#175 Birth Control Pills: How They Affect Our Health and What To Do About It

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donni Wilson and in this episode I'm going to be talking about birth control pills, also known as oral contraceptive pills. And the information that I feel is important for everyone to have, especially those of you who are considering taking a birth control pill or are already taking a birth control pill, because a lot of this information is not shared with by the provider who's prescribing these pills. So it's really important to understand everything before you make any decision decision about what to take for your health.

So one of the important things is I want to talk about risks related to taking the birth control pill, including risk of HPV related cancers like cervical cancer and nutrient deficiencies associated with birth control pill use. And I also want to really help you understand how it's possible to feel good and balance your hormones and ovarian function naturally. For once you're at a point in your life when you're ready to not be taking the birth control pill. Okay, so let's go into this topic and I really always look forward to your comments and questions. So please, please feel free to reach out after you're listening to this episode. So it turns out that they estimate more than 10 million women in the United States alone are taking birth control pills, which are prescription medications, on their synthetic hormones. So I think this is a first, very important point to clarify is that when these birth control pills are made, they're using chemical versions of hormones, estrogen and progesterone. You can get a birth control pill that's only a synthetic form of progesterone. But most people take what are called combined formulas that have a synthetic estrogen and a synthetic progesterone. And I emphasize synthetic because the difference is when we make a hormone synthetically, it signals to our bodies, but it doesn't signal exactly the same as our hormones that are made inside our bodies or what are called bioidentical hormones. So I want to emphasize that when I'm talking about birth control pills, I'm really referencing synthetic hormones and the risks associated with Those types of hormones versus bioidentical or natural hormones like naturally produced estrogen and progesterone, or bioidentical estradiol, for example, or estriol and progesterone formulas that are sometimes used for fertility and perimenopause. Those bioidentical hormones, the way I think about it is our bodies recognize bioidentical hormones. They know exactly what they are and they know how to respond to them exactly in a more healthy way. Whereas when it's a synthetic hormone, it, the body responds to it, but it can have a slightly different effect in our bodies. And I think that's why some of these risks tend to occur when we use synthetic hormones, especially with longer term use. And so you're going to hear that repeatedly in this conversation is that if you're taking these synthetic hormones on a short term basis, the risk is lower. And as the length of time that you're taking it increases, the risks increase. So that's an important thing to consider because sometimes you may need a birth control pill for a short period of time and that may not be as concerning. It's also known that as when you stop taking a birth control pill, the longer you've been off the pill, then the risks go away, they decrease over time. So that's an important thing to consider. So why is it that so many women take a birth control pill? And what I find in my practice is that because I'm always listening to women and understanding, I always ask them when they say they're taking a birth control pill, I say, what was the original reason that you started taking that birth control pill? Because believe it or not, for most women, I would say definitely greater than 50% and probably more than 70% of women that it's not just for birth control, even though they're called birth control pills and they were originally created for that reason as a birth control option for women, actually they're more often prescribed by gynecologists for regulating the menstrual cycle in some way. So some of you can probably relate to this. If most women, when they go in to see a gynecologist, let's say for irregular menstrual cycles, like your periods coming too often or not often enough, or you're missing cycles, maybe you're actually diagnosed with perimenopausal symptoms or pcos, or even endometriosis, perhaps you have PMS symptoms, sometimes really severe PMS symptoms, even to the extent of what's called pmdd, a dysmorphic disorder. So if you're. If your anxiety, depression, fatigue, bloating and symptoms become more severe in the time before your period. And also sometimes if you're having a lot of symptoms with your period. For example, severe menstrual cramps, heavy bleeding, and acne, which usually comes before the period, but also can come during the period, sometimes weight gain, bloating. These symptoms that can happen because of the hormones of the menstrual cycle being out of balance. Oftentimes, the bursting that a gynecologist or other practitioners will prescribe is a birth control pill. Because what the birth control pill does, or what's called oral contraceptive pill, is it takes over for your ovaries. It literally turns off the ovaries. So it takes over for your ovary function. So that's an important thing to understand when you're taking an oral contraceptive. It's essentially turning off your ovaries. No longer are your ovaries making estrogen and progesterone on their own. You are relying solely on the synthetic estrogen and progesterone that you're swallowing in the birth control pillow. Which is why if you miss a dose, right, if you miss a day of your birth control pill, you could have breakthrough bleeding. You could have other symptoms, headache, nausea. There's a lot of symptoms that can happen if you miss your dose of birth control hormones, because the body's really, those hormones are signaling to your body every day. And in fact, if you're taking a birth control pill, I would say it's important to take them at the same time every day so that you're giving really consistent signals to your body. And if you miss this pill, then you want to know that it's no longer.

Preventing pregnancy. Even if you miss one pill, you can then get pregnant that month. So you have to be careful about making sure you get your doses and especially if you are using the pill for contraception.

So this is, I'm hoping, touching for a lot of you. I'm like, yep, that's. And I'm hopeful, as you're listening, maybe you're taking notes, Yes, I knew this already, or no, I didn't know that, and I'd love to hear from you what are the things that you're. You knew and which things you didn't know and you're learning from, from this conversation, because that helps me to see where I can provide better information.

So what happens with the birth control pill is that for a lot of women, it does regulate the cycle, can decrease the bleeding, and the pain and the acne. And so for a lot of women, it's really helping them to be able to keep up with your daily life. Because if you're having a lot of menstrual related symptoms, it's hard to go to work and get to school and do all the things we need to do. And so for that reason it can be really saving for us. At the same time, what I'm going to be talking about later in this episode is that I feel like there's a big gap in that we jump straight from having menstrual related symptoms to using a synthetic hormone pill. And there's a lot of things we could do in between to help women with those symptoms and help your body naturally address them without necessarily having to use a synthetic hormone pill unless you really need to or want to. And maybe you've tried everything else and the pill is the only thing that's helping. So there's always variations in, you know, your case and what's going to work best for you. That's why I'm here to provide the information so then you can think through what's, what are your priorities? Is your priority to be preventing the pregnancy at this point in your life? Well, then maybe the birth control pill might be a good option. We'll talk about some of the other options for contraception. Are you trying to regulate your menstrual cycle and might there be other options for you to consider? But first I want to go into talking about what are the risks of especially long term use of the birth control pill. One that's been well established in research and I'll share references for you in the notes are nutrient deficiencies. So what can happen with birth control pills is they end up depleting our nutrients. So this is especially true of some of the B vitamins. So this would be like B2 or riboflavin, also B6, B12 and folate, which is B9. All of those B vitamins become, can become deficient with use of a birth control pill. But also vitamin C and vitamin E can become deficient and the minerals like magnesium, selenium and zinc and these are all important nutrients for all different reasons. And actually you can often find those nutrients in a really high quality multivitamin. So what I recommend is if you are taking a birth control pill to definitely be taking a high quality multivitamin. And I have other episodes about how you find a high quality multivitamin for one. One of my key ways I know that it's high quality is I first look at the ingredient list and I look at what form of folate is in the product and we want it to say methylfolate. If it says folic acid, it's not a high quality product. Then look at the B12. If it says cyanocobalamin, it's not a high quality product. You need it to say methylcobalamin. And this way you know you're getting active forms of the B vitamins. And if a company is putting in those active form of B vitamins, they're much more likely to be a professional grade company that's invested in getting the nutrients that you need, not just nutrients that to make it make a product. Okay, so definitely make sure you're taking a good, high quality multivitamin. It's also important to be doing regular blood work, like annual blood work at the very least. And you can check some of these nutrient levels in your blood work, but it's important to do the right tests. So this is why it's also important to have a practitioner who can guide you. I guide my patients all the time. And how to get the right blood work. For example, it's not that helpful to just measure folate in the blood. We need to be measuring homocysteine in the blood. So it's important to get the right tests so you get the right information to know do you need more of these nutrients and how to fine tune it for yourself. Okay, so that's the part about nutrients and this connection to hpv. I think part of it is because of the nutrient deficiencies. Because when I work with cases of HPV that's persisting, that's cases where the HPV is not going away. Not going away. And someone who's been trying different things to try to get it to go away, but it's staying there and it's causing abnormal cells. And we end up doing the blood work and we see, oh, they're low in their homocysteine is too high, which means they are low in folate and muscle B12 and other antioxidants like vitamin C, E, selenium and zinc. And those when you have low antioxidants and low B vitamins that already increases risk of HPV related abnormal cells and cancer risk. So I think that part of the reason the birth control pills have been associated with HPV and cervical cancer risk is because they're causing these nutrient deficiencies over time. And so that's an important preventive step you can take is to make sure you're taking those Nutrients and monitoring your blood levels. Also, birth control pills are associated with increased risk of certain cardiovascular issues, including heart attack risk, stroke risk, as well as blood clots in general, like dvt, which is a blood clot in your leg. Now, it's considered more rare, but I like to point it out because I've heard of several cases and worked with women who were on a birth control pill and had a stroke and then had to recover from a stroke and found out that they were related, the birth control pill and the stroke and their practitioner had never told them about that. So I really want you to know that so that you're monitoring for yourself and deciding intentionally, is this a risk that I'm willing to take? And one of the things that even increases the risk of stroke with birth control pill use is having an MTHFR gene variation or really two gene variations. I talk a lot about MTHFR and I'll share a different episode, a link to another episode where I talk about mthfr. It's a gene variation that affects our ability to activate folic acid into folate. And this gene variation already carries a risk of stroke wasted. When you combine the risk of stroke with MTHFR gene variations, especially the 677 homozygous gene variations, there's two of the C677. Then you combine that with a birth control pill and the risk of stroke can increase.

Really. There's even a study I'll show you that suggests that if you have MTHFR gene variations, especially the 677, that you should really consider not taking oral contraceptives because of that increased risk. And so I want you to know about the risks, those risks of stroke and blood clots that's associated with MTHFR and oral contraceptive use.

Is your HPV test positive? It's normal to feel anxious, confused and afraid. Try to take a deep breath. I'm here to help you. And yet there's no time to waste. Forget about the wait and see approach. Let's work together to create a personalized action plan starting now. Join my 12 week say goodbye to HPV program and get access to the healing steps of my proven protocol to get rid of HPV once and for all. So I want to also share a little bit more about this connection to hpv because there's been a lot of studies, studies around the world for thousands of women. They've been trying to figure this out. Not just for cervical cancer risk actually, but also other types of cancer risk, breast cancer risk, UTERINE cancer risk. They keep looking to see, you know, is there an association? And it's tricky, of course, because some of the research is funded by the pharmaceutical companies. So you have to really look closely at this research and really say, hey, is this something to be concerned about? And I would say, because I. And I'll share the references after reading through those research studies. Again, the thing that I would say is that it's consistent that the researchers are saying that when a person's been using birth control pills or oral contraceptives for more than five years, then there is increased risk of cervical cancer caused by hpv. So again, it's this combination of having HPV positive and an oral contraceptive pill. And if those are existing together over at least five years, they do see increasing risk. What does that mean is if you're taking the pill and you test positive for hpv, then it's important to, I would say, make sure you're getting your Pap smears. I mean, I think this is true for everyone. Make sure you have a regular Pap smear so that you know what's happening with your cervix and, you know, if there's abnormal cells and you know, if you're positive for HPV and if you know you're positive for HPV and you're on the pill, then you're going to want to be even more careful again to address potential nutrient deficiencies and other ways of helping to protect yourself, because there is this slightly higher risk. What this one particular study says.

Is that there's a 10% increased risk for less than five years of use and a 60% increase risk for five to nine years of use. 60% increased risk for five to nine years. I had a doubling of the risk with 10 or more years of use. And a lot of women I talked to have been using the pill more than five and even more than 10 years. So I think this is really important to know, right? Like, the. The more years you're taking the pill, the more we need to be paying attention and being careful with this risk of cervical cancer that's associated. And a thing to know is that after you stop the pill, that risk declines over time. So you can. If you stop the pill, then you can gain ground, you can decrease that risk again. So that's encouraging, right? Then you go, okay, this is worth it. I also want to point out about the iud, because that's another potential contraceptive that's used the iud, that has hormones, a hormonal iud, meaning it's releasing hormones with the IUD also has increased risk with cervical cancer, whereas the copper IUD does not have that risk with cervical cancer. So it does seem to be related to these synthetic hormones. There are studies that show, and the researchers try to identify exactly what's happening. There's multiple mechanisms besides the nutrient deficiencies. These synthetic hormones also are signaling to the immune system locally on the way that our body manages cells, even at a local level on the cervix, meaning how does our body know when there's a healthy cell or when there's an unhealthy cell, and how to get rid of the unhealthy cells and how to do this very precise signaling that happens at the cellular level with our immune system. And that's where we think there's a change that happens with the birth control pill use. And then HPV takes advantage of that and makes it more likely that abnormal cells can develop. So, again, if you're currently taking the pill, then I'm not saying that you should stop. Stop. I could never say that, especially in a video episode like this. But what I do encourage you to do is just weigh out all of the information, take your notes and say, okay, here's what's new information to me. Here's the reason why I'm taking the pill. And what would be criteria for yourself for how will you decide when you want to stop using the pill? Because likely there's going to be at some point in your time that in your life that you would stop using the pill. So what. What does that look like for you? What are those criteria for stopping the pill? And then you want to make a plan for that. You want to make a plan for how are you going to prepare your body for coming off the pill, is how I would look at it. You want to be preparing so that you can transition to healthy ovary function. You want to be addressing the negative effects of the pill at the same time, like the nutrient deficiencies. So I really recommend that you make a plan and even start addressing nutrient deficiencies and start addressing your health in general before you stop the pill, so that when you stop the pill, you're not just totally, you know, have no safety net there for yourself. You want to create a healthy environment. So when you stop the pill, your body's like, okay, I'm ready to go. Your ovaries are ready to start functioning again for you and helping you feel better. So best to have a plan. So think it through. Don't make any quick decisions. Weigh out all the all of the scenarios for yourself, of course, it's a very individualized decision. And then make a plan for yourself and see what's the right answer for you. If you, if and when you decide to stop the pill again, you want to be, I would say, assessing your health and really helping your body function at its best. Because, because that's the key. When our bodies overall are functioning at our best, that's when our ovary function is going to function at its best too. Our ovaries really can pick up on so many signals from our environment. Any kind of stress signals it can pick up on, including sometimes we're thinking we're doing something really good for ourselves, right? We're thinking, oh, I'm gonna, you know, do this new diet plan, whether that's intermittent fasting or a ketogenic diet or you're gonna do some more exercising. Definitely exercise and diet are important for healthy ovary function. But I want, what I want you to hear is that if we overdo can also inhibit our ovaries. It can when, when our ovaries perceive stress and sometimes if we're fasting for too long for our bodies, like too many hours in the day, we're not eating or we're exercising too intensely, it actually decreases signals to the ovaries and then the ovaries are not going to ovulate any hormones as optimally. So to me, this is all about optimizing what I call your self care. C for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. And this to me is a foundation of health in general, but definitely the foundation for healthy ovary function, including fertility. Because one of the most common reasons women stop the birth control pill is when they're ready to get pregnant. So how do we help promote ovary function? For fertility is the same as when we want to promote healthy ovary function without the birth control pill. We want to make a healthy environment for your ovaries to get the best signals. And we do that starting with with care. The clean eating is includes things like managing your blood sugar levels, eating protein every few hours and not overdoing it with sugar, for example, and identifying inflammatory foods. Perhaps doing a food sensitivity panel that I use, the one that I suggest in my office is my favorite because I can see sensitivities, for example, to dairy proteins and gluten and sometimes eggs or other other foods that you may not even realize, like almonds and bananas for certain people can be inflammatory. And when we have inflammatory foods, that inflammation affects Our whole body, including ovary function. And I can't tell you how many cases where we identify the inflammatory foods, we start healing, the digestion, healing leaky gut, balancing the biome in the gut. All of a sudden the ovaries start working better, the estrogen and progesterone are a better balance, and women start feeling better and they're like, how did that just happen? All I did was start feeding myself in a way that balances my blood sugar and helping my digestion function better and heal. And my ovaries start functioning better and my PMS goes away. They're so amazed at. And it's just that amazing connection between our blood sugar, which is also insulin. So glucose and insulin function affects your ovaries and your digestion. How well are you digesting your food? How well are you absorbing your nutrients? How about your biome? Even your gut biome influences ovary function. And of course the biome influences the biome vaginally too. And there's a biome in the uterus and the ovaries. So we need to be thinking, how do we keep everything in balance, let alone other hormones like thyroid hormone and, and let's see, insulin we spoke about, and other hormones in the body, including testosterone and dhea. And for me, one of the key factors, key hormones to balance when it comes to optimal ovary function is, is cortisol. Cortisol is our main stress hormone. And if cortisol is too high or too low, it inhibits healthy ovary function. So that means we need to know what your cortisol function is up to. We can measure cortisol in urine, we can measure cortisol morning, midday, evening, bedtime, urine or saliva. And we can see what is your cortisol up to. Is it too high at certain times, is it too low at certain times? And wherever it is, then we can use the correct herbs and nutrients to get it back on track again. Because there's different herbs and nutrients that help lower cortisol that's too high than to raise a cortisol that's too low. That's why it's important to know. And I describe that in my book, the Master Stress Reset, your health book. I describe all of this actually. How to individualize self care, how to know what's happening with your cortisol as well as your adrenaline levels. I call that your stress type. So it's how stress has affected you. How has stress stress affected your stress hormone of cortisol and also adrenaline. Has stress in your life caused your Cortisol to go too high. Has the stress in your life cause your cortisol to go too low? That determines your stress type. And once you can, you can do the quiz I developed in the book, which is also on my website, and you can also do the test. You can actually order the cortisol panel along with adrenaline. Cortisol and adrenaline are both made in our adrenal glands. And the adrenal glands are near the kidneys. They make other things too, but in terms of stress, they make cortisol and adrenaline. And so we need to know how your adrenal glands are functioning based on the stress that you've been exposed to. Because we've all been exposed to some amount of stress in our lives. How has that impacted your cortisol and adrenaline? And then we can determine the appropriate herbs and nutrients to help get those levels back on track again. And I can tell you over and over again how amazing it is to see the women in my practice when we get their cortisol adrenaline back to optimal and they not only feel better in terms of energy and sleep and mood, but they already start working again. And of course, this is up until menopause, but it even helps with perimenopausal symptoms and it helps postmenopausally as well. So even once the ovaries calm down and they go into menopause, still, we need your adrenal glands to be functioning optimally because now you're even more reliant, reliant on your adrenal glands to help you feel good when your ovaries are not actually there at a lowest functioning. And even if then you choose to add in some bioidentical hormone replacement, you're still going to need your cortisol and adrenaline optimal. So no matter what, we need optimal cortisol and adrenaline. And what I find is that it's also important to have optimal neurotransmitter levels. So this is serotonin and GABA and dopamine. You would think, oh, these neurotransmitters just have to do with my mind or my mood. What we find, of course, as you'll know as a woman, is that our mood and our energy and our focus is very much affected by our hormone fluctuation. So if estrogen and progesterone are fluctuating during the month, that's going to throw off your, your neurotransmitter levels as well. And then, and so these hormones influence the neurotransmitters and the neurotransmitters influence the hormones. They're all in communication with each other. So the way to balance it, the way to help you feel better, is to achieve optimal hormone levels and optimal neurotransmitter levels. And neurotransmitters can be measured in urine. I offer those tests through my office. And you can then balance your neurotransmitters using nutrients, the precursor nutrients. And I talk about this in the book, the Mastery Stress Book by. I also teach this in my programs and in. And when I work with you, one on one, I help you to rebalance your serotonin, your dopamine, your gaba, using nutrients in a natural way so you can optimally produce neurotransmitters again without having to rely on medications or synthetic chemicals to modify your neurotransmitter levels. We can actually support optimal neurotransmitter production and metabolism using nutrients. You hear that? There's this connection between the ovarian production of hormones and all the other hormones in your body, as well as your neurotransmitters, as well as your digestion and also the immune system. And so the immune system is tied into all of this. So if anything's out of balance, it can affect your immune function and immune system, meaning you might have higher inflammatory levels. You might. That also influences your risk of hpv. So this is why it's so important when you come, you're coming off the birth control pill. Let's say we want to get everything rebalanced, not just your ovary function, but we got to get your digestion rebalanced, your neurotransmitters rebalanced, your nutrients rebalanced. You see, we get everything rebalanced, including your immune system function. So then you can fend off hpv, let alone other infections, because a lot of times women are also experiencing vaginitis, which is vaginal yeast or vaginal bacterial overgrowth that is recurrent. That also can happen with the birth control pill. We can help get that addressed as well. And we can help with. Even with something like endometriosis, where there's a lot of inflammation and pain happening, I work with many cases where we can get all of that to rebalance, reset, and get you out of pain just because you're coming off the pill. Because I know it can be scary at first when you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm afraid to come off the pill because of the pain and misery that I was. That I went through in the past. Believe me, I've been there I've had these symptoms myself and what I can tell you is from my experience and from my patients experience, it's absolutely possible to help rebalance and prevent those menstrual related symptoms with natural approaches, nutrients, herbs, without having to rely on synthetic hormones. So if you're at a place where you're like, you know what, I, I, I'm, I'm really not happy with this HPV that's not going away, or maybe you already experiencing abnormal cells on your Pap smear and you're like, what else can I do? Then you might get to a point where you're like, okay, I need to stop taking this oral contraceptive and start helping my body to have a more regular menstrual cycle without all these symptoms. And that's definitely possible and I'm happy to guide you. You can always reach out to my office or write just to my website and schedule time for us to meet so I can make a protocol for you. In terms of contraception, I wanted to mention that.

There are some other options.

I really hope and wish for other options for women because I feel like a lot of the contraceptive options that we have at this point in time also carry a lot of risk with them and not just from the birth control pill, what we've been talking about today, but also IUD we talked about. Hormonal IUD also carries some risk associated with it, even spermicides. The spermicides that contain nonoxynol 9 also are known to carry some risk because now we're introducing a chemical vaginally and that can shift the vaginal biome and increase risk of especially even just disruptions of the vaginal biome, including infections and, and so on. So I really feel like women deserve to have more options that don't have toxins involved or synthetic hormones or risk. And there are some now being developed, some more non toxic, not necessarily just more, but they are non toxic spermicides and approaches that are being developed. So I encourage you to look for those and seek those out if you're really wanting to use a non toxic contraceptive. And also there's the copper IUD which I mentioned already, also what's known as the fertility awareness method.

What the fertility awareness method is, is by knowing when you're going to ovulate, so as your cycle gets back on track and you start to be able to predict and know, oh, I'm likely to ovulate between day 14 and 16, for example, then you know your fertility window when you're most likely to conceive which is of course also important when you're trying to conceive. I usually think of it as about a 10 day window to be, to be sure. So probably between, for most women that would be between day 10 and 20 of your cycle. Day one is the first day of your period. So if you count the first day of your period as day one, then day 10 to 20 is the most likely window of increased fertility. And usually the greatest likelihood of ovulation is between day 14 to 16. Sometimes you can identify the symptoms of ovulation, such as a vaginal discharge, the clear slippery discharge. Sometimes you might feel a pain on one side or the other in your ovaries, like a little crampiness. And you might be able to use ovulation sticks and urine sticks so you can measure signs of ovulation and you can also do monitoring your body temperature because what happens is after women ovulate, the body temperature goes up by about one degree. So you check your basal body temperature every morning when you wake up and you can monitor to see is your temperature going up. Then you know your right around ovulation time. And so then what you can do is either not have sex during that time or make sure you use a condom during that time to, to prevent pregnancy. So that's a way to, to plan for pregnancy, right to, to manage or, or right. If you don't, if you're not at a place in your life where you want to get pregnant, that's a way to understand your own body and be able to manage that and make different choices about the likelihood of pregnancy. Or on the other hand, if you are wanting to conceive, which I can talk about more in a different episode, then you're going to want to know that window so that you know when to support pregnancy. And then what you can do in the fertility awareness method is to, you know, have sex at the other times of the month, then you would or, and, or not need contraception at the other times of the month. So I hope that makes sense and I encourage you if you would like to learn more. There's so many resources for the fertility awareness method, including there's apps to help you and different even devices for helping you to know that you're ovulating and when you're fertile and so on. So those are some of the tools that women are turning to at this point in time to help them to understand their body and support their natural ovarian function so they can feel good without having the risk associated with oral contraceptive pills. I hope this episode has been helpful for you in understanding birth control pills more and understanding their connection especially to HPV and cervical cancer risk, as well as some of the other conditions that we talked about today. I invite you to reach out if I can be more help if you have other questions and definitely if you are in the situation where you're working on fending off hpv, I will put links so that you can get more information from me. I have a free guide, HPV Recovery Guide that you can download and read about quickly. It's a relatively short little PDF guide on your computer or on your phone. And then there's a masterclass, it's called the HPV Answers Masterclass. That's about an hour and a half that you can, you can. All you do is put in your email and it's going to give you access and you can watch immediately. That's for free. And then I also offer an online workshop that's live. So I'm actually there with you for a whole week. It's actually, it's called the Five Days to Heal hpv, but it's actually eight days because I like to add on some extra days for all of you because my intention with that week long workshop is for you to really understand all the susceptibilities to hpv. Not just the birth control pill use, but all the susceptibilities so you can really identify what do you think is making you susceptible to HPV and then what are your next steps to determine those susceptibilities and address them and the ways that I can help you to do that. So I definitely encourage you to sign up for the Five Days to Heal HPV online workshop. I do those on a regular basis, so we'll put the link on. This way you can hopefully join me in the upcoming workshop. HPV Workshop and of course at any point in time you can always reach out and I'm happy to help. I've been helping women with their health now for over 23 years. I'm a naturopathic doctor as well as midwife. I love helping women with understanding their bodies and what you can do to support your bodies to be as healthy as possible, as well as to prevent things like cervical cancer, vaginal cancer and also miscarriages. One of my other favorite things to do is help, you know, help you with fertility to get pregnant but also prevent you from having a miscarriage. And there's a lot we can do for that too. I'll talk more about that in an upcoming episode, so be sure you sign up and subscribe to not miss a next episode of How Humans Heal. I love having you here with me, and I would love to hear from you on other topics you'd like to learn more about. I'll see you soon.

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