Hidden Impact of Environmental Toxins on Women's Health with Dr. Betty Murray & Dr. Robert Whitfield

Hey, everyone, this is Dr. Whitfield. Today we have Dr. Betty Murray, who is a women's health Advocate, nutrition expert, PhD researcher, certified functional medicine practitioner, author and speaker. Betty helps women over 40 harness their hormones to lose weight, optimize sleep, restore energy, and thrive. During her research for PhD, Betty had several key discoveries that led to hormone and metabolic imbalances that plague women over 40, restoring balance to these key metabolic and hormone path. The basis of her menopause mastery program. This program has helped her and hundreds of women release unwanted body fat, improve hormone balance, reduce hot flashes, restore sleep, and turn up their energy without living on a diet of deprivation. She is the founder and CEO of Living well Dallas Functional Medicine center in Menvora, a national women's virtual clinic delivering bioidentical hormone treatment and guidance to feel like perimenopause and menopause had never happened. She is the host of the Menopause Mastery podcast, author and featured writer for Brains magazine, and has been featured in Grazia magazine. She is frequently featured, a nutrition expert on Fox News Broadcasting, CW33, NBC and CBS. All right, everyone, I have Dr. Betty Murray, near and dear friend and colleague of mine, both near in terms of she's in Dallas, I'm in Austin. And dear we're in the Mastermind and Mindshare collaborative together and have been to many, many meetings together. And she is an expert on on women's health and perimenopausal hormone issues, which my patients with breast implant illness often have as a coinciding or coexistent issue. And we were just kind of talking about it off air, but we're going to dig right in to though and we'll listen to Betty actually explain how this happens in her own words instead of me jumbling and mumbling through it.

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

I'm glad we finally got this scheduled. It's not easy. We're doing this at 7am so everybody knows and we're fully getting loaded with caffeine.

That's right. That's right. It is a early morning. Not that we don't get up early. It's just early to be talking.

Yeah. I don't normally do shows at seven, but I'm happy to have Betty on any time. And this worked for our schedules. So we're going to listen to her explain how perimenopause and breast implant illness can be happening together and giving you worse and worse symptoms.

Yeah. So, you know, I think it's like we were talking before we got on the air. A lot of times women start to identify that they're not well, and these symptoms all sort of conglomerate together and that they may have breast implant illness. And it just so happens to coincide with the time period of perimenopause. And I think probably the biggest challenge for a lot of women is they don't realize perimenopause is an average of eight years. Okay. So that's the top of the bell curve. So that means some people get to experience some kind of symptoms, you know, for close to 16 years, and some people get very little.

Jade, what does it start, Would you say average age?

Average age is probably about 42 and average age of menopause? So menopause is a single day in a woman's life, and it's one year from the last time you've had your period. And the average age in the US is 51. So most women around 42, 43 are going to start experiencing things now. I started experiencing perimenopausal symptoms in my late 30s. I was 38, going on 39. And that's when everything started to really show up for me. At the time, even, you know, I was already in functional medicine. I owned a medical clinic. I did not really think it was that because I thought it couldn't really be that. That's so early. So I think a lot of women.

Just have earlier, though. Don't you feel like it's happening earlier now?

Yeah, I would agree. I think, you know, and we could jump into 100 reasons why that may be going on. But yes, there's a lot of more hormone disruption that women are going through. And men, you know, that are. They're going through just by living on this planet.

Yeah. And it seems like it's just driving backwards and getting earlier and earlier and earlier. So, yeah, I mean, that's, you know, when. And now I remember why somebody was giving me a hard time in a comment about a post we made. And it was because they're like, oh, these are just perimenopause symptoms. And I was like, well, I've had these symptoms in somebody who are 25. That's not perimenopause. So you. We can. And I talked to Betty about this, but I'll just reiterate and then she can comment on it. So if I have somebody with what we would term breast implant illness, which is just chronic inflammation, you know, medical device is part of the picture. And we test their hormones. In particular, we're looking at total testosterone free testosterone estradiol, levels, estrone levels, DHEA levels, they'll have a really suppressed free testosterone level and a low total. And in your 20s, you should not have that. So when someone says something to me, I'll clap back and say, no, not in your 20s.

No, no, we shouldn't see that in your 20s. You should be at your absolute peak, hormonal peak at that time, because that's fertility peak. And I think what people don't understand is inflammatory conditions, whether it's breast implant illness, you know, other medical device mesh, or if it's autoimmune conditions or other things, when your body's chronically inflamed, it's going to suppress normal hormone function. It just is. And you know, and I think it's overlooked in the conventional medicine system because they don't know what to do with it. So they're just kind of like, we won't even talk about that. But it's chronically going to cause hormonal problems.

Yeah. You know, I'm constantly getting asked like, what is the one test? And da, da, da, da. And you know, Betty and I, she has a PhD, we can sit here and talk about metabolomics and end products of the Krebs cycle all day long if we choose to. But that will be probably in a brief period of time. I would say a much more go to testing way to look at or instead of what we've been doing forever, like things like our audience. C reactive protein and the SED rate are things that are, they've been looked at forever. I'm, I'm 55 in a, you know, a couple weeks. Those tests have not changed as long as I've been alive. And they're super nonspecific. If one of my patients comes in with an elevated CRP or SED rate, that's really bad.

Yeah. Because those are very. You're absolutely right. They're very non specific, particularly hscrp. You know, it can elevate even on a viral infection. But if you've got a chronically elevated HS, highly sensitive C reactive protein above 3. So 3 is the high end of, kind of the range. I would say optimal is below 1. But if it's chronically elevated, there is some driving force behind that. Now, it could be breast implant illness, it could be significant insulin resistance and ins, you know, and visceral fat. It can be something as simple as that all the way to a chronic inflammatory disease. But, you know, I think our challenge today is we don't have a lot of commercially available inflammatory testing. To get more specific, there are a few labs where you could do inflammatory cytokines to kind of dig in and go, oh, you know, what pathways are inflamed? But I think the reality is once you know you're inflamed, you're inflamed. You know, as somebody who does an incredible amount of testing in our clinic, you know, sometimes I'm always like, even though I'm a scientist, I said, you know, if it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it's a duck. Right. I don't know if we need 10 tests to prove it.

Well, and that's why there is no one test for what we do. You know, we look at, as, you know, I like genetics quite a bit. We look at functional genetics, and there are a lot of people making, unfortunately, a lot of money off of clients by selling 10 genes or 6 snips or whatever for $600. Because they've been on Rogan, which is nice. We look at about, I think it's 250 SNPs now. And we look at drug metabolism in addition to all the things that affect immunity, like vitamin D metabolism and the antioxidant pathways and glutathione metabolism and the methylation pathways, which most of us have goofed up methylation anyway. So that being said, you know, looking at than like their toxicity burden, and we've talked about this. So if you look at someone's genetics and how they detox, and then you look at their toxicity burden, meaning for those listening if. If you haven't heard us discuss this before on my show. So environmental toxins like phthalates, glyphosates, BPAs, parabens, triclos, all these different things you get exposed to. And then heavy metals. I grew up in an area with really bad groundwater, so arsenic was very big on my tox profile when I first looked at it, which is always nice. In addition to. My dad was a nuclear weapons inspector, so I have a lot of beryllium in system, which is great. And then mycotoxins come from mold. And this would be a great thing to ask Betty about, because everybody in Texas gets exposed to mold all the time, and it is a thing. And mycotoxins are not great, and they really affect hormones and your endocrine system in general. So I'll let her. This is perfect. Now, I just ran myself into a really good thing to talk about with mold.

Good. Yeah. You know, I think it's our environmental toxicity as unprecedented levels. I think the most Important thing for people to understand is everything on the planet was organic until the Bronze Age, right? So we're not talking that long ago. And then if you really, really look at it, everything on the planet was natural and organic before the industrial age. So we're looking at just a few generations of humans, really, in human time, that have been exposed to all these environmental chemicals, and our body doesn't know how to handle those things. And I think the biggest and most challenging thing is that those toxins, when they come in contact with our body, have to go through the same processes that our own personal toxins go through. Right. They have to get cleared out of the liver. And like you said, the genetics play a pretty significant role. And so if your toxic burden is high, which everybody's is like, there's nobody free from this on the planet. I remember watching this documentary, and these scientists went to Antarctica, and they were literally, like, tackling those giant emperor penguins and pulling feathers off of them. Like, literally. I didn't realize they're, like, 3ft tall. But what they were trying to do is understand the toxicity level because of the way the ocean, you know, currents go. There shouldn't be that much toxicity there. And when they analyzed these feather, they found all kinds of mercury, all kinds. Everything that exists in the United States in a toxin exists all the way down there. So we have this toxic burden. But then when you get to mold in particular, which is, again, everybody thinks Texas is hot, we don't have it. I'm like, yeah, but we get torrential rains and floods and crazy stuff. Those mold toxins, I mean, they cross. They cross the cellular membranes, they cross into the brain, they completely foul up the hypothalamic control, which is your director of the show for all your hormones, and they wreak havoc. And, you know, I think a lot of people don't realize their chronic illness may be being driven by that.

Yeah, there is no more difficult patient. I remember, I think it was pun post pandemic. So everybody listening. I used to refer everybody out all the time to all of my functional medicine practitioners near me in Austin. And then because of the pandemic, obviously, we couldn't refer people out. And then many people just closed up and just went online, and that was it. And which is totally fine. It forced us to take our testing in house, put it under one umbrella, and then we built out our staff to help accommodate caring for our patients from a detox standpoint. So I remember somebody I referred out to, I sent a patient to them, and this was I could not figure out what was going on with this patient. And, you know, I would talk to them and think they understood what I was telling them for instructions. Post op, Husima was there. And like a couple days would go by and they would call the office and say, hey, I need to see Dr. Whitfield. Got a problem. And it was like Groundhog Day. Like, each week I would see the patient. And my protocol is pretty specific how I see patients. We see them in our preoperative situation, operate, see them at a week, a month, 3, 6, 9, 12. It's a lot more follow up than most surgical patients get. And then our detox program runs, like, with eight to ten follow up calls. I mean, it's. There's a lot of touch points. I mean, we have a patient app and all this conversation going back and forth. And I remember I was like, I'm seeing this patient again. What's going on? They're like, oh, she called, she had a problem. Well, okay, make sure there's no, like, wound problems or, you know, there hasn't been the development of a hematoma or something. So I guess you're like, what's going on? And they can't really tell me anything. It's just like having the post op, one week appointment over and over again. And I was like, am I crazy or am I saying the same? And I looked at her husband. I was like, hey, are you remembering these appointments? Like, you got to help her. And he just looked at me like, what do you mean? And so I was like, this is. I need you to go get checked out for something else. Some I'm missing something here. So my friend sends her back, like, I don't know, three to six months later. She looks like she had her head shrunk. Like, you look at her face. You know what I'm talking about. If somebody's had a mold exposure, their whole head is puffy and swollen. And when people joke about, like, it doesn't cause a problem, like, you have no idea how much neural inflammation you get. Mold. But then when you saw this lady, well, her whole body was different now. But I was just like, I was amazed by. Her head looked like it was shrunken. And I was like, oh, my God, this is. It was creepy. And that's. That led to doing all the mold testing we do. And we started off with great planes and then use Vibrant now for total toxicity.

And me too.

I'll never forget that lady. But now when someone comes and I tell my staff I'm like, if the person is not making sense, and it's a very, like, circular conversation back and forth, and you're just like, what is going on? You got mold, you got Lyme, you got both. Whatever. You gotta. Me, you don't.

Yeah, I think it's more prevalent than people realize. You know what I find. What we find clinically in my clinic is a lot of times they've had mold exposure and they keep. They think it's thyroid because they get the swollen face. Like, you know, swollen face, swollen eyes, puffy, you know, lymphatic, you know, congestion. And they're like, I swear it's my thyroid. And so they keep chasing the thyroid. I'm like, no, we're probably toxic. We gotta fix that first. Then the thyroid will work better. But I think, you know, I think we. You and I both see individuals that are really struggling and don't realize they're struggling how much there's a point.

I mean, that's a great point. How it's confused a lot with everything else. It's like, what is that? When we're in school, everything's the great imitator. Like, all these other things that masquerade is, you know, something else. I think mold is, like, first of all, it's a super underappreciated source of toxicity. I had a mold thing happen at a place we were living, and I got relatively sick. And my daughter, because the way we detox, a similar genetic. We have similar, you know, more similar genetics than my son and I do. And both of us. Oh, man, mess that was making me really unwell for a long period of time. And it's not easy to. To get rid of.

No, I think that's the other thing. Well, and you can have. You can have, like, you said, two different people or four different people living in the house. And if you won the genetic lotto. And I'm saying that to be kind of. Kind of facetious, you know, the reality is, if you have the genetic combination that doesn't detox well, you could be falling apart, and your spouse may be totally fine. And I think that's often what I run into, is you've got. Nine times out of ten, it's the woman that's falling apart, and the spouse is like, I don't understand what's going on. Like, I don't have a problem. You know, they don't realize their small problems are part of it, but they don't have just the overwhelming endocrine disruption, neuroinflammation that their Spouse does. And so it makes it very hard because they, the woman gets labeled as hysterical crazy. You know how we all get labeled.

And I, I explain it the same way. So I have a lot of that, you know, in the office. And, and I just explained it this way. And I look at them, I go, hey, you know, as guys, we have more testosterone. Women have like 1/12 of it. That's the huge buffer in all of this. So you may not be experiencing the same things because you genetically detox more efficiently, but you also don't have as much cortisol, you don't have as much estrogen, so your stress hormone reaction is much different than hers. And then still, they may look at me stupid, but that's at least somewhat of a. I can give the simpler explanation that way. And, and that helps them. And touch on, like when you see people going through perimenopause and menopause, like, cortisol's a nasty actor in all this.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I had, I have a quiz that I've had out for two years and 57,000 women have completed it. And it's all about your hormones. It's, you know, it's about your adrenal function, thyroid function, perimenopause, menopause, blood sugar control. And, you know, it's interesting, you know, so you kind of fall into one of those five buckets, right? What's your dominant. And I think the big take home message is what's your dominant problem? Right. Because the reality is, is in most instances, whether somebody's in their 40s, in perimenopause or in their 50s and hit menopause or have a thyroid problem, they always have a cortisol problem, they always have a stress chemistry problem. And until they correct that, they're going to be playing whack a mole. And I know this from my own experience. You know, this is really, I think, what drove my early perimenopausal symptoms. You know, I'd worked in IT for 11 years, working 80 hours a week. I went back to get a master's while I still did that. And I traveled for a living and I wore myself out. And then I opened a clinic and I was like, let's go, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. And I didn't realize that I was just slowly just trashing myself. So by the time I hit my late 30s, I was completely out of gas, you know, and my thyroid and this and that. And so it was, you know, this whack a Mole situation with hormones. And I'm also a type A, so I'm, I think, well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. You know, I'm like, I'd rather get up early, get stuff done. And the reality is if you're not sleeping, if you're not recovering, if you're not exercising appropriately and not too much and not too little, and you know, if you're not learning to say no and all those other things, your cortisol is going to be high all the time. It's going to beat up your receptors, the keyholes in the brain for all your feel good neurotransmitters. It's going to reroute all of your hormone production to cortisol, affecting fertility and recovery and your regulation of your periods. And it's going to make even recovery from surgeries like what you do very difficult. Very, very difficult.

Yeah, I tell you, it's pretty funny. I did a, a show and several like social media posts about it. I think people obviously come in and now you have people coming from Asia and Europe and the continental United States, of course. And there's not some kind of the secret in the sauce is like how you prepare for surgery. So our books coming out about sharp, our methodology for preparation. But I tell people, and I'll do like simple things, oh, I can't come to Austin. What you know, or there's always a thousand excuses. I'm like, okay, well here's what you can do right now. Betty says, and you gotta do what Betty says, you gotta sleep better, right? So the way I tell patients to do this is stop eating earlier so that you can digest better. Women in my clinic, in my experience, have even more digestive issues. And the longer a period of time you can have for digestion, the better. So if someone's going to bed at 9, I just tell them to stop eating at 6. If someone's going to bed at 10, then 7. You know, give yourself more time, not less time. I think we all get into this habit of. And my wife does not appreciate the fact I eat so early because it's complicated in terms of meal prep. But I'm getting up really early. So if I'm getting up at 4:30 to go, operate by 6 because I gotta drive, I gotta see the patient, I got to mark the patient, all these things. So I'm just running a different, you know, situation right now. And you know, when, when things are a little bit further down the road, you know, we'll adjust that. But for right now, that's the way it is. And so I'll constantly be like shutting down, eating and drinking really early. And if you don't metabolize, you know, when we're older, we don't make as many proteases or guts. Not as efficient. So you can take enzymes. I don't promote any. I know there's multiple types. We have some in our fine mass. Enzymes is great. There's gold digest. Gold, gold digest, whatever. There's just a host of them. Right. So that can help you. And then stop drinking flipping water and tea before you go to bed. Because my patients tell me they, oh, I have to get up in the middle night and go pee. I'm like, you're in your 30s and you're female. What are you doing? It's not going to help you if, if Dr. Betty is talking about your brain not working. Getting up to go and pee at 1 o' clock or 3 o' clock in the morning is not helping that because you can't get the deep sleep. You're not going to be asleep long enough. Your sleep cycles are going to be screwed up. Your hypothalamic pituitary axis, which Dr. Betty's talking about, will never work. Right?

No, no. I mean, you have to protect sleep like your life depends on it, you know, and I, my husband and I joke all the time because I'm 54 going on 55. You and I are in the same boat. And you know, on the weekends we're pre blue plate. That's what we joke about, you know, like blue plate special at a cafe cafeteria. You, I'm like, we eat like 3 o' clock in the afternoon. That's our last meal, like literally our last meal. Because personally I have a colitis history, so I've protected digestion very much, but I don't sleep well if I eat, if I finish eating at 7, chances are I'm not going to sleep well. And it is, it's hard for families and everything else like that. But yeah, trying to digest late at night is challenging, but they need to protect their sleep environment, make it dark and cold and get off their phones and, you know, stop drinking so they aren't waking up in the middle of the night because as soon as you interrupt that sleep pattern, you've lost a lot of the quality of the sleep.

Yeah, I go through it, you know, routinely because there's just some behavior modifications you can make starting as soon as you hear a show we do or a post we do. I mean, some of them are Obvious. And then some of them are not because people don't understand the quality of the food they're intaking and how, you know, food has so many unfortunate things in it. Real food doesn't. But still things that are used to herbicides and pesticides and all these things disrupt a woman's endocrine system. And then of course, things. And like, don't drink out of a plastic water bottle, for God's sakes. Please just, you know, get a grip. There's things called phthalates in them that, you know, are used to make the water bottle harder so that it holds shape. But I don't know the industry. Like, I was really happy when I was over in Spain recently. Everything's in glass.

Oh yeah. Now all of Europe's like that. You don't get plastic.

You know, I was like, wow, this is so nice. I don't have to worry about it. And they would have these huge glass water bottles in our room and I would just carry one around with me because I'm like, oh, this is right size. It's glass. I don't really have to worry about it. I'm not freaking out about a plastic water bottle because I was just like. And of course the European Union has different criteria for what you can do growing food. So that's obviously super helpful. So for everybody listening in our country, it's a little bit of like wild, wild west in terms of like what your food gets treated with. So constantly trying to evaluate and we'll get Betty's tips on how you can like better control your food quality to help your endocrine system. How about that?

Yeah. So I think the take home message for everybody is that most of your herbicides and pesticides are basically endocrine disruptors to the pests. Right? So they are, think of them as birth control for bugs. Right. So the reality is they look the same to our body. So they are very. So they look like estrogens, they look like hormones. And so when you're exposed to these on your food, they disrupt your own hormones. They also disrupt the detoxification pathways in which your body got to get, has to get rid of them. And like you said, United States allows for a lot of toxins in our food and our environment that other countries just do not allow. Genetically modified organisms, all of those things. And so when you're trying to take care of yourself, there's no way in the United states to get 100% away from it. Honestly, at some point you're going to be exposed to Something. Right. But you do what you can with what you. With what you have access to. So a lot of times what I have my people do is, you know, definitely buy organic when you can, particularly fruits and vegetables, things that aren't peeled. You know, look at the clean 15 and the dirty Dozen from the Environmental Working Group, your animal proteins. And if you do dairy, get that organic also, because you know where your toxins are stored in your fat. So if you're eating foods that are fat, like cheese or animal proteins that contain fat, they're going to have the. Whatever the animal was exposed to. And I tell a lot of people to go to your local farmer's market, join a csa, because a lot of local farmers, we have a resurgence of that in the United States. You know, they're going to do organic regenerative farming. And you get stuff that's recently picked, it's probably at its freshest, and it doesn't have a bunch of toxins on it. And you're helping the local economy and that. You just start with that and remove the plastics from your world. Just you work a little bit at a time.

Yeah. And that's. It's like the. The book Atomic Habits. So you're just trying to make very small changes that cumulatively, according to, you know, it makes sense. Like, if you can make these small changes, then over time that will make a bigger impact. And if you adjust, you know, I talk to people about air quality. I know it's like they're like, what are you talking about? I have a H Vac and this and that, and like, it's not the same. And I'll get somebody making rude comments in my, you know, posts about, you know, this, that, and the other. And I'm like, okay, so spores are very small, and so you have to have a much different system to manage those. And I hear all the time, just like you're mentioning about cortisol, if you have problems with just glutathione, and glutathione is. Binds with all these chemicals that, you know, Betty's talking about. And if you don't have enough of it or you can't metabolize, that's just hangs out in your liver. And then you have this liver that. Your liver's a beast, basically. Like, you can, you know, as we see people routinely, day after day, week after week, in restaurants and bars around the world, they abuse their livers pretty good. But if you can start making small adjustments, you know, to the air quality and the food quality, like Dr. Betty just mentioned that will help. And then, you know, for fluid, what you said avoid plastics. Everybody's heard of filtered water. I don't think we're groundbreaking here. You know, filtered, highly filtered air, kind of like mountain air. That's nice. And then filtered water and then a better quality of food and improved sleep. And you will definitely feel different. There's, there's, it's, it would be hard for me to believe if you, if you did that and got Jen to do intermittent fasting with you, like, you would. You would have a whole different probably outlook. I'm sure there's a lot of people are going to listen to this and like, yeah, they're full of it. If you did that and fasted, you would change probably. I don't know the percentages you would change, but you would definitely drop inflammation.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, in my Menopause Metabolism Mastery Program, they're utilizing different forms of appropriate fasting and cleaning up the environment, getting the toxins out using appropriate supplementation. But not a lot with. Even if somebody's not doing hormones, because we do a lot of hormone replacement. But even with a woman not doing hormones, just doing that, they'll drop a ton of inflammatory body fat and fluid. They'll feel better. They're, you know, their overall just sense of energy is better. And it's not they're doing energy drinks or anything like that. It's just your body can only take so much burden and it's gonna, you know, it's gonna. It's going to eventually slow the engine as it's getting that burden. Because people think about detoxification and biotransformation of the liver, but you gotta remember the cell has to do it first. Every cell has to do it first. And it sends it all to the liver. Right. So it starts at the cell and has to work its way downstream. And so cleaning up affects every cell.

Yeah, I mean, we talk a fair amount and, you know, the clinic about it's hard if you get too granular. So I try to keep everything, you know, as digestible, no pun intended, as possible. Because if you give people too many things to do at one time, it's. They just get overwhelmed. So when I have somebody with and almost everybody I see has some type of absorptive problem, not necessarily frank leaky gut, but many times. So we'll use, you know, liposomal liquid formulations for my patients just to avoid that and, you know, talk about what we've just described in terms of air and food and fluid quality. And really talk about sleep so people can like understand that. And we haven't talked about this, but I mean, you know, I know you're interested in metrics and benchmarking things like I am. So we use ultra human rings and whoop straps and things that really, you know, you want to know the quality and quantity of sleep in order to really help somebody. And when someone says they sleep good, I'm always, you know, that's going to get a rise because I'm going to say like really? How do you know that? How are you measuring that?

Yeah, just because you wake up and you don't feel like hammered crap doesn't mean you slept well. You know, as somebody, I've worn an aura ring for eight years. I have eight years of data, almost nine at this point.

You know, I think that's, you know, there's far fewer excuses to be made now in terms of that. So I know, you know, obviously the date is the date. If you can't get six and a half hours of sleep with about hour and a half to two and a half deep, you got no chance in recovery.

So here's the interesting thing. A lot of women struggle getting that much, particularly in perimenopause and menopause, particularly of deep sleep. Like if you were to look at a woman's, you know, data, it's often much shorter and it's due to probably hormone disruption and other things, but it's usually shorter than a man's. Your testosterone level helps growth hormone levels.

I was trying to get people engaged in, in wearing or using a wearable to know better. And you know, so since you did that. I have a patient who, she's a cancer patient and she came in last week and wanted to have a follow up discussion about what to do. I have a lot of patients who, who want to explant and they'll want an aesthetic flat closure with or without a fat transfer. And, and this patient came in and we were talking about, you know, the surgical things that she had questions about. And then I asked her how she was sleeping and it just into this discussion about so heart rate variability is something I'm always looking at but I don't discuss it out out with patients very often because it's just like I said, another level of detail that becomes a little bit more challenging for them if they're not used to that. It's not part of their thought process and looking at it, you know, understanding it. So she says, oh my, my HRV is only 18. And I said okay, you know what, since you threw that out there, obviously you're going to know something about deep sleep because you're looking at aura ring or an ultra human ring or a loop strap or something, apple watch, whatever's calculating this. And I forget which wearable she had. Honestly, I can't remember. And she was getting, I think it was 20 minutes of deep sleep. And I was like, oh, that's, that's a problem. So to your point, obviously that's a different biologic profile because that person's been in menopause, because they put them into menopause basically early from cancer treatment. So that's a whole different category. But to your point, like that is going to be always the, the challenge. And yet the goal for my patients is to get them an hour and a half to two and a half of the deep so that everything that should happen that's magical at night with growth hormone release and everything else can happen because you, you recover at night, not during the day. So for everybody listening, you, while Betty and I are at work, we're not recovering. And while you're upright doing your thing, you're not recovering either. That only happens when you sleep. So if you can't make adjustments and get more and more of that, both quality and quantitatively the length of time to sleep, it's going to be a challenge to recover. And I see this all the time with patients. So we spend all this time going through and doing things in the clinic with hyperbaric oxygen therapy and lymphatic massage to try to get people in more parasympathetic state, red light therapy and all the supplementation, nutrition support to try to really stimulate them and get them into an anabolic, which is a healing phase more rapidly.

Absolutely. You know, it's, I think the challenge for a lot of women is they don't really get that deep sleep. And the other part that most women, I'm sure your patients say this is we're all worried about dementia. I would say that by far, hands down is the, the biggest worry people have. And my, at least my patients, my clients is, you know, they don't want to, they don't want to lose their mind and have a physically, you know, still here body. And when you get deep sleep, that's when you actually store your short term memory. It's like the filing cabinets get opened and your brain puts away what happened that day so you can remember. You know, the idea of like, remember in college you would cram for a test, stay up all night and Take the test, you'd actually don't remember any of that, you know, by the time you sleep the next day. Because deep sleep in the early part of the evening is when you do that. And then I know that most of my women will also say, you know, they get into perimenopause and menopause emotionally, they feel frazzled. Right. They might be more anxious. I mean, one in five women experience depression, one in three experience anxiety. And REM sleep is when you process your emotions. So when you have completely discombobulated sleep, you may not be experiencing anxiety and depression and cognitive problems. You have a sleep problem that is contributing to feeling like that, you know, and so I think it's just under underappreciated across the board.

I do too. So when, when we do our interviews, and this is a good kind of close is if I don't know that we know this because usually it's stereotypical that the man is snoring and the spouse or single other taps moves them around and stuff. And my wife did this to me because I snored and I'm not overweight. I don't have, you know, the typical, you know, anatomy issues. But I mean externally I don't. But in, in the back of my airway I have a narrowing. So if you did a CT scan and spun it and looked at it, it's narrow. So you know, you have to do mouth guard. And I wear a CPAP. And the Dr. Betty's point, you do not want to set yourself up for brain problems. So your brain needs oxygen and at night you don't want to be somebody who's waking up 19 times a night in addition to going to the bathroom, you don't want to be struggling for oxygen. So hypoxia is definitely, you know, a big, big problem in terms of predisposing to the things with, you know, your, your brain health. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, all the bad things.

Yeah. You know, there's apnea, right. Where you stop breathing and often snoring is part of that. But there's upper airway resistance, which is probably what you've had your entire life. And that gets under diagnosed and it's very common in women. And the damage to the brain is greater at a lower rate of, let's say impairment. So the take home message is if you've got airway problems, if you're asleep, like, if you like I have my people look at their aura rings and if their sleep is always consistently poor and they can't figure out why we always do a sleep study, always. Because chances are they've got upper airway, they've got a bunch of arousals that are happening. When you and I met, I had braces on because I did palate expansion for that reason. And so I think it's very much under diagnosed. And that may be one of the big drivers for women's health is they don't realize they actually have a problem because they're not snoring like a freight train.

Right. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show today. I'm glad. Even though we did it at 7am on a Monday. Been a pleasure to have you. And I look forward to obviously seeing you again soon at one of our meetings. So everybody please look up Betty Betty, tell them how to find you and. And what's the best way to interact with y' all on social.

Yeah, so you can find me on social@bettymurray_Phd. You can also look me up@bettymurray.com and look me up in those two locations. I also have Menopause Mastery, which is my podcast. I've had Dr. Rob on there before talking about breast implant illness. So, yeah, you join me there.

Awesome.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Thank you for coming on.