Dr. Tabatha Barber flags doctors who dismiss menopause, joke about aging, or push surgery without exploring root causes. She explains how the gallbladder stores bile and moves estrogen-based hormones, so removal or stagnation can lead to estrogen dominance and toxin buildup. Functional medicine asks why; conventional medicine applies band-aids.
A couple other ones. This is what I heard last week. There was no discussion about the menopausal process. It wasn't. How do you want to go through and transition in this time? Do you want to transition naturally or do you want to try some bioidenticals? It was, yep. It sucks to age and some, you know, joke about it. That is not acceptable. Maybe medical care from a doctor to a patient, that is ridiculous. And for doctors to either ignore the discussion or to blow it off like it's a joke, that's a huge red flag. You need to find somebody who will listen to you and actually give you the risks, benefits, and alternatives of all the safe, good options out there. Another red flag is your doctor's quick to do surgery or procedures. Those should be last resorts. I'm hearing more and more about women in their 30s now having their gallbladders removed. It used to be women in their 40s would have gallbladder dysfunction. In medical school, we're taught the four Fs, fast fat, fertile, 40, something else. So the problem is you need your gallbladder. If you've had it removed, we can do, you know, do your best to function without it. It stores your bile, but your bile is really important to move your cholesterol around and to move your estrogens around and all of your hormones that are cholesterol based. So. So if you don't have enough bile to transport that, you're going to end up with estrogen dominance, which is another issue. The other piece of it is bile helps transport toxins out of our body that our liver has worked so hard to remove out of our bloodstream. And so if we don't have this transport mechanism to safely get things to our stool, we're going to struggle. We're going to have more symptoms and more issues. If you have gallstones, you need to ask why? Why is my bile not moving in and out of my gallbladder? Why are things so stagnant that I'm forming stones? So that's the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine is functional medicine isn't just trying to put the band aid on the problem. It's asking why and trying to figure out that and fix that problem.
