#284 Why Menopause Is Making You Susceptible to Infections (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.

Are you in perimenopause or post menopause and dealing with recurrent infections and wondering why now? Why now? Am I having bladder infections or vaginal infections when maybe I haven't had them any other time in my life or not since many decades ago? I'm Dr. Donni Wilson. I'm a women's health expert. I'm a naturopathic doctor and midwife and I've been helping women with their health and including their vaginal and urinary health for over 25 years. So this is what I think about and help patients with every day. And I'm so glad that you're here listening in for this information. Maybe you've been searching for answers. Why is this happening to you now at this point in your life? And maybe your doctor is not. They're just prescribing more and more antibiotics for bacterial infections or antifungals for, for yeast infections, or just telling you if it's in the case of high risk HPV virus, they're just telling you there's nothing they can do and to come back and see if there are abnormal cells developing. Right. I know because I'm trained as a primary care provider, I was trained that same way and I understand that that's what the standard of care is offering right now. I also know as a alternative or functional medicine practitioner for a couple decades to 25 years, I've been helping women to look for alternative approaches to infections. In fact, this is the one of the most common situations that I help to address. In my office just today, I talked to a patient who when she first came to meet with me a year ago, she was having bladder infections, she was having vaginal yeast infections and testing positive for high risk HPV and abnormal cells on her Pap smear, all of them all at once. And she's in her 40s and she was getting no help, no answers from her standard medical practice. So she started looking online, like maybe you're doing, and looking on social media, looking on YouTube and you find, hey, there's gotta be another solution. And so now today, when I met with her, I. I even had to remind her that that's what she was experiencing last year, because her life now, she. When I ask her how she's feeling, she says, I feel great. My energy is good, my mood is good, I feel good in my body. She hasn't had a bladder infection, she hasn't had a vaginal yeast infection in months and months and months. And today we celebrated that. Now, her Pap smear is completely negative, no abnormal cells, and negative for high risk hpv. So that's just mind blowing, right? Even after her doctor told her that wasn't possible, she's proven that it's possible. And so that's what leads me to tell you that it's possible because I see women doing it when they follow. And that's what she said. I said, what did you do? What. What worked for you? And she said, Dr. Donnie, I just followed your suggestions. I told you I did exactly what you told me to do. And that's why she got to where she is. And so I just. It's not to say that I know everything. It just happens to be that I know a lot about this because I've been helping thousands of women for so long, right? If. If you do anything over and over, you start to figure it out, and then you figure out what's working. I also worked with a woman today who, when she first came to see me, she's in her 50s and she's just going through menopause. She. Her period just stopped this past year, and she was very nervous, very, very nervous about using hormone replacement therapy. And she just went going through a divorce, right? And she found out that she had a high risk HPV virus and abnormal cells on her cervix. And she also then decided to do a vaginal microbiome test. So I want you to know that all of this is possible because it doesn't happen in the standard gynecology office. They can do a vaginal swab to look for yeast and bv, but sometimes they don't catch it. And it's not a full DNA analysis of the microbiome, but those tests do exist. So she. When she came to see me a few months ago, I said, you know what? It. It sounds like there's some vaginal symptoms going on and this HPV going on. We better check out your vaginal microbiome. And so I sent her the test kit. She. It's a test you do at home. You send it in, and this lab does a full PCR analysis of the microbiome of the vagina. And they showed us that she had all kinds of abnormal bacteria, including urea plasma, which usually is considered to be needing to be treated with antibiotics. But she said to me, Dr. Donnie, can we, is there anything else we can do? Because I really don't want to do more antibiotics. And so I guided her with my protocol to heal the vaginal microbiome, to address the abnormal bacteria, to address the urea plasma, to address the hpv. And we went through all the steps along the way to not only heal her vaginal environment, but her digestion as well. Because the gut and the vagina, the microbiomes are completely interconnected and related to each other. If there's an issue in the vaginal microbiome, we have to address the gut microbiome. And so lo and behold, today we got her new vaginal microbiome panel back. And it was cute because before she met with me, she even searched on ChatGPT what the results meant. And ChatGPT was telling her, oh, this is really good and this is even better and this is super. So by the time she got on the call with me and I said to her, this is like a perfect test result. This is exactly what the vaginal microbiome should look like. She was like, yeah, Chad GP told me already. And I'm telling you, when you compare her result from six months ago to now, it's night and day difference in her vaginal microbiome. And she did not need to take any antibiotics to do that, any antifungals. All she did was follow my suggestions to optimize her vaginal microbiome in her body, in her health, and she's learned so much along the way, including how to safely use natural bioidentical estrogen vaginally. And now she's working with hormone replacement therapy, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy in a safe and effective way for her, the rest of her body, as well as she goes through menopause. I want you to know that this is not just for women in their 40s and 50s, because even though when we hear about perimenopause and menopause, most of the time we're talking to 40 and 50 year olds because that's when the change is happening, right? That's when it's, you're going, what is going, going on in my body and what's going to come in the future? And so that's when it's really a front of mind. But I want you to know that from then on the rest of your life, you're considered to be in menopause. So if you're in your 60s, if you're in your 70s, if you're in your 80s, if you're in your 90s, or even if you're over 100, this is still super relevant to you. I can tell you how many patients I've had in their 90s and even over 100 who contact me because their main health issue is bladder infections, recurrent bladder infections, and recurrent vaginal infections in their 80s and 90s and over 100. So this is not something that goes away the older you get. This is something that actually can become more and more of an issue. In fact, it's very common for women over 80 to have recurrent urinary infections, bladder infections, and recurrent use of antibiotics that even can lead to systemic infection and need to be in the hospital and even more complications from there for women over 80. And I'm emphasizing this because to me, all of this can be prevented. If only we were doing a better job of helping women with their vaginal health and their vaginal microbiome, they wouldn't then be susceptible to bladder infections. Right. Because the bladder and the vagina are right next to each other. So if there's an imbalance in the vaginal microbiome, that's going to make you more susceptible to bladder infections. And as soon as you're susceptible to bladder infections, you're also more susceptible to vaginal infections. They're right next to each other, and the microbes can go back and forth. It's very short distance. Right. So you might not have realized that your bladder is related to the vaginal situation. And one of the first main important connections to understand is when estrogen levels drop. When estrogen levels drop, which happens for most women in their 40s, sometimes in your 30s. But most women, it's more like after age 42ish and into your 50s, definitely. Depending on if you go through natural menopause with your ovaries gradually decreasing in function, or if you go through a surgical menopause where the ovaries are removed and there's more of an abrupt decrease in hormone levels. Either way, eventually estrogen's decreasing. And as estrogen decreases in the rest of your body, it also increases decreases vaginally. And when estrogen decreases vaginally, it affects the health of the cells. This is where you might be hearing people talk about vaginal dryness. It kind of is more popular to talk about vaginal dryness you might hear that more often. But to me as a practitioner, the vaginal dryness is just one of the symptoms, one of the flags that tells me, oh, we better start paying attention. Because as soon as that vaginal estrogen drops in the vaginal cells, it affects the vaginal microbiome. Remember, the microbiome is your healthy bacteria and microbes that are meant to protect you from infections.

Just like we have a healthy microbiome in our gut and everywhere else in our body, on our skin, in our mouth, there's also a healthy balance of microbes in the vagina, even on the cervix and even in the bladder. So if those microbes get disrupted, usually that means you have less of the good ones and more of the bad, not so good ones or just less of the good ones. And then what can happen is an infection of any form is more likely to be able to occur. Because I think of your healthy microbiome as like your bodyguards or your bouncers, right? If any abnormal bacteria, yeast or virus wants to show up anywhere in your body, but we're referring to especially the bladder and the vaginal area, if a microbe shows up that shouldn't be there, but your bodyguards or bouncers are not there to bounce them out of there, then they can remain and start to cause an infection. And that's especially true when your estrogen is low and when your immune system is low, or if your nutrients are low, or if your blood sugar is high, or if you're exposed to toxins. Right? These factors make it more likely, but I especially want to emphasize the low estrogen. So when estrogen is low vaginally, you may or may not have any discomfort, you may or may not have any pain you might. Or pain with sex, or pain when you go to the gynecologist and have a speculum used, or, you know, any kind of discharge or discomfort. But what you can tell usually is there's a little bit of a change in your body and then you're more likely to get bv, which is bacterial overgrowth in the vagina, yeast, which is yeast overgrowth, or maybe both. It can ping pong back and forth between BV yeast, BV yeast, or even overgrowth of good bacteria. That's a possibility too. You can have too many good bacteria. And then what also becomes susceptible is the bladder, because when your estrogen is low, the tissue is more sensitive and fragile, and more likely the bacteria can show up when they shouldn't. And so then even just the slightest dehydration or sexual intercourse or traveling or stress and a bladder infection happens. So to me, I always teach my team, as soon as a patient says I'm getting bladder infections or I have urinary irritation, frequency pain with urination, right away I'm going to want to know their age and whether they're on vaginal estrogen, because the decrease in vaginal estrogen increases the likelihood of a bladder infection so much. It's like, like a, such a clear association. And as soon as I then help those patients to reestablish a healthy estrogen level. Now, this is not going to be the case if you're likely, if you're in your 20s or your 30s, your body's going to be making enough estrogen quite likely. So this is for those of you who are in perimenopause and after menopause, where your estrogens dropped and maybe you're, you're. Even if you're on hormone replacement therapy, by the way, even if you're using estrogen and progesterone for your systemic health, right, you might be swallowing or using a patch or using a cream of estrogen and progesterone, but if you're not using a vaginal estrogen, because even though estrogen might be circulating around your body with hormone replacement therapy, if you're not using a local vaginal estrogen, there might not be enough estrogen vaginally to protect you from bladder infections and vaginal infections. So I urge you, if you even get one bladder infection, even if you get one vaginal infection right away, ask your doctor, do I need to be using vaginal estrogen? I know how scary it is to test positive for HPV virus. And I know it's even more concerning when your gynecologist tells you that all you can do is wait and see if it continues and if it causes abnormal cells. That's exactly why, as a naturopathic doctor and midwife, that I feel so passionate about helping women to be proactive about protecting themselves, themselves from HPV virus. I've been helping thousands of women for the past 23 years to do exactly that and to get HPV to negative and stay negative. And that's why I developed the say Goodbye to HPV online program where you can get access to my proven protocol from wherever you are in the world. So I hope you will come check out the say Goodbye to HPV program, review the success cases and see, see if this is going to be a good fit to help you get your life back from hpv. Now not all doctors even are familiar with the research on this, but I'm here to tell you that it's absolutely now really recent research showing how safe and effective it is for women to use vaginal estrogen. I know we were, we were told to be afraid of estrogen from 23 or more years ago when the Women's Health Initiative came out and they told us, oh, estrogen causes cancer. Believe me, I know you've all heard it. We all heard it. I was heard that because that's when I was graduating from naturopathic medical school. I heard it too. And I've been hearing it for all these years. Estrogen is related to breast cancer. But then in 2023, the same researchers came out and republished an article that said, actually, we were wrong. Estrogen doesn't cause breast cancer. And in fact, estrogen can be protective against many health issues, including osteoporosis, heart disease, dementia, and even preventing cancer. So the information is completely changed. And remember, when we're talking about vaginal estrogen, less than 15% of it circulates around your body. So especially with the use of vaginal estrogen, there's very little of it that circulates around the rest of your body. And so there's most of it stays local to the vagina. So there's very little concern. In fact, what you should know is if you want to do full hormone replacement therapy, you're going to need to use a vaginal estrogen and a systemic estrogen, meaning estrogen that circulates around your whole body and estrogen vaginally. Okay, because now we know that when women use a vaginal estrogen, it's really helping to prevent infections, the urinary infections, the vaginal infections, including high risk HPV virus, and helping to prevent not only the recurrent need for antibiotics, but the prevent systemic infections and prevent cancer caused by hpv. So even if a person has a history of cancer, you should still talk to your doctor about using vaginal estrogen, because the research studies now are showing that in most cases it's okay to use vaginal estrogen even if you have a history of cancer. So talk to your doctors about this and look up the research. Don't just listen to me. Make sure you do your research and find out for your body and your health what's right for your body. Because I would hate for you to be dealing with recurrent infections and recurrent need for antibiotics if using some vaginal estrogen could help you at the same time. That's not the Whole story, right? Yes, we can find out, okay, which vaginal estrogen. By the way, there are pharmaceutical forms of vaginal estrogen in cream or in, in pills that you can get prescribed on from a pharmacy and you can, you can even potentially be covered by insurance. So ask what are the pharmaceutical forms of estrogen? Now anytime there's something that's made by pharmaceutical company, you should really look at the other ingredients because most pharmaceutical products are patented or they're all patented and they're gonna have other ingredients and you want to make sure you're not reacting to any of the other ingredients. Sometimes there's lactose or even gluten or other substances in the other ingredients that you don't want to expose yourself to. So look at that. And if you know your body's sensitive and you don't want to be exposed to the other ingredients, then you're going to want to work with a practitioner who can work with a compounding pharmacy to help you make your own custom formula of vaginal estrogen. Whether again, whether it's a suppository, a cream, there's many different forms it can be in. But this way we can, the pharmacy can make it for you and they can do it without other ingredients that could be causing a reaction in your body or chemicals and substances you don't want in your body. And the other option is through a practitioner like me. I have ways to be able to order vaginal estrogen through a practitioner grade companies. So I want you to know there's options and there's ways to safely support your estrogen. Some practitioners will use the type of estrogen called estradiol, which is E2. And that's okay. The research definitely shows it to be effective. That's what the pharmaceutical versions are made of is estradiol vaginally. And you can also use estriol, which is E3.3 estrogen number three. Estriol is also effective and gentle estrogen for supporting vaginal estrogen. That's the one I tend to use is estriol for patients. Because I would rather use a more gentle and yet effective estrogen whenever possible. But you're going to work with your doctor to get the right dose and frequency for you. It's something usually you might use vaginally, not every single day, more like once or twice a week. And you would use it then in, in through your life to help protect the urinary and vaginal area from infections. So the other part of this, once you've really said, okay, I've Taken care of that. I've got my vaginal estrogen in a much better place now. It's a lot easier to maintain a healthy microbiome. But if your microbiome, like I mentioned with the patient, if you have had BV or yeast or urea plasma, or maybe you need to do this micro, this microgen microbiome panel, which we can order for you through my office and find out who's living there, who needs to be addressed, then we can address it using natural approaches, herbs, nutrients and natural suppositories, including probiotics we can use vaginally. This is well established in the research, the use of probiotics. We usually think of probiotics as something we swallow. Yes, we can use oral probiotics too. In fact, if you're interested, you can find one of the most researched oral probiotics to support the vaginal microbiome on my website. It's called Women's Probiotic Support. And so we can use oral probiotics and we can also use vaginal probiotics. And there are a lot of different products out there on the market. Patients. Show me this one, this one, this one. I think there's at least 20 I could think of off the top of my head. You can find. However, I always warn you to, it's best to work with a practitioner to guide you so that you're getting a good quality product and the right bacteria for your body. So when I work with a patient, one on one, I specifically guide them on which vaginal probiotic to use based on their body, based on their case, and make sure that it's going to be effective. And so this is something we use with one on one patients as well as in HPV program participants to help them establish a healthy vaginal microbiome. Again, you can introduce, right, you can bring in these healthy bacteria, but you, you have to keep in mind it doesn't just help to flood the system with healthy bacteria. We need to know, are there any unhealthy bacteria to get rid of and is there a lack of estrogen to us to address? So that when you put in the good bacteria, they have a healthy environment to survive in. If there's not enough estrogen, those bacteria are not going to survive. So you're going to be going in circles. So we need to take into account the whole picture, which also includes doing the right blood test to find out if you have any nutrient deficiencies, hormone imbalances, blood sugar level imbalances.

And address those factors as well. So I go to such detailed level with my patients and program participants to make sure that we're not missing anything. Because to the degree that if we miss a big A nutrient deficiency, if we miss a blood sugar imbalance, if we miss a thyroid or other hormone imbalance, cortisol imbalance, then that's leaving you susceptible, and that makes you, again, more likely this infection is going to recur. And we shouldn't. You shouldn't have to be dealing with recurrent infections. So we need to go, what's really going on here? Is there low vitamin D, low iron? Is there low B vitamins? Is there a thyroid imbalance? Is there a blood sugar imbalance? Is there a toxin exposure? How can we reduce your toxin exposure? Is there also, interestingly, women who have a history of abuse and trauma in their life, starting back from childhood through adulthood, any history of stress and trauma makes you more susceptible to having these vaginal and urinary infections. So I always focus on also making sure that we help you to recover from stress and trauma. We do specific testing for cortisol levels, adrenaline levels, neurotransmitter levels, and help to optimize those levels so that no longer is the past stress able to make you susceptible to infections in your future. And that's huge. And it's not addressed in a standard doctor's office. And that's why sometimes you, when you get to a certain point, you have to say, wait a minute. My health is so important. My livelihood, my ability to not have an infection, my ability to protect myself is so important that I'm going to need to invest in a practitioner who can get you the right tests and the right support to help actually help your body heal and protect you from infections going forward. So you just have a complete protocol and plan. You know, oh, if this happens, here's what I'm going to do. This is what I talk about with my patients today. You know, if one woman is now going to be dating, she's like, what do I do if I'm sexually active with a new person? What do I do to help prevent HPV from coming back or from a vaginal infection from coming back? And so I teach them exactly what to do to protect themselves. Because it's not about never interacting with another human being. If you would like to be intimate with another human being, we want to be able to help you feel confident and to know what you can do to protect yourself and prevent it from becoming an infection. I'm so glad you've been listening in to me today. And if you would like to learn more, or if you would like to even set up a call with my team and talk through your case and your situation, please know that I help women of all different ages and all different situations and even all over the world. Because these are things that I can teach you from wherever you are and you just send you we connect by phone or zoom. You tell me what's been going on and then I can teach you. Here's what to do. And then I can send you the test kits you need, if you need them, the supplements, the suppositories you need so that you have access to what you need in order to help your body heal. I believe you deserve to have access and that's why we do what we do in my office. So thanks again so much for joining me for this video. Please reach out if I if you have more questions or if you'd like to know how I can help you and if you would like if you are dealing with high risk HPV and risk of cervical cancer or vaginal cancer, then I welcome you to download my free HPV Recovery Guide so you can learn more about my approach specifically to hpv. And I look forward to connecting with you all very soon. If you don't already subscribe to How Humans Heal, you can just click the subscribe button and join me for the next episode. Take care.

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