more going to the white code God that's going to tell you what to do. What? No, it should be a relationship, but you should help your best interest in mind. And you should know about what you should do. And I think a lot of people are moving to that space because they see that healthcare is failed in many ways for them. And they're like, well, they don't have solutions. I want to be healthy now. I don't want to wait till I have diabetes to go see them. I don't want to wait till I have a problem. Every year I go see the doctor and the doctor is just scanning me for problems.

26:59They're not giving me anything to work on any solutions for this year. They're just hoping I'm doing the right things, right? That's not a plan. They're very reaction. It's a very reaction, right? Like you're just waiting for something to do something. Optimization is how do we keep you healthy and prevent disease? Maybe, maybe, maybe after for you, right? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I've noticed is that especially since COVID, I feel like it's really accelerated is that when I refer patients to various different specialists of all the various types, the wait list is getting longer and longer and longer. And I don't understand if it's because everybody's leaving medicine or they're like, are they retiring? What exactly is happening here? And I'm assuming a lot of people are coming to similar conclusions. When I was in residency, people don't understand how medicine works, but there's an X amount of medical doctors. So once you graduate medical school, you're technically not a doctor.

28:00You have to graduate a residency to be able to practice, right? So when I was graduating, everyone who had a medical school in this country, there was a spot for you in a residency of some sort. Now, you may not want that spot, depending on how well you did, just maybe where you have to go. But there was always enough spots. In fact, there was more spots than what we had. That's how foreign medical students could come in and fill these spots, right? Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Then they slowly started adding more medical schools. They started adding different, so it was just MD that it was DO, then they started adding more more doctors. But the problem was they weren't adding more residency spots. They were actually decreasing them, right? And so as this continued initially, first, now a lot of the foreign medical grads no longer could come here. I was just unfortunate because a lot of these people are brilliant. They're coming in here with different perspectives. Right. Those went to the wayside. And it became a point where even if you graduate a medical school in this country,

29:02you're not getting a spot. Really? Wow. Yes. So now you have that, which is a huge problem that they don't even dress. Yeah. And now we're going to make more doctors. And it's just not true. They're increasing medical schools. So they go, we're making more doctors, but nobody can practice unless you graduate residency. They don't tell you, well, we're not funding the residency. So they're going down. So that happens. And of course, yes, you see, you see the doctors are getting more and more disenchanted. They're getting more jaded. The system's failing. It's failing them. And so they start going into other spaces like I'm doing. So you see this, right? And as you see this, then it creates more burden for those who stay. Right? So now the ones that are already seeing 50 patients, they're exhausted. They're already wanting to leave. Now you're piling on more, right? And you have people who are going, well, I see what doctors are now. You used to be an appealing job. I don't know all the doctors I talked to. They're not happy. They're quite miserable. Right.

30:02I'm not going into that. Right? So I think you have this whole dynamic going on. Right? That's forcing it to change, but it's not changing. Right? And I think if you don't change, you die. Eventually, it'll collapse. Eventually, you die. And I think that's what's happening. And that's why I think the system is going. Right. Yeah. Well, and the more people go outside the system and do cash-based practices, that money's not going to the insurance companies because it's their cut out of the middle. I've also noticed that a decent number of my patients, even if they have insurance, a lot of times they end up either they're underinsured or they've got a plan where- It used to be duckable. Yeah. So we've got cash prices negotiated with labs. So a lot of people, even if they have insurance, they're paying cash for labs. And that's also exponential since COVID, as well, around 2020. It's just, yeah, definitely. When I started my business, I'm going to treat my wife. And I say, go get labs. But we have insurance. We have good insurance. It's put through the insurance. I don't know if I should.

31:03The labs only charge me like barely $200. Right. No, no, no, we have good insurance. And we talked about, okay, we put it through our insurance. It was almost $500. And we had a $5,000 deductible. So it would cost me $200, cost me over two, you know, two and a half times. Right. And I had to pay out a pocket. And I had very good insurance. Right. And so you're like, why would I participate in this? Sure. Yeah. So back to the hormones, because that's kind of the first thing that you discovered from the functional medicine world, it sounds like. Yeah. There was at least for quite some time, a big controversy over hormones. I think it's getting less and less now, like a lot of the studies. Right. So what can you summarize for people? Like, what was the controversy previously? And what did you, what, what did you come to the conclusion of to say, this is not something that we should be as worried about or maybe not for everybody? Yeah. Okay. There's definitely a few things, right? For men, I'll divide into men and women.

32:03And I treat more women than men. But men, there was always, hey, man, you're taking out a box steroids. That's a testosterone. What are you doing? They're just trying to cheat. They're just trying to cheat. This is not necessary. Guys are just, you know, and to be perfectly honest, hormones were not even a concern, right, until men started having issues. Really? Women, we've kind of pushed them to the side for so long. The landmark study for the WHO that said that hormones are dangerous for females. Oh my God, it just, it just, it just banished women to this island of misery through paramedic paws, through menopause for, for the rest of their life. And then you said, wow, you're paramedic. I'm on software. She'll be a fine. She did it. You could do it, right? Oh God. What a disservice. So for the men, you know, it was that stigma. You're, you are using out of box steroids. Now, testosterone is in the class of anabolic steroids. We know that most people don't know this, but it is. But anabolic steroids is synthetically made. They're, they're doing all-drink testosterone, which is a natural hormone in the body.

33:05And they're driving it to the more anabolic effects, the more muscle building and performance, right? And they're stripping it mostly of all of its health benefits. So it's strictly for muscle building. It wasn't for health. Testosterone is crucial for all of us. Men and women. It does, it works the brain to help with dopamine and mood and motivation and drive. It helps you with sexual function, of course, but muscle. It protects your heart, long-term. So many things that are crucial to have our hormones balanced. And this is not something that was talked about often. It wasn't also talked about how dysfunctional hormones have become in the general population, right? So I'll talk about that in a second, but for females, it was this WHO study that said, hey, we wanted to give women ash. I'm not a surgeon and progesterone, but what happened was they're using synthet, so when I went and got educated, I said, you know, when we're in medical school, we prescribe it was on the formulary. Of course, I don't want to be a jerking goal. Oh, no, I'll look up. Oh, I'm a reason why I'm like this. An epitome of the doc can't afford that. Oh, okay.

34:05Well, what's on here? We want to make sure you're not paying out of pocket. We realize that all the studies have been done, are being done by pharmaceutical companies. That's whose, that's whose, it's paying for them. And studies are very expensive. They can be tens of millions of dollars, right? And so when they did the study, of course, it was based on their synthetic medications. And so when they found out that that really wasn't the estrogen, and the estrogen was, mind you, what we were given, women for estrogen was horse urine. That sort of was, right? And so when people hear that, they go, oh my god, that's what I was given. Yes, sadly, that's what, sadly, that's what you were given. And even that, although it was not good for your body, in the study, it didn't show to be the main culprit. The main culprit was the progesterone. That was a synthetically made progesterone that was causing the risk of clotting of heart attacks and cancer, right? It was mainly cancer and blood clots. But we didn't know that. As a doctor, I said, oh my god, these hormones are bad. I, we didn't know about compounding pharmacies when I was in training. We didn't even hear such a thing. And we didn't think that ester dial was what you needed.

35:06We said estrogen. They lumped it all together, right? Well, ester dial is the natural current thing. If we give that, now there's good studies show, hey, no, if we give women the actual bioidentical, meaning it's exactly like the molecule you're supposed to have. Ester dials, a molecule. You do fantastic. If we give progesterone, there's absolutely no risk of the things we gave with the synthetic version. Oh my god. And women feel amazing, right? We're we're we're weathering the paramedicons. And then we get to medipods. They're no longer losing their bone. They're no longer having risk of heart attacks and strokes because now they're protected. We weren't taught that. And even still, if you go to some of your doctors, now they don't know this. They're not up to date on the research, but this is what the research shows. And so when I learned all of this, I was like, oh my god, this is a travesty. I'm going to start doing this. And of course, my wife's on it, my mother's on it, my aunt's on it, my sisters on it. I mean, I'm giving it out like candy because I know how protective it is, right? And they all they all feel amazing, you know?

36:08And so it's so important, I think that people realize that what we were giving people were synthetically made. And what's available now is bioidentical to your body. And that's the whole problem. That's what caused all the issues, yeah. And there's also different schools of thought with respect to dosing strategies. So some people are all about super physiologic, like get you back to your 20s when you're much older versus just minimum effective dose. Where do you land on that spectrum? So this is how I do. This is how I've done this, right? So we have really good landmark studies from the end of the current society, which is a world-renowned society in our nation on endocrine system. And they deal with thyroid, all of the stuff we're talking about, all hormones. And they've been telling us since 2008, they've been screaming it, but no one's really listening, that we have so many endocrine disrupting chemicals in our environment, right? And we're ingesting it on a daily basis. It's allowed to be put into our food, into our water, on our skin products. It's everywhere. And they keep telling us every five years or so, hey, you know what?

37:09We found more studies that say, now it's here. Now it's embedded into your DNA. Now you're passing it on to your children. And what we've, what I've seen and what we've now have in the research is that hormones that your parents had or your grandparents had are not the levels you were born with. You were born at much lower levels. And you're born to an environment that's more toxic, sadly. And so our levels are going down, down, down. What's happening though is the labs are showing the general populations range, right? It's not showing this, because we're all moving together, because we're all being affected. So instead of them going, hey, 10 years ago was this doc. And 10 years prior to that, it was that. It was prior to this, it was that. Like we know a testosterone has gone down almost 50%. You have to scale this, move it, and it says, now you're normal, right? And this is where the complication comes, where patients go see the doctor and they say, hey, I feel like crap, all this stuff's going. I feel normal. These are normal. So they've done studies and they've done really good studies, say, hey, how do we treat patients hormonally?

38:10Well, safer thyroid just as an example. So, okay, here are the ranges, but the patient doesn't feel well. What do we do? Okay, we put them in a double blinded study where the doc doesn't know and the patient doesn't know what they're getting. Somebody's getting real medicine, somebody's getting a sugar water pill or something, right? And they track them and they say, okay, are there symptoms getting better? They come in with, I'm tired, my hair's falling out, I have brain fog, right? My metabolism's slowed things for the thyroid. All right, keep increasing their dosing in our controlled manner. See if they get better or they get side effects, right? And they keep doing this and when they get better, tag it, get the labs and we'll see what happens. So they do this and they go, holy cow, we have ranges, we have decent ranges, but what we notice is that every time we're getting people better, it's outside the normal range that we are documenting now, right? Which tells us multiple things. One, our lab ranges are dysfunctional, right? If we're in there, we're probably not doing well. And I treat patients based on their symptoms and how they're feeling.

39:15And then if we push, push, of course, if we go too far, we have to think of many things. But my philosophy is, I have a certain regimen based on studies. We start incrementally increasing your dosing, see how your symptomatology does. And once we get you a state of where you feeling great, we leave you with a lot of things. And we leave you there. And we see how you do. And we see over time, we have to adjust based on symptoms or situations, but that's what I do. And it generally, you know, hormones are tricky. What you do today, you see two or three months from now. So it is totally different than anesthesia where I give it right now. And it's in seconds, right? It was definitely something to learn. But it's a game changer for people. So yeah, I don't believe in massive. I just believe in giving you back what you need to resolve the symptoms that are causing you the problem. Yeah. Very good. So what have I not asked you that you want to make sure you leave with our audience? Oh. You know, I mean, I don't know about ask me. I would just say, you know, through my journey, I think I learned that we're all up against

40:23it. Life can be very challenging for people, right? And I learned that we got to give each other grace. We got to give ourselves grace. We have to, we don't have to live in a place that we don't feel well. There's solutions for these things. We don't have to talk us into accepting certain things. We need to take action. But there's much help out there in every aspect. You just need to look. And I think you need to tap into your higher self, you know, and ask for that help. You have a power within you. I think that's connected to God. I think it is God. And I think we all have it. We all have a birthright to it. And if you just sit and ask, you will be amazed at where you'll be guided and where you'll be taken by just asking. Yeah. Where can people go who want to learn more about you and what you do? Oh, yeah. And you can go to www.optimizemd.health. I have some social media stuff they're working on on optimizemd.dark or mic, either on Instagram

41:26or I think Facebook, they're posting. And then optimizedoctor.com. All these places can kind of lead you through some information and hopefully you can learn. And if you need to talk to me, let's talk to you. That sounds good. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Mike. This has been great. Really appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate it. Do you ever want to spend more time in God's Word? But the day just gets away from you? Bible League International created a free guide called Nine Tips to Get More of God's Word in Your Life. It's built with practical ideas to help you build a simple rhythm in Scripture, plus a 30-day Scripture writing challenge to keep you going. Because when we spend time in God's Word, something wonderful happens. Clarity grows and joy deepens. Get your free copy today. Just text more to 94878. It is God who directs our paths. I'm Christi Graham, host of the show on the ground with Samaritan's Purse. I recently talked with Franklin Graham, my father-in-law and president of Samaritan's Purse about how he stays grounded.

42:27Proverbs 356. Trust in the Lord of all your heart. And not on your own understanding, but on your ways acknowledge him and he'll direct your paths. To hear this encouraging conversation, listen to this episode of On the Ground with Samaritan's Purse, wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's On the Ground with Samaritan's Purse. Thanks for listening to Christian Natural Health. This show is run by you, so please write in with topic and guest suggestions for future shows. For more great content, subscribe to Dr. Lawrence Blog at www.DrLorrenDeVille.com or follow her on Facebook or Twitter. Add Dr. Lauren DeVille. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to share it with your friends and give us a five-star writing in iTunes. It really helps us to stand out so other people can discover great content as well. Have a great week and God bless you.

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