This is a podcast episode titled with a URL link from June 16, 2025, featuring a conversation primarily between a speaker diagnosed with uterine cancer and Dr. Betty Murray. The discussion focuses on interpreting hormone test results, hormone metabolism, genetic predispositions, and cancer risk pathways, providing a detailed scientific explanation of hormone-related health issues.
So in this episode, we are doing something a little bit different. And I'm going to say it's unexpected, too. I did not expect to announce for the first time to all y'all that I have uterine cancer. So we're just going to drop that bomb right off the bat. But the reason I'm leading with that is so that you understand the purpose of this episode. Since my diagnosis, and I've always been planning on releasing these episodes along with my deep dive of all the different rabbit holes I've been going down, just wasn't planning on doing it so soon. But what happened was my Dutch test came back, reached out to my dear friend and colleague, Betty Murray, and I said, okay, interpret this for me. And, and, and what do you have to say? And she came back with, well, you're going to be shocked. and pissed, and I've uncovered a whole lot of shit.
A couple of things that I want to clarify while we're going through this conversation today is number one, bioidentical hormones are not really the cause of cancer, right? They aren't. Right. But how you metabolize hormones and all of the estrogenic sort of materials out there, the xenoestrogens, can drive a risk whether you have hormones or not. My scientific argument is without hormones, we, you know, we don't have our protective estradiol and estriol. We actually might be stimulating these pathways heavily with other crap from our environment, like fragrances and phthalates and all that other stuff. And that's why we see these cancers more in a menopausal woman than we do in a 25 year old. So, you know, what we're going to walk through today is one of a couple of the major pathways that research is kind of pointing to. So while you were on this test, so anybody that's never looked at this test before, these are speed dials, right? So these are speed dials that basically say if you're in the green, that means that you're in an expected level of physiological dose, particularly if you're on hormones or if it's before you go on hormones, your physiological dose is appropriate. And then if it falls below on the left side, that means it's under physiological dose. And if it's in that little purple field, it's postmenopausal range. And then if it's in the red over here, it's considerably higher than what's expected. And it's breaking down into basically your estrogens and your testosterone and your progesterones. Right? So while you were on here, you were on rhythmic dosing, is that correct?
When I did this test, which was literally done probably about two weeks ago, I had changed over. So the beginning of April was my diagnosis. at that point of time, I changed over to static dosing of 2.1 milligram patches twice a week.
All right. So, and then you were not, you were said you were inconsistent with your testosterone, but you had been doing testosterone kind of on and off, or at least some androgens, right?
Definitely, yeah. About 10 milligrams a week of testosterone A plus the oxandrolone.
Okay. Okay. And then obviously you were doing physiological doses of progesterone.
Yes.
So first and foremost, obviously, if we look at your results and we look at your testosterone, it's incredibly low. Right. And even DHEA is relatively low. And your other androgens, which are all in the little green area right here, and androgens are a recovery hormone. They rebalance things. They're protective against breast cancer. In most cases, you do have a little bit of a preference for the five Alpha reductase pathway, which I'm surprised because I know you don't lose hair a lot, even even though you do, right? But what's interesting to me is there's a huge gap in these tests, whether it's Dutch, HuMap, the Hormone Zoomer by Vibrant, any of the companies that do urinary hormone metabolites. There's a gap and it's how the test gets run because you were on probably, you should have at least some testosterone. It might have been at the lower end of your dose or later on, right? But your testosterone looks almost non-existent at 1.3. Right? Now, I'm going to point out a couple other things and I'm going to start wrapping this together. So the aromatase enzyme can take testosterone and make estradiol and it also can take androstenedione and make it into into estrone. Right? So, and if we look at your genetics, if we were just to look at your genetics, you have a high propensity for aromatase to make estrogens. Right? And we'll go back to that genetics in a few minutes. Right? So that what that means is, is your, your androgens have a strong commitment to making estrogens, right? So if we look at your estrone, it's on the high side of normal. If we look at your estradiol, it's very, very high. And then your estriol is relatively high. So there's some very important caveats here. First and foremost, estradiol can go back and forth between this 17-hydroxy steroid pathway and get made into estrone. right? So these two can get made back and forth to each other, and then aromatase also makes estrone. So if you are on testosterone, it doesn't make sense for it to be very, very low with a normal estrone and a relatively high estradiol. Now, when we look at how our body metabolizes estrogens or, and toxins, I'm going to use an example. So I'm going to use this. I think it's a lip. you know, lip balm. So when your body goes to prep this to get rid of it, genetically, it's going to move it from either estradiol, estrone, or estriol down one of these three pathways. So it's either gonna go down the two hydroxy pathway, the 16 alpha hydroxy pathway, or the CYP1B1 pathway down to four hydroxy estrone. So I like to think of that, it's kind of like Goldilocks and the three little bears. you know, the first pathway is the porridge is just right. That's that green pathway. So it's going to wrap a wrapper around that estrogen molecule because it's got to get the green wrapper around it because it has to be done in order in order for it to get thrown out. So your preference for that two hydroxy pathway is pretty strong, right? It's pretty strong. Then let's look at the blue pathway. Like, I like to consider that the sort of in between in the pathway. that's a blue wrapper. And that wrapper is made by the CYP3A4 pathway, which you have a slight preference for, which makes 16-hydroxyestrone and also makes estriol, which is a very weak estrogen but becomes very important later on. And you genetically make quite a bit of estriol, but not a lot. And if we look at your little pie chart down here, there's a very low amount of basically estriol production. And then estradiol, which is our protective estrogen made by our ovaries that peters out when we're in menopause because the egg carton is empty, it no longer gets made. So when we put estradiol back, estradiol can go back and forth and make estrone, but it can also go down through these pathways. And then the last one is that CYP1B1 pathway. So this is the one most associated with cancer risk based on if you're looking at Dutch or HuMap or the Hormone Zoomer, all of those companies will point this one out because if you make a lot of that metabolite for hydroxy, it makes a metabolite that can damage DNA. And when you damage DNA, it creates spelling errors, and then you can get cells that don't realize they need to die, right? Apoptosis. So the four hydroxy pathway is considered damaging, and you make quite a bit of it. It's not your highest, but you make quite a bit of it. So Where does the testosterone come in? All right, so all of these tests, because of the mechanism of how they perform these tests, have a huge gap. And basically what that gap is, whether they're using urinary hormone out of a tube or they're you're peeing on a strip and then you're using it later, in order for them to perform the action, it has to go through a thing called hydrolysis. When that happens, it destroys a sulfate bond. So one of the major pathways of estrogen and testosterone detox is no longer visible on any of these tests. Here's where it becomes important. So if I, if I, if the process of the test actually destroys the bond for the most primary way that estradiol and testosterone get detoxified, I have no real visibility to it. It is using a glucuronidation technology to see it. So here's the way to think about it. The very last step of detoxifying all of your hormones and basically most of the crap coming out of your body, honestly, it gets to, I like to describe this as, okay, I'm going to clean out my house. So I start in the attic, which is going to be up here in these very first steps, right? The CYP1A1, the 1B1 or 3A4. I'm going to, I'm going to get all that junk out of my attic, right? And so I drag it into the kitchen. That's step one. That's your phase one liver detoxification. None of that stuff is getting out of the body until it gets to phase two. And phase two is where we do glucuronidation, we do methylation, and we also do sulfation, right? So phase two is getting it to the garage and the dumpster. Okay, so the challenge is because of the mechanisms in which they use this test, we see half of the distance of phase two and we never see if it makes it to the dumpster.
