Dr. Tabatha Barber warns about medication red flags: PPIs should be re-evaluated after 3-4 months, statins can mask underlying cholesterol causes and deplete CoQ10, and cholesterol fluctuates with hormonal shifts like menopause. She recommends bioidentical hormones over synthetic alternatives.
Dr. Tabatha Barber
March 20, 2023
After about 3–4 months of continuous use.
The other big one is. They put you on something like a ppi, a proton pump inhibitor, Protonix nexium, omeprazole for heartburn. And they leave you on it. If you're on that medication more than four to, you know, three to four months, that needs to be reevaluated. There's a reason your stomach is making too much stomach acid, and that needs to be addressed. And it's usually a diet and lifestyle situation. It's usually a gut microbiome issue. You usually have the wrong bacteria living in there. Not enough digestive enzymes to get your food out of your stomach and into your intestines in a timely manner. Something else going on, being put on a statin for years and years and years for your cholesterol issue without figuring out what's going on. Because elevated cholesterol is not simply something that is a statin deficiency. There's a reason these levels are changing. For women, most commonly, it's the changes in your hormones. Did you know cholesterol is actually the backbone ingredient that's used to make your sex hormones? Your body uses cholesterol to make estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, cortisol, aldosterone. It needs cortisol. So imagine you go into menopause and you're no longer making all of these hormones that you used to make. Your cholesterol is probably going to go up because you're not using it the way you used to. That isn't necessarily bad in and of itself. Cholesterol is much more complicated than that. And we've dumbed it down and we've really giving it a bad rap. And so it's important that you go to a functional or integrative practitioner who understands the importance of cholesterol and what all those numbers actually mean, because they're there. It's not just bad and good, and it's not that straightforward. And statins do not fix the problem. They cause many other problems. The biggest one is mitochondrial dysfunction. They wipe out your CoQ10 levels, and you can't make make your energy without that. So statins really cause a lot of damage in women over time. Doctors who say that synthetic hormones and bioidentical hormones are the same and there's no difference. That's a red flag. If they want to give you Premarin or something else made out of conjugated equine estrogen or Prempro, which is like medraxyprogesterone or norithindrone, those are synthetic progestins, and those completely act different in your body, and that is not what you want. So you need a prescriber who understands the difference between the forms of hormones. And that's a really important key because it changes the risks associated with taking those medications.
