Steaming for Pregnancy and Postpartum

The vast majority of women who I recommend steaming for are people who have the common women's health issues that their doctor is recommending either pharmaceuticals, especially birth control, or surgery to fix. So this goes from recurrent infections in the vagina or bladder, cervical infections, STIs, early cervical dysplasia, which. Which can lead to cervical cancer. If that viral message isn't fully integrated into your corpus, it can help to improve blood flow to the ovaries. So a lot of my PCOS clients, they actually find that they can start ovulating again. In addition to the steaming, we're doing a lot of lifestyle modification, but the applications for this are far ranging. Endometriosis is a huge thing for women in our country. So this steaming practice has a number of ways that it works. I think the mechanism is a little bit unclear still, but this is an ancient practice, Ben, that predates modern medicine by thousands of.

You brought up steaming. I had read up on its benefits about three months ago for male prostate health and sexual health and also pelvic floor relaxation prior to something like a morning bowel movement. And I had a wooden box in the garage and cut a hole in the top, made some tea, put it in there, took the lid off the tea and kind of sat there and played my Italian duolingo for a little while. And since then, I actually got a seat. I think a Leia Moon. I gotta see. It's got like, you know, it's like Cadillac. It's got like infrared light and a done for you steamer and. And like the sauna house, the full meal deal, you know, two or three times a month. I'll still sit on that thing and do meditation or prayer or still. Yeah, a little bit of duolingo. But. But talk to me about steaming and, and especially how it. How it fits into your practice, your recommendations. Right.

Well, we've talked so much about pregnancy and postpartum. I will start by saying if you're pregnant officially, it's contraindicated to steam while you're pregnant. What we're talking about is boil. There's a hot pot of water and you squat over it, or you get a stool like Ben has. There's a hole there, and the steam comes up and flushes over your external genitalia. For a woman, that's the vulva, the perineum around the anus goes into the vagina, in through the cervix, through the tubes, hits the ovaries on the outside, fills kind of the pelvis and abdominal cavity with this really healing.

Let'S say blood engorging steam. It doesn't burn you, it doesn't hurt. It's really a matter of getting blood flow to all these critical parts. I use this in my fertility practice. I use this across the board. This is something really, really important in pregnancy. You can actually use it to help prepare the tissues in the pelvis for childbirth. So 37, 38 weeks, you can start doing this a couple times per week. It'll help to actually nourish those tissues. Helping them become a little bit more elastic. Helps the connective tissue, all those collagen containing constituents of your pelvis which has to open up. It actually can help to kind of get the pelvis and the body ready. It's not a ways of inducing you. It's really a matter of preparing the body for this thing that's happening. So that's one use. And then in the postpartum period, yeah, the steam actually, remember, it's not just helping to nourish the tissues by improving blood flow by opening up all these little capillaries and blood vessels.

It's also whatever the herbal constituents are that you use there. And there's a variety of different blends that the steamy chick on her website that she sells, I just send people there whenever I have an idea as to what they need. You can use these herbs to also provide some medicinal healing properties to the tissues themselves. And man, they've actually studied this in the postpartum period. Kelly actually helped lead the study with Kimberly and Johnson. And women, within a matter of days, their tissues are back together, their pelvic floor feels relaxed again. It's also a moment to just do some self reflection. Sitting for 20 minutes on the stool, having some bend time to do some duolingo. Like that's actually really important as a part of the slowing down process. But let me extend it further because actually the vast majority of women who I recommend steaming for are people who have the common women's health issues that their doctor is recommending either pharmaceuticals, especially birth control, or surgery to fix. So this goes from recurrent infections in the vagina or bladder, cervical infections, STIs.

Early cervical dysplasia, which can lead to cervical cancer if that viral message isn't fully integrated into your corpus. The uterine fibroids, abnormal periods for any reason, uterine polyps, early endometrial atypia, which is the precursor to endometrial cancer, tubal disease, from maybe a past gonorrheal infection. We can clear out the scar tissue in the Tubes, it can help to improve blood flow to the ovaries. So a lot of my PCOS clients, they actually find that they can start ovulating again. In addition to the steaming, we're doing a lot of lifestyle modification, but, but the applications for this are far ranging. Endometriosis is a huge thing for women in our country. So this steaming practice has a number of ways that it works. I think the mechanism is a little bit unclear still, but this is an ancient practice, Ben, that predates modern medicine by thousands of years.

Yeah. Just because I only have so much time. Like I mentioned, do it two or three times a, a month. But in an ideal scenario, how often are you recommending that, that women, for example, steam?

Well, for most women it's usually three days before their bleed and then three days after their bleed stops.

And it's like a 20, 30 minute steam.

Yeah, you could do it for longer. Like, you know, a pot of, of boiling water is only going to have so much steam coming out of it for so long. But you can actually put it onto a heating element.

Yeah, that's what mine has, the layer moon. It just keeps it a certain temperature.

Yeah, it's like a little, not a Bunsen burner, but you know, like a hot plate under there that just keeps it going. So for most women, if it's your first time, I don't even recommend using any herbs. Just get a hot pot of water and boil the water and then squat over top of it with a blanket around your waist so the steam doesn't escape. It just kind of goes up in there and just see how you feel. If you feel like a hell. Yes. I really liked that. Then we can go a little further. And I always offer people, you know, go to my website, send me an email and I'll set you up with a free steaming consultation. Because it's so if I wanted to get rich, I'd be out doing C sections and GYN surgery. This steaming thing is such an easy intervention that almost everybody's gonna benefit even if you don't have an active complaint. I just think it's a really, really nice sort of self care thing we can do whether, you know, whether you have a vulva or a penis. I actually steam myself.

I was just gonna ask you if you steam.

Yeah, well, I had like a really bad jock itch, you know, from, you know, probably stress, probably jujitsu, whatever. And it would come and go with, with stress or if I was eating too much sugar, of course, and I was like, let me just Try this out. I got some of Kelly Garza's cooling herbs, and I made a little pot of water, and I sat on there. I got like a. A bedside commode, you know, that they use in, like, old people's homes and whatnot.

Yeah.

And pop the. The. The. The thing under that. I got the. The commode for, like, five bucks. The herbs were ten bucks. And I. I popped it under their hot water, and within a matter of days, it was completely gone. So now that doesn't address the under, you know, the upstream cause. Perhaps I need to get my gut in order. Maybe I had some other, you know, medical things that was under a lot of stress. But for the time being, while we're trying to fix these other issues, like your cervical disease or your endometrial issues, your abnormal periods, your painful periods, your endometriosis, we can use this as a far less invasive intervention than pharmaceuticals, birth control, surgery, and, you know, whatever else your doctors have to offer.

Yeah, it feels really nice. Although, correct me if I'm wrong, I actually wanted to ask you about fertility. I would imagine just because heating the nether regions for a guy is contraindicated for fertility, which is why it's a good idea to avoid saunas and hot tubs, et cetera. I suspect that steaming for a guy, I think it's called lingam steaming. And guys do. It probably wouldn't be great if you're trying to maintain or upregulate fertility. But if you have any comments on that, feel free. And I'm just curious about your overall methods for fertility enhancement in general, because I know that's also a specialty of yours.

Well, fortunately, I currently have a track record of 100% with my fertility program. I almost, like, I just stop and just say I have 100% track record, and then I never have to change the numbers. But, you know, people find me before, usually before or maybe after they. They had a, you know, an IVF sort of process that didn't go the way that they wanted to. Let me start by saying they find it if IVF didn't work or if they're. They're kind of wincing at the IVF cost, which on average across the United States is somewhere between 12 and $15,000. Um, the most recent couple that went through my fertility program, they're the lowest cost that they were estimated in their city was 18 grand, and they got pregnant. So my. My. My. My program is. Is about six grand.

And that's just like an online program.

It's. It's all remote. Exactly. Yeah. And they get a big box of stuff. So I'll, I'll walk you through what I do so that you can understand. Um, I'm not using hormone therapy. Um, I'm not gonna be doing any surgery. Um, I can order labs and imaging, but usually those things have already been done as a part of their ob GYN workup. So what typically people have happen is they haven't gotten pregnant in a year of trying. Right. Meaning penis and vagina ejaculate, no baby in nine and a half months for a year. They haven't found that success. And their ob GYN wants them to go and see the rei. So reproductive endocrinology and infertility is what it used to be called. They may have changed their name a little bit, you know, since then. But what that is is basically we're going to hijack your hormone system in order to force your body to get pregnant, failing to realize that there's a signal here. If you're not finding fertility to be easy as everybody else seems to have it, there must be something upstream that's causing that. And before I go into the women's side of this, men, 40 to 50% of fertility challenges are due to our relatively low sperm counts, low motility, low morphology. And what all of that means is that there is something that we men are doing that is causing this precipitous decline in fertility rates. Specifically when it. Look, when we look at sperm counts and motility as that's declined over the past several decades. And I don't think it would be any surprise to your listeners to know that, like, hey, you've got four powerful modems in this guy right here. You're putting it in your pocket and it's sitting centimeters from your gonads, just blasting it with some pretty powerful radio waves.

So that's, that's actually been fleshed out in research, by the way, if anybody wants to look it up in terms of sperm morphology and exposure to cell phone in close proximity.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So the first thing I tell people is turn your WI fi router off at night. Get this thing out of your pocket. If you have to have it near you, just have it on airplane mode until you need it. That's already better than most others. But we also have these 5G towers popping up everywhere. It's. It's something we should be concerned about. But then the. Some of the other things, like you said, you know, no more prolonged hot sauna use, you know, or if you do Use that.

New that. Have you seen the ball? Cooling underwear. Nathan, you can. Actually, I still have. I. You know, I'm not trying to have a baby right now, but I. I just, you know, suspect possibly there might be potentially downregulation of the activity of Leydig cells in the testes with repeated heat exposure. And I've thought about getting a pair of those just for my. Just my sauna says. Yeah, apparently keeps your balls cool.

You want to do it together? We'll do like an N of 2 trial and we can send our semen.

Off and get it sounds like a fun trial. At least parts of it. Right?

You do it live, too. Um, so. No, we won't. We won't put anybody through that. That. That.

Yeah, I think it's called, like. I think it's called snowballs or something like that. Anyways, I totally derailed you. Keep going.

Oh, it's okay. It's okay. So that type of stuff. There's some research out of Scandinavia that has shown that prolonged sauna use is potentially going to be detrimental. If you're on. If you're having fertility challenges, consider that there's a variety of nutrients. I get guys eating. Actually, I tell them to go and eat smoked oysters, three cans per week. That's my prescription pad. There's selenium, molybdenum, zinc, magnesium, fatty acids. All the stuff that you're testicles are going to use in order to create as many great sperm as you can. So even if your doctor told you, I have a normal semen analysis, consider the range of normal. It's like 20 million to 200 million per ejaculate. We want to get that number up as high as we can. If we're sort of even contemplating going down the 18k route of IVF, so adding those nutrients, CoQ10 can help be helpful. A bunch of fish oil, that type of stuff can be really helpful. Along with the Weston A Prices, you know, their sort of foundational principles. I also tell people, lose your bike shorts. I'm also. I was also an ironman distance triathlete, and I still was biking to work in fellowship in San Diego every single day. And my wife and I weren't getting pregnant. I lost the underwear, I lost the bike shorts. I started supplementing, you know, doing some supplementing. I actually. I actually cut my exercise down because my adrenals were being skunked from too much exercise and too little sleep and too much stress at work. As a fellow at ucsd, so improving sleep and all that Other stuff. Eventually my wife was like, listen, you're stressed out about this. Let me take this into my court. And she started tracking her for her cervical fluid and whatnot. And I'll get into that when we get into the women's side. She started tracking those things which are physiologic markers of.

Which of the four phases you're at within your menstrual cycle. And within a cycle or two, bam, we were pregnant. And gosh, the elation, it was just like, it was like sheer elation. I was so exuberantly stoked that we were pregnant. And I, I really wanted to give that to other people, which is why I'm taking this approach.

So on the women's side, by the way, just a quick note. For the men, we conceived a week after my Iron man, one of my Iron man triathlons. But I always trained on one of those. I think it was Sella Italia. I think made a S E L L A. Although there's a other manufacturers out there. I use one of those bike saddles that has kind of like a hole for your balls and a real like a split up the middle of the seat. So there's very little pressure on my nether regions while cycling. Your sit bones take a little bit more of a hit. You kind of got to build a little bit of butt callus. But yeah, it, apparently I was fertile after racing Ironman. I don't know how much of it was the, was attributed to the seat. Maybe I should write them a thank you letter, but that was my method.

Well, well, let's consider the whole picture, Ben. You know, you've taken very, very good care of yourself. You like to optimize your, your nutrition. You're drinking living water. We should say you're doing a lot of other things that also supports healthy spermatogenesis, the development of healthy sperm. If you take the average American and we add all of those factors in together, it's not just the bike shorts. You also have to stop eating some junky stuff. We have to get your body nourished. We have to get your stress levels controlled. If you're in a state of stress for a man or a woman all the time and you're dumping cortisol into your bloodstream, you're, you're like your hpa, your hpatg. Go Nadal. Access is going to prioritize resources towards getting away from the lion versus creating babies. It's not a good time to create babies if we're in this like constant state of stress. So for both people, you know, whether you're an ironman distance triathlete or whatever, is. If you can do any of these things, it's going to at least improve the likelihood. I like to get everything dialed in. So we're just talking about some of the basics now. On the women's side, there are so many factors. There's vulvar, vaginal, cervical, endometrial, meaning the inside of the uterus, fallopian tube, ovaries, your other hormonal pathways. All of this is relevant. But what I actually, I want to pause there because we're talking. We're getting into the nitty gritty. What actually I think helps most of all. And we can talk. I mean, really, all the stuff I'm applying to the men, I'm also applying to the women. And in addition, we do something called a Dutch test, which is an incredible. I should totally talk to you about that at some point. A Dutch test.

I implement it with all my clients.

Oh, perfect.

Dried urine test for hormones. And I like it just because you get the same hormonal analysis as you do via blood work and saliva, but then also upstream and downstream metabolites in those hormones. So if cortisol is elevated, maybe you don't have excess adrenal output, you have poor cortisol clearance due to hypothyroidism or something like that. Like, you can really unlock the. The hormonal picture or reveal it a lot more easily.

That's right. That's right. And then we can also see, are you ovulating? Are you getting enough progesterone from the corpus luteum that results in the ovary after you've ovulated? I mean, there's so much we can do with that. I also do a stool analysis on all of the women in my practice. And part of that is like, for example, if you have hyperactive beta glucuronidase activity, which is produced by C. Diff and some other species of the gut flora, you can actually cleave off a part of the metabolized estrogen and then it gets reabsorbed. So you have people that are in a hyper estrogenic state and we don't know why. Your adrenals, your gonads, everything seems to be working well, but it's actually a gut issue. So those two together provide some foundational work for us to start dialing in lifestyle. But even before we do all of that, Ben, I include biogeometry signatures, I include tangerine quartz to work on some second Chakra, creative expression issues for these couples. You know, I give, I give them four different books. You know, I mean, it's, it's a packed supplements, organ meats, whatever. I give them all of that to start. But the first thing I have them do is to write a mission statement. What are you guys doing here? Like, what is your purpose here? What are we trying to achieve? And then I follow that up with a 10 day connection challenge. Because a lot of couples who are on this fertility path, they have started to like, lose track of the big picture. Their sex has become mechanical. Intimacy is out the, out the window. It's a matter of, okay, the pee strip turned. We have to have sex right now. It's time to have sex. And that is not a fun way to make a baby. If we look at this through the lens of conscious conception, what if the spirit of this baby, the soul of this baby is waiting for the right time to come into your womb, but mommy and daddy are just not on the same page. So I do a mission statement. I have them write it up and paste it in their bathroom, in their kitchen, in their bedroom. This is what we're going to work on together. Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder. And then we do a 10 day connection challenge. And it's, it's really ramping up the sort of intimacy practices that I think are very, very critical for people who are on this fertility challenge. So it starts with, you know, hand holding, with foot rubs, with dancing in the room, not even touching, just dance to a favorite song together. Start to express with one another, start to be vulnerable with one another. And it leads all the way up to things like genital massage through, through your clothes, no orgasm. We're just going to play here. Getting people to reconnect, actually, I think is the most critical part and probably the primary reason that my program works so well.