Women’s Health + Peptide Therapy + Hormones with Dr. Amber | Ep. 40 (Audio Only)

Welcome to my podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole Kane, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology and a former anxiety sufferer turned anxiety freedom rebel. All right, lovelies. Oh my goodness, you are in for a treat. I am joined by Dr. Amber and she and I have been connecting back and forth for a couple of years now and we get to learn from her today. We are going to learn all about her methods and helping turn the page in mental health. And so thank you so much, Dr. Amber, for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It has been fun. We have been connected and finally we get to meet, meet virtually for podcasts. So I'm excited.

I have been loving your stuff so much and so I was like, why haven't we done an interview yet? I have been looking forward to this conversation. It feels super overdue.

I agree, I agree. Likewise. Yeah, you put out such amazing content specific to anxiety and you know, it's such a relevant topic, especially in the last year, talking about how we can support naturally and what are things we can do. So yeah, happy to dive in and talk more about that.

And so before we do that, I got a brag on my girl here. And so a couple of just like real quick, like if you're listening to this and if you have your phone nearby or old fashioned piece of paper and a writing utensil, I want you to do two things. Number one is check out Dr. Amber's Instagram. Her, her handle is Dr. AmberND and her website, you need to make sure you go to the website and bookmark it. It's hormonefoundations.com so before we do anything, if you're listening to this from your phone, just click on Instagram, go and make sure you follow her, get on the website, bookmark that and then we're going to talk about all sorts of cool resources that she has. But let me just start by telling you just a few, few of the reasons Dr. Amber is so amazing. Are you ready? Okay, so first of all, Dr. Amber is a licensed naturopathic doctor at My Bright Wellness. She's a medical director for KE Longevity. She resides in Los Angeles, California. And this genius clinician is trained in regenerative medicine, detoxification protocols, hormone testing and treatment, bioidentical hormone therapy, peptide therapy, which by the way, I'm so excited to learn about, and IV nutrient therapy. She also has a practice in Redondo Beach, California where she specializes in bioidentical hormones and peptide therapy. And in addition to all that, if you can believe it, she is also a member of the International Peptide Society, and she's completed peptide therapy certification training through the American Academy of Anti Aging, which is a 4M. So these are just a teeny bit of her credentials, which is a lot for one beautiful young human. And so congratulations, girl.

You're.

I really admire you. I love this.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I. You know, so much of that training is really. I learned a lot in school, but I think a lot of what I use now is actually what I've learned after and in my own health journey, so. Yeah, thank you.

I actually would love to learn a little bit, especially about your journey and what fuels you in what you're doing today with clients.

Yeah, yeah. So really what I work with a lot now is women's health hormone testing. I do gut testing as well, and then the peptide therapy and how we can apply that to lots of different situations, health concerns. And so I had my own journey. I grew up in the Midwest on a standard American diet, and I was gut issues and skin eczema as a kid. And, you know, really the only therapy or option that was available at that time was a medication or cortisone and more of a suppressive action. And so as I got older, I actually started poxing and I started intaking a lot of information about biochemistry and understanding the body and nutrition and how we can really change our mood and our brain function based on what we eat. And saw this link between cognition and nutrition really early on and thought, there's more to this. I need to study this. I want to help other individuals understand this and change their life with this information. So went through my own health journey. I had where I found peptide therapy. I had a candida gut overgrowth, which caused debilitating brain fog. It was a systemic infection, and it really tanked my mood, felt exhausted, had skin changes, had an unhealthy gut. It was from a lot of chronic stress, years of stress. And I found that peptide therapies, when a lot of the more conventional leaky gut protocols and gut protocols that I had used had not really done as much as I would have liked. And so the peptide therapy was one of the things that really resolved my food sensitivities. The brain fog went away, my skin cleared up, and it was a really profound experience for me to see. Wow, this really helped me. And so then I got trained in it thereafter through a 4M. And now I use that a lot in my practice because I find that it can help address the root oftentimes of what's going on and I use it in tandem with other therapies. But it was really my own experience that brought me to using this.

The work you do is really out of the box for Midwestern. So this could be why I am so drawn to you in part is because I'm from the Midwest also and so from Iowa. Where in the Midwest are you from?

Minnesota.

Minnesota.

Oh yeah.

So I totally, yeah, I. The only thing to do when I so went to school in Decorah, Iowa, like north northeast is there's nothing to do besides like drive to Rochester, Minnesota.

Yeah, yeah.

Go to the Twin Cities spirits for that.

Yeah, I, yeah, lots of cornfields and you know, corn, wheat, crops.

So yes, all of the beige, that's, that's what I always joke with my family is that everything they eat is beige like pork, loin and corn and it sounds true.

Yeah.

A lot, a lot of really, I mean tasty corn. It's the best sweet corn ever. But what I, I hear you saying is, you're describing, what I so resonate with is growing up you're eating these pro inflammatory foods, foods that tend to have a lot of allergen potential. And the way that it affected your health, you know, you were experiencing kind of head to toe symptoms. You're describing, you know, eczema and things like that. And so you started doing a lot of research and you started an education in like studying the biochemistry and as your story commenced you found peptides and different types of, you know, naturopathic modalities and it was transformational for you. It really got your health back. And so when did you decide to go to school and become a naturopath?

Yeah, so I was on the route to become a conventional MD at the time. I was doing pre med and finishing up thinking about what's next. And I job shadowed several doctors, several MDs. And when I left that experience, I just, I was a little disenfranchised and I took a step back and thought I'm not sure that this is the route that I want to have for the rest of my life. I knew I loved helping people with their health. I knew I loved talking about nutrition and mind body medicine and, and I just didn't witness that. And I didn't see people rejuvenating or turning around their health. When I walked into these doctors offices, I saw a lot of someone walking in on six medications and putting them on a seventh, really abbreviated appointments and then you know, the patients were sick, but the doctors were also struggling and sick and stressed out and it was just, you know, their hearts were good, but the system was there and it was hard to escape that system. And so then I found naturopathic medicine shortly thereafter. And that really drew me in. I thought this is exactly what I had in my mind of what I want to do and how the way in which I want to be able to help people with their health. It's more training, definitely a more intensive school load, four or five years of medical training, thousand patient contacts. We had a lot of clinical work that I did and I worked in homeless camps in Seattle all the way up to. I worked on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood and was doing home visits for some high end clients. So I've really seen every spectrum medicine and been able to see a lot of chronic illness patients as well as those who are looking for optimization. And I do see the peptides can help both people because they, they really correct what's happening in the cell. And that's the beautiful thing with, with the peptide therapy.

I'd love to learn more about peptide therapy. So two of your specialties I know are women's health and peptide therapy. And so can you tell us a little that is.

Yeah, so it's a different approach. The, the term that it really fits under is something called cellular medicine. And I was trained by a group of practitioners who's really on the forefront of what's happening and treating what's happening in the cell. So if we look at the symptoms that are happening, like brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, what's going on in the cell to cause something to go wrong or at a more micro level. And so looking through that lens, all of the things that are going on in the cell, there's energy production, we have constantly, we're producing waste just like you would in your house. You're producing trash daily and we have to take the trash out. And so there's lots of different needs of the cell, the mitochondria. And that's how we really produce our energy. And so the, the peptides really can target what might be going awry in some of those situations. Essentially what a peptide is, is it's a chain of amino acids. And so many people who are listening might have heard about a peptide from their collagen peptide supplement or maybe their skincare that says it has peptides in it, maybe copper peptides. And so it's a similar idea, but we're using these therapeutically and so we can have a different chain of amino acids, different combinations of amino acids that are building blocks of peptides. These Chains and then proteins, which are the much larger segments of these peptides connected together. So the technical definition peptide is less than 50amino acids in chemistry. And so that's what we will administer some sort of signal to the body to help do something to support a function. Maybe it's immunity, maybe it's gut health, maybe it's related to mood to make something that maybe the body hasn't really been making as much anymore. And it really fits into natural medicine because there's no suppression. It's a very bioidentical option. It's something our body recognizes. For example, our body makes BPC 157 body protection compound. We can talk about that. And yeah, it really fits into this more holistic view where we're not turning off things, we're really supporting the body to do a better job at what it knows how to do.

That's really neat because you talked about how in your story when you were in the other world studying and you would walk into clinics and it felt very much not, you know, not to put words in your mouth, but it sounded kind of like a pill for an ill where, you know, people are on six medications, they get a seventh medication and it just didn't feel like they were getting healthier and becoming more well. And what's different about peptide therapy, if I'm understanding correctly, is that it helps your body achieve greater health and wellness because it's supporting these different natural mechanisms that it's supposed to do anyway.

Right, exactly. Yeah, I like to say we support the cell, we support these normal biological functions instead of suppressing them, which is what many of the conventional therapies do, especially for diseases like autoimmune disease. And I see a fair number of women with autoimmune conditions and you know, it's biologic drugs, it's Humira, Remicade, a lot of these strong suppressive drugs that can cause immune compromise and really some long term consequences. Whereas the peptide therapies, there's some options that can be really helpful for restoring immune signaling when it's been lost. And there's things outside of peptides like low dose naltrexone that can be really helpful there too for culturing that immune signaling that's happening. But yeah, I agree with everything that you said. We're really supporting and not suppressing.

And as you know, the passion, the jam, the mission of this podcast is to support people in brain health and mood health. And so one of the things that I was eager to talk with you about today is how can peptide therapy be useful for somebody who's struggling with mental health or brain health concerns?

Yeah. Oh, such a great question. So there's several, there's several options that can be used for cognitive health whether and for. If it's a lack of mental focus, inability to pay attention, more of an ADHD picture, or somebody who has more of the anxiety picture, which is a lot of the individuals that you work with, or if it's more of that lower mood, that depression that's happening. There's options really all across the board and even for cognitive decline where we're starting to see memory lapses and changes in brain function as we age. And so there's options for all of those within the world of peptide therapy. And a few of them there's a, there's a few options that are actually intranasal. There's different methods of administering these. So the ones that are used for mood, a few of them are intranasal, which means you breathe it in and it's very specific for the brain. Right. So we know that you can cross that blood brain barrier and really get straight to the brain. And so there's two that I like to use. One is called, and these are biochemical names that may sound a little crazy, just like the BPC157 does. Celanq and Cilank. Is that intranasal peptide that one of the things that it does is it quelches this kind of bad actor chemical that your immune system makes called IL6 Interleukin 6. It's inflammatory chemical and so it can really quelch that. And we know that you look at the model of anxiety and depression that's driven by a lot of the upregulation or that feed forward cycle that can get started in the body of pro inflammatory cytokines. Things like IL6 saline can come in there and kind of quiet that down. And so it can really help with mood both in anxiety and depression. And it can be used, it's not super stimulatory, it can be used later in the day. I've had some of my clients say I use it at 3pm when my anxiety hits or I use it at night when my anxiety, anxiety hits. And that's, that can be a really great option for them to use at any point in the day when they need it.

So that's, that's called Silane.

You said link. Yeah. S E L A N Kalink and.

We'Ll make sure to put that link in the show notes. And so to make sure that I'm tracking. So Salink can be used intranasally and it's not terribly stimulatory. So someone can take it in the evening or during the day. And its zone of genius is like you said, more helping with anxiety and calming the nervous system, is that right?

Yeah, it can also. So because it can quiet some of that inflammation, some of those pro inflammatory cytokines or those interleukins as bad actors the immune system can kick up when we're under a lot of stress, lots of things can do that. But it also can bind with GABA receptors. You and I both know about how important GABA is in anxiety and in sleep as well. So GABA is that relaxing neurotransmitter that we make that calms us down, that keeps us grounded and balanced. We know that progesterone levels can, you know, that metabolite of progesterone can bind in the brain to help our body make gaba, which calms us down. So if we're low on progesterone that could be an issue. But Solank works on that same pathway, binds to GABA and it can help really calm us down through that method.

And I like that too. I'm thinking about as you're, you're explaining about the inflammatory piece is one of the ways that benzodiazepines, which is a common medication for anxiety, one of the ways they work is that they're somewhat anti inflammatory. And so when people are tapering down on those medications, a lot of efficacy in helping with the side effects can come from bringing down that inflammation as well as bringing up the gaba. And it sounds like this is kind of a one stop shop for supporting individuals who are dealing with the inflammation and maybe insufficient gaba.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the cytokines that tends to be elevated in the cytokine storm or cytokine elevation even in Covid is IL6. And so it can help to quasi. But yeah, the inflammation is a huge driver behind potentially why we might not be, why we might be feeling anxious or why our body is not producing the right neurochemicals to calm us down. So yeah, and it's really great because it doesn't have that withdrawal effect, it doesn't have dependence. It's really, really, you can use it later in the day. It's a better, it's an option that can be used for somebody who has anxiety and obviously, yeah, looking at the root causes. But if the root cause is the inflammatory response is upregulated, it does address that.

That's exciting. And so we'll make sure that we get the link for that in the show notes. One thing that I know the listeners are going to ask is, well, how, how quickly does it kick in? Like how much time to expect?

Yeah, the intranasal forms, you feel it almost immediately for most people. I mean everybody's individual. So it may be that you need to use it for days in a row before you see the effects. But many times I've used C Max, I've used Synapse and. Which are both intranasal. And you feel them pretty quickly. Yeah, within a matter of minutes, generally because it's very quickly absorbed.

I love that. Thank you for telling us about that. That's, that's an incredible resource that I can think of so many people, myself included, that would benefit from that. What other, what other peptides would you say are at the top of the list?

Yeah, so there's, there's celin and then there's cmax, sema X. So that's another intranasal that can be used. I use that one more for somebody who has difficulty focusing. We're trying to improve their memory. Maybe they're in a higher education like law school, med school. They're trying to study to get some sort of test completed, some sort of degree. They just have a lot of learning and it's somewhat superficial or it's more of a modern experience for us for you and I to have to sit for eight hours in front of a computer and pay attention the entire time, all day long kid, much less an adult. And so we almost need things on board to help our focus now to have that sort of attention. Things like celanq. It is in the category of a nootropic. I'll use it with other nootropics. But even as a standalone it can be really, really helpful. So CMAX helps with brain function. What it does is it improves bdnf, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor. And there's lots of other things in natural medicine that do that. But essentially when you have more bdnf, you can change glutamate levels and GABA levels. It influences both of those. Right. And if we have way too much glutamate, we're overstimulated and that can contribute to anxiety and restlessness. Not enough gaba. We really want to have enough GABA and not overstimulating glutamate levels. And so it can actually help in that balance. And again, it's an intranasal peptide. And there's no dependence, again, like it. It can be helpful, but it's not addictive like something like Adderall. It's not as intense or strong as a lot of these conventional medications for ADHD and ADD and attention difficulty, which.

Is wonderful for the moms that are listening to this, whose kids, especially having to do online school or zoom when it can just be so difficult. In fact, I was talking to a mom yesterday and. And she has two kids and they're trying to homeschool them. And one of them just struggled so much, sitting still for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. And she's described that he very likely qualifies for adhd, but she doesn't want to medicate him or give him amphetamines. So the strategy they came up with is they got him a trampoline. So every time he just feels that, like that restless, agitated energy, he runs out, he jumps, he gets really sweaty, exhausted, he comes back and he focuses. Pretty time consuming.

But you think about what's happening when he's jumping on that trampoline. When you exercise, when you're breathing, get deeper breathing, I mean, you produce some more of these, the flow of oxygen in the body, you produce some more of those neurotransmitters that could potentially help with focus. Right? You're kind of bringing flow of energy to the body.

So this peptide could really enhance that and support him in that. And I'm thinking too about the way that we want to work also naturopathically is healing the brain. And it sounds like that's able to do that because we know that that ingredient helps with neuroprogression and helping your brain with plasticity. And so it's really cool that we have this really safe supplement that it's not really a supplement. How would we categorize it? Just like as, I guess a peptide, right?

Yeah, it's. It doesn't really fit in the. It's not a pharmaceutical, it's not a supplement. Right. Because you over the counter, it's kind of in the realm of a nutraceutical. It's right in the middle. It's a peptide. It's kind of in the middle of those two.

It's its own category. And so it's wonderful to have this amazing medicine that's available to help our families. And so you're talking about lifting the mood, reducing anxiety, balancing neurotransmitters like glutamate and gaba, helping with focus, and also doing that while training in healing the body as opposed to something palliative or habit forming.

Exactly, yeah. The other peptide that we should mention, and I love that you brought that up, is we need to really heal the gut, heal the brain. Because leaky gut. Leaky brain, right. Or vice versa. So when we have a head trauma, we end up seeing usually some sort of gut issue as a result, some intestinal permeability happening there. And same is true when we have damage in the gut. It can impact the brain, can impact the mood. A lot of our neurotransmitters are made in the gut. So that's really a strategy. It's a place that I start with. Most people that come to me for the first time is addressing that. And there's a few peptides that are used for gut health and restoring some of that maybe potentially leaky gut situation that's happened. So we know chronic stress can lead to leaky gut. Certain foods, we don't even know all of the triggers, but there's a lot of things, a lot of some medications can damage the gut lining. And so the. Probably the most commonly heard of peptide therapy is something called BPC157, body protection compound. And that one is it's really good at protecting the mucosal lining in the gut. And so if we protect that mucosal lining, we know that we're going to have better nutrient absorption. We're going to sometimes, you know, our neurotransmitters are made in the gut. If we can't absorb nutrients, well, then we end up having even nutrient depletions. We could be eating a pretty healthy diet but not be absorbing it. And so there's a lot of different variables happening at that gut layer where we have the immune axis or that immune reaction that can happen if food seeps through the gut lining. And that can cause our own host of food sensitivities that could potentially even lead to changes in mood if we have a lot of immune signaling happening in that gut lining. So, yeah, the body protection compound, it's helpful not only in that gut lining, but also in joints. I like to use it. So that's a great add in. I use an acid reflux as well. You can just dump the capsule in water, swallow it down before you eat a meal, and it literally just coats or protects that lining from damage. So that's another good one too, that could play a role in mood. And when we support the gut, we know that we can better make some of those neurotransmitters in the gut and.

You have a wonderful YouTube video. Actually, I was watching it today. And so, so listeners, make sure that you follow the peptide doc at YouTube and of course we'll put the link there. But Dr. Amber has a whole video where she talks about BPC157 and you share about how it can help balance your serotonin dopamine, gaba. And you also talked about how it can help heal the brain. And then today we're also learning about how it can help heal the gut. So it feels like a really, truly naturopathic, supportive therapy.

Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of conventional gastroenterologists who are using that now too because they've looked at the research and they've incorporated in their practice and they've seen people improve in, in terms of gut inflammation. I, I have Crohn's colitis patients, ibd, ibs, and I've seen changes and improvements in symptoms related to the gut energy levels. Some of the mood can improve as well. It's more of a longer term strategy. Right. Most people who take bpc, they don't day one experience a difference because we really have to work at just repairing that lining, which could take four to six weeks minimum in general. So it's more of a longer term strategy, but it's really, really phenomenal for gut inflammation at bpc.

You've blessed us with so much right already. We've talked about depression, we've talked about anxiety, we talked about gut health, we've talked about healing the brain and healing the gut. And you know, you said leaky gut, leaky brain. One question that I'm really eager to get your take on is sleep. And so sleep can be a really big problem with anxiety. And I know that was my story is it started with just unbelievably terrible insomnia, which then spiraled into unbelievably terrible anxiety. So tell us about your approaches for sleep.

I love this question because I think this is so relevant to women's health. I hear this from everyone and I had so in my first year of med school. Just a quick story. I was waking up every night at 3am in the morning and just wasn't sleeping through the night. I was under a lot of stress. You know, we were doing cadaver dissection and 12 hour, 16 hour days. Just a lot of, a lot of cortisol flowing through my, my veins for that period of time and I didn't really know why. I was just in the beginning of learning all of this about what's happening in the body physiologically, and what is, what is cortisol doing? So cortisol is that stress hormone. We want this circadian rhythm to be in balance, so we want that nice rise in cortisol in the morning and then we want it to fall into the afternoon and evening so that we can get to sleep at night. What I tend to see a lot is women are waking up in the middle of the night having difficulties sometimes falling asleep due to that high cortisol level. And that can be from looking at screens, working late at night, which so many of us are guilty of. But yeah, really acknowledging some of these hormones that drive sleep, cortisol being one of them. And so I'll give specific herbs that will blunt that cortisol response. I think the beginner mistake for many women is to take something like melatonin. They may not have melatonin, low levels of melatonin, thinking that that will help them to sleep through the night. And often they keep waking up at that 3am and that's usually a cortisol issue. So there's different hormones. I usually test melatonin, I test their cortisol rhythm, their four point cortisol, and see what's happening and then give the appropriate treatment based on what I see. But those are, those are big ones. And then of course you can also test neurotransmitter levels or you can look at symptoms and guess what's happening with GABA and glutamate. So we know a lot of those high sugar foods before bed. That's the big mistake that many people and I grew up doing that ice cream before bed. Same. It's a Midwest thing, right? And then, you know, the kid who can't get to sleep and they're wired and they're ready to go because they have a lot of glutamate floating around that stimulatory neurotransmitter. And you know, so we really want to pay attention to how our inputs or how our environment is maybe telling us to signal or produce more of these neurotransmitters. But if, if that's the case, then we look at diet, we look at, you know, their sleep hygiene and some of those factors, things that I use to boost GABA you can use. You know, there's lots of different blends. I like to use something called dhhb, which is dihydrohenochiol, and it's just the compound extracted from Mongolia bark. Mongolia bark has been used for a long, long time in medicine. And so again, it works similar to Celanq, where it's going to boost the GABA production in the body. And so when we boost gaba, right, we can sleep and we can get into that restful deep sleep and not have that busy mind that's keeping us awake from glutamate. And so that's one of them. And then I always look at progesterone levels, especially if it's in a woman who's perimenopausal, 47, 48, getting close to 50, she probably has a little bit of low progesterone, maybe it's starting to tail off as she moves into menopause. And if you have low progesterone, you're not going to get that signal in the brain to make gaba. So that might be the root as to solve that as well. But you can also find low procedures progesterone levels in younger women too, due to it could be all sorts of reasons. But often birth control can suppress that totally suppress the signals for estrogen and progesterone. And so I've run lab tests and you can find the flatline estrogen progesterone in a woman who's very anxious. So, yeah, the hormones do play a role, but I think there are some things in natural medicine and peptide therapy that can help look at what's going on with neurotransmitters and help provide a solution.

You actually answered one of the other questions that I had in mind, which is hormones or lab markers or tests that can play a role in anxiety and sleep. And so you talked about neurotransmitters, trying to figure out what's happening with your glutamate, your gaba, your dopamine, serotonin. And then you also talked about hormone testing, looking at estrogen and progesterone and identifying what may be out of balance, even if you're not menopausal, that even young women can experience these imbalances in their hormones. And then you also talked about 4 point cortisol. And for listeners who aren't familiar with that, can you explain just a little bit more about what you mean?

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. So there's a few ways to test this. I look at it in a urine sample because I run the other hormones that way. And so it's just four different samples that you do throughout the day, usually one in the morning, late morning, midday, like afternoon and then evening. And so what we get when we test that, you can run it in saliva as well, but we get this nice graph. Essentially, it's your circadian rhythm, it's your sleep wake cycle. And we know how your body's adapted. And you know, this changes if you travel to another country, you are on a flip schedule and your time zone changes. We have to reset the circadian rhythm. But there's so much research literature about how fluctuations or changes in circadian rhythm, especially the staying awake at night and sleeping during the day rhythm when it's light out, can really be such a big problematic thing with health, leading to higher risk of diabetes, anxiety, depression, obesity. I mean, the list goes on. And so having a normalized cortisol curve, so we have that nice rise in the morning, we do need cortisol. It helps get us going, wakes us up, gets our brain functioning so we can work in the morning. We don't want to have high levels all day long and we certainly don't want to have high levels at night when we're trying to sleep. So we get this beautiful map or this beautiful picture where I think it's helpful for each woman to see what her sleep cycle and her sleep wake cycle looks like. And it usually correlates with her symptoms. But sometimes it's not what we expect as well. Sometimes we have a flip curve. So, yeah, that's the four point cortisol. It's just looking at four different times. That test can be done from home too, which just makes it really easy.

Which is so much more convenient than going to the lab and having them take your blood is the comfort of your home. Because really going and getting up, getting your car keys, driving to the lab, the stress of sitting in the waiting room and then getting your blood drawn. Your body responds to stress by producing cortisol. So you can get incorrect data with a blood test just because of the nature of the blood test. So I love that you're suggesting, considering saliva or urine, my favorite. I, I don't know if you've used this before, but I love the Dutch test. Have you had an opportunity to play with that?

Yeah, that's the one I use exclusively. I love the Dutch test.

It's like my favorite. I always tell all my women, like, in a perfect world we would have your Dutch test because it takes so much of the guesswork out. It looks at your progesterone, it looks at your estrogen, your estrogen metabolites, because not all estrogen is created even equal. And it looks at some of those neurotransmitters, it looks at melatonin, it looks at cortisol. All these different tests that you're talking about so that your doctor, when you guys go see Dr. Amber, she will be empowered in creating solutions that are individualized for what you need. And so I love that. Are there any other tests that you're like, oh, my gosh, absolutely. In my top five.

Yeah. I like running a stool panel as well. If I had to pick two, it'd probably be the hormone test and the gut, where we get a map of. It's called a GI map, a map of your microbiome, because we know that fluctuations in the microbiome can also lead to mood changes. There's certain gut bacteria that are linked to autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and certain IBD conditions. So we know that the gut microbiome is really key player here. And many of us, many of us have fluctuations, depletions. If you've ever had antibiotics as a child, we know one dose of antibiotics can permanently change your gut microbiome. And so there are things that we can do to resolve that and add in prebiotics, but it really just depends on the individual, their international travel history, their antibiotic history, where they're at. But that's a huge. I think it's becoming more used in medicine. Looking at the gut microbiome and how that plays a role in mood and anxiety and depression, I think that's brilliant.

Especially reflecting back to what you said at the beginning of our conversation, is the gut is the foundation of health in so many different ways. Where 95% of our neurotransmitters are made, it's in the gut. And when we look at how it regulates your immune system, how it helps with processing your hormones, your brain and body could be making estrogen and then your liver is trying to detox it. But if your gut's out of balance, there could be bugs in there that reactivate your estrogen. So looking at the Dutch is beautiful and brilliant, but really combining that with the digestive information, what's actually happening with your gut, the microbiome is going to give a lot fuller of a picture.

Absolutely, yeah. And on occasion, I'll run like a neuro profile where I look at each of the individual neurotransmitters, that isn't always my first go to, but depending on the severity of the individual and the financial situation, because all labs are expensive, so they can be a cost. So, yeah, it's all things to consider, but you can actually look at what are the neurotransmitters that are depleted and you can, can see if they're not converting, if they're stuck, you know, a dopamine, they, they can't convert something. So you can see what's happening and add in the correct thing that they might be missing if there's a nutrient depletion there. A lot of these B vitamins are critical as well as I think about like copper and some of these micronutrients that we might not get that are involved in producing neurotransmitters. And many of us have nutrient depleted diets now. It's just not in our food source. So. And if we're not supplementing with it, then, you know, we don't really have the essential co factors to get to that next step to make that neurotransmitter to improve our mood. So there are definitely functional medicine, holistic medicine options for testing and for treatment that don't involve a medication like an SSRI or something of that nature. And oftentimes it's working collaboratively with their practitioner who's prescribing that medication if they want to get off of it or if they're trying to transition or they want support and feeling better naturally. So it's collaborative. But yeah, there's definitely options and the.

Collaboration can help with buffering a little bit of the cost in some cases. And so that kind of brings up the question of people are listening. They're like, okay, I love this. I want to get this testing done. I want to find the root cause. I'm loving these peptides, I'm loving these herbs. What is the average cost of treatments? And also not to ask two questions at once, but the average cost of treatments and how do our listeners feel? Find a doctor who can prescribe it or offer it.

Great question. Yeah. So I would say most of the peptide therapies are pretty feasible. Many of the botanical supplements, if we add in, usually the range is anywhere from 20 to $100 of what you'd spend. It varies based on the individual, what they're depleted in what we find out, many of the peptide therapies, like a bottle of Solank is about 150 and that should last about two months. So for a two month supply. The caveat is many of these are not covered by insurance. These are created by a compounding pharmacy. And so they don't work with the medical insurance coverage. For that reason. You can submit things as a super bill, which I've had people do in the past, and sometimes they will cover it many times FSA dollars can cover it as well. Cause that's like a credit card that can be spent towards your healthcare. And so that'll cover peptides, that'll cover functional medicine visits. But yeah, it's very feasible when you compare it to really high end treatments. The challenge is many of the conventional medications for anxiety and depression are completely covered by insurance. Even though they might be very expensive monthly. If you have medical insurance, you do end up paying about it in a roundabout way by paying for medical insurance. But a lot of the therapies that I use, like low dose naltrexone, like bpc, like Celink and cmax, many of these are not covered by insurance. And so that's the challenge. If you have, I would encourage get a super bill. You can get a lot of the labs run through your conventional practitioner. Sometimes they don't know about the Dutch or some of the stool panels, but they can run cbc, cmp, a lot of the liver enzymes, it can run those sort of labs and that can be covered. So that's a helpful way. And then how would you find a practitioner who could work with some of these therapies that we talked about today? Few places. So there is an organization called A4M, the Academy of Anti Aging Medicine. And that's who I was trained in peptide therapy by. There's a lot of functional holistic practitioners on that network, a lot of MDs who practice in a similar way, who use peptides in their, in their practice. And so you can have a practitioner directory. If you go to their website, you can find somebody on there. You can also go to ssrp which is the training organization for doctors using more of a cellular medicine approach, which is what I would say I use a lot more of now and I've been trained through them. And so they have a whole network of practitioners that are really exclusively using peptides, but so many other things as well. Many of them are using exosomes, stem cells or you know, all sorts of alternative ozone therapies in their practice. So that's a good resource. And then trying to think if there's anything else, if there's any other networks, those are the two big ones. There's a group called the Peptide Society which I'm a member of and they do have a network as well of practitioners. They are not always super responsive, but you can reach out to them and usually you'll get a response back of a doctor who's in your region who could help you.

And of course people can reach out to you. And you know, definitely you have you're really responsive on your Instagram, Dr. AmberND. And you have a beautiful website, drambernd.com you have hormonefoundations.com you have a YouTube video, you have a Facebook. We gave us the information of the peptide Rx and so we'll definitely share that Facebook group. And I just want to piggyback on one thing that you said when it comes to the cost of disease management versus health care and in thinking about the cost. So I have a friend who, she struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and you were talking about how some of these peptides, some of this really beautiful root cause testing can help people with inflammation and with these symptoms. And her rheumatoid arthritis treatment costs $30,000 a month and it's, it basically it can bankrupt her. So right now her insurance is covering it. But what happened recently is her job changed insurances without letting her know the new insurance was refusing to pay for it. And so she was faced with do I basically bankrupt myself to receive these life sustaining treatments or do I quit my job and try to or buy cobra? So she was really stuck between a rock and a hard place versus the story might have been a little bit different if she was able to get to the root cause of what was impacting her health, to bring down that inflammation, to invest in looking at the different tests and the different treatments that might actually help her in the long run. And so I, you know, I have a lot of mercy and compassion for how this kind of work can be cost prohibitive for some. But then at the same time, I think it depends how we look at the long view versus the short term and what we're investing in.

It's always a, I mean your health impacts every area of your life. Right? It's the most valuable investment you can make. And yeah, really addressing the root cause and improving some of the inflammatory signaling that's happening or getting to the root of what it is and if it's a hormone imbalance. So yeah, it's, I mean I, I think it's comes back to understanding the value of life and your time by not pursuing some of the things that could really help you to feel better outside of even medications that might just manage it. We're losing days in life and years and, and time and so yeah, it's, I view health as one of the most important investments to make.

Today. We have learned so much from Dr. Amber. We've talked about testing, we've talked about peptides, we've talked about getting to the root cause. We've talked about depression and brain fog, attention and sleep and anxiety. We've gotten into the details of neurotransmitters and how to respond, restore the balance. We've talked about different ways to support sleep and some of the pitfalls that people often fall into when trying to manage their sleep. And we've talked about, really, the true philosophy of naturopathic medicine. And as we're finishing up in our conversation, I'm just curious if there's anything else that you wanted to make sure that our listeners learned about today.

Yeah, I think. I think the really pivotal thing is, and I. I do a lot of work with this. I have a course on it. I've worked with a lot of women on hormones is sometimes it is a hormone imbalance because our hormones really run and drive our life. And peptides are, you know, ulcer signaling molecules that can tend to decrease with age. And so just like those hormones can decrease with age or medications or chronic stress, we can see impacts in thyroid and sex hormones. We really want to. We often forget about these other kind of signaling molecules that are right up there next to hormones, but we don't really talk about them as much. So some of the peptides are just as valuable to look into as a therapy, and some of them can actually address hormone imbalances like fertility, like supporting healthy repair hormones. And so, yeah, this is a relevant topic whether you're aging or whether you're young and you're having some symptoms or you're just looking to optimize how you feel, optimize your brain function. Maybe you're in school and you want to add in some sort of healthy nootropic that's not addictive. This can help in all situations.

We're so grateful to have this wisdom. And this is really my first opportunity to really dig into these things that you're teaching. It's about, like, peptide therapy and the relationship between the hormones and how it can interrelate in these different aspects of brain, gut, you know, the whole endocrine piece. And so I'm really so very grateful for the work that you do. You are giving hope to people around the world. You're giving hope to women. Your education is making such a huge difference. Difference. I mean, we're across the country and I've been so very blessed by your content over these years. And so I just want to say thank you so much, Dr. Amber, for everything that you do and for being a part of this mission to spread the word that there is hope for anxiety. And so you're amazing. Thank you so very much.

Wow. That. I accept that. That is. That's beautiful. And you're doing much of the same work and I love that we're both on this journey to supporting and educating and helping so many women, so many men with improving mood and helping them to live a really holistically optimal health life. Yeah. Thank you.

Oh, thank you so much. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening and make sure that you check out the resources below. We have so much from Dr. Amber here that you're not going to want to miss, and so be sure to check those out. Follow her on Instagram and I will see you all next time.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Cain, a naturopathic doctor with a Master's in Clinical psychology. While these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling education, medical training, and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological, or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911-OR call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you're in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole Cain is so passionate about people getting their life back. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with Dr. Nicole Cain about writing the next chapter of your life so that it plays out just the way you want it. Explore your options for working with her at www. Dr. Nicolecane.com that's Dr. Dr. Nicole N I C O L E Cain C-A-I-N.com when you're there, be sure to take advantage of the free Anxiety Freedom One week challenge. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the get your life Back podcast. Here's to your next chapter.

Sam SA.