Women’s Health, Medical Courage, and the Future of Healing with Dr. Christiane Northrup

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Good morning, everyone. Dr. Stillman, I am very excited today to be welcoming Dr. Christiane Northrup to the podcast. Dr. Northrup is someone who I have followed for a long time. We actually share a history of having lived and practiced in Maine. I did my residency at Maine Medical Center where she worked.

Oh my God.

Yes, I know. I didn't think you probably knew that about me because it's not particularly— I don't hide the fact, but it doesn't become a big part of my bio. And I don't, and I don't think you were practicing at Maine. You weren't practicing at Maine Med when I was there, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Dr. Northrup graduated from Case Western Reserve. She then went to— that's in with her Bachelor of Arts in biology. Then she went to Dartmouth Medical School. Internship residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts. And then you had a very long career, from what I read, in academic medicine. You were an associate clinical professor at Tufts, and then you were at— in South Portland, and then you were an instructor at University of Vermont, and then Maine Medical Center, which, you know, at some point became affiliated with Tufts. And then you left academia, started your own practice and practiced until I think it was 1999.

Yeah. And then— Right in the—

yes. —moved full-time into speaking and writing. I've looked up to you for a long time because you're one of those rare people who's on the one hand a genuine clinician who also survived in academic medicine for a period of time and then who came out of academic medicine, did something interesting, seeing patients in the real world and also then had the courage to have controversial opinions and not hide them for various reasons that people hide those opinions. I like to start though, Dr. Northrup, because I just gave you the intro, but I actually love to start by asking people who they are and where they're from because they always have something interesting to add on top of the bio.

Okay. Who am I?

Yeah, I love that. It's such an open-ended question, but I think it's very important.

I love that question because I'm working on it. I'm reading a book called Fearless by Jamie Winthrop, Winthrop, whatever. And he said, we're not our vocation. We are what is our identity? What is our identity? So I've come up with, yeah, I'm a kind of a fearless spiritual midwife for the innocence of humans. That. But I'm literally, I am working on who are you, not your vocation, who are you. So Jamie was a policeman and did tremendous amount of work with the Taliban in Arab countries, and he said his identity is a militant peacemaker. Okay, so he's a cop who knows how to go into these situations with terrorists and ask them what their true identity is. Because none of us is a Democrat, a Republican. I'm definitely a healer and a warrior. I would say those two. And I believe that I'm here to fan the flames of new life. That's kind of it.

That's it. Just that. Where would you say you're from?

I probably Alpha Centauri, but I grew up in Ellicottville, New York. In this little town where my family still has the family farm. We raised Angus and my dad was a dentist, but a kind of a gentleman farmer. And so we still have the 500-acre farm and my brother raises Black Angus and it's very grounding. I grew up shoveling manure. I was in 4-H. I got a pregnant Quarter Horse for writing a letter in the 8th grade about why I wanted this horse, and she then gave birth to 4 different fillies and lived well into when I was a practicing physician. So my brother said I should be sending you the grain bills.

That's quite the story. Yes. Now the next thing I like to ask people, particularly with an introduction like that into their early life, is what was it that inspired you to become a physician?

You won't believe this. I'm trying. It was a better degree than a PhD. That's the only reason. Okay. So my aunt and uncle were both medical doctors. My dad's a dentist in the middle of it. Okay. He had worked at a MASH unit in World War II. So we had all these, and he was a lot older than my mom. So he married her when he was 36, just back from the service. She's 19. And they had a sort of Sound of Music thing with skiing. Skiing was the deal in my family. And I had a sister who was on the US ski team, but I digress. So anyway, my uncle and aunt always came to family dinners and all that. And they made fun of my dad who was a dentist. He wasn't a real doctor, but he believed that you could tell someone's health through their smile. And he was holistic, very holistic. We grew up on organic food, Adele Davis. We had a, compost heap. We— my mother spiked our orange juice with vitamin C. My parents were joggers. My mom did yoga. We did all kinds of stuff like that. And my aunt, before I went to med school, gave me the book The Nuts Among the Berries so that I knew what a stupid health nut I was. And so I went to medical school because having interviewed all these places to be a biology teacher, I called my advisor, Dr. Davis from Case Western Reserve, And he goes, "Listen, you being a biology teacher is like a thoroughbred running a junk horse race. Why don't you go to medical school?" That's literally what he said to me. Then my dad said, "Hey, at the end of 4 years, you gotta have be something. You might as well have an MD after your name." That was it. So then I applied to a whole bunch of medical schools. It was just around the time that they were starting to take a lot of women. My class at Dartmouth was 50% women back then. And so I said, "Okay, I never intended to practice." Then, up at Dartmouth, I see a baby born. I nearly fell to my knees with the wonder of it. I'm weeping. The nurse is yelling at the medical student because he let go of the cord with a Kelly clamp, and then the cord's like a little fire hose spraying the whole room. And I am meanwhile overcome, which I now know it was the Holy Spirit. I'm overcome with this pain-filled, joy-filled pain that no one should ever be in this room who doesn't see it as the holy moment that it is.

And that was it.

Yeah. So that's why I went into OB-GYN. Powerful. Yeah.

What do you think of the— are there any experiences in your early life that stand out to you as connecting you to that level of empathy and awe for the world? Because you also majored in biology, and so I have a feeling there were some key moments in your childhood that really shaped you for that, or maybe some key influences. Does anything come to mind?

I always believed in— yeah, one of the main things that happened to me when I was about 12, I was babysitting for this couple and I saw a box, a book was in a box and the name on the box was Natives of Eternity. And I was the ultimate good girl, valedictorian of my high school class, but I ripped open the box because I had to see it. And the book was Natives of Eternity by Flower Newhouse, who was a Christian mystic. In Escondido, California, and she had a place called the Christ Word Center. And I went home and told my mother about the angels, the angels of birth, the angels of death, the elementals, the divas, the nature spirits. And I was overcome with the wonder of, oh, good, what I've always thought is true. And then began a series of breakfasts with a woman named Gretchen Carroll who had been to the Christ Word Ministry. And then we would talk about all of those things because she knew Flower Newhouse, who could see angels. And we talked about all of that. And then my sister was killed when I was in my second year of residency, when everyone was dying of GYN cancers. It was at Tufts. It was the oncology rotation. And my sister's killed in a car accident. And my mother met a woman who was a spiritualist minister. And she channeled this entity called Dr. Andre, and he came to the house. I'll never forget it. She came to the house, becomes this Dr. Andre. And I know, by the way, the Christians are just horrified at this. Just, I know that. And then she explained what had happened to my sister and that my grandmother, who had died the year before, was in the car with her. And so I always knew there was this other thing. And I read all of Edgar Cayce when I was in my teenage years and reincarnation. And I remember reading Joan Grant's novels. She had one called Far Memory, which was her memory of being a pharaoh. And that she was, you had to be, you were buried for 3 days. And if you lived, you got that crown with the third eye open. And then I went to medical school and residency and I said, oh yeah, this is like being buried alive. If you can get through this, then, you know, now I realize it's just those of us who become doctors, what are we good at? We're good at following orders and we're good at incredibly hard work and going without sleep. But in terms of thinking outside the box, there are very few who do that. But I went into medical school— Oh yeah, wait, I forgot the biggest one. Here's the biggest one. My sister, who I named Bonnie Laurie, was born and she wouldn't eat and she died at the age of 6 months in a pool of her own vomit in the hospital, Buffalo Children's. At the time, you weren't allowed to hold your child. You just could look in a little window into the nursery. My brother was then born when I was— How did she pass?

What was the cause?

No one ever knew. Never had the cause. Then my brother is born Now, my mother was on antibiotics every single day. I think streptomycin for what they thought was viral pneumonia. Now, at this point, every single day, I don't even think— what duration? Exactly. So every day we went to Florida, to Fort Lauderdale, so she could get rid of this lung thing. And that's the whole pregnancy. So I think the baby was damaged from that. But we don't know. Then my brother Bill's born. He won't eat. He's in the hospital and the nurse comes up to my mother and she says, "If I were you, I'd get him out of here. The doctors don't know what he's got." My mother was told he was mentally defective, that he wouldn't live, whatever. And here's what they did, which you could not do today, 'cause Child Protective Services would take your baby. My parents signed him out of the hospital against medical advice. And tube-fed him every hour on the hour at home. And I remember holding the tube. G-tube or NG? One year. G-tube or an NG? NG. And my dad was good at that, obviously, because he did all the oral stuff. No doctor could find out what was wrong. Finally, my parents were introduced to a Dr. Crump at Women's Medical Center, which no longer exists, in Philadelphia. She was a pioneer in pediatric endoscopy, and she put down a fiber optic light, ga, to look at his esophagus, and she said, "It is so eroded that if you don't get that tube out, it's going to rupture, and then he'll die of a massive infection in the mediastinum." And so they took the tube out, and she goes, "Let's just wait." Can you imagine? Doctor's just waiting. It's like delivering a breech, please sit on your head.

It's one of my favorite Hippocrates quotes. He said, "Sometimes to do nothing is a good remedy." That's, yes.

2 days later, he starts to eat. They give him, now imagine how stupid this is. What's the first thing they give him? Orange juice. Orange juice with an esophagus that's eroded, but he was so hungry, he'd swallow, scream, I swallow, scream.

Yeah. Wow.

And so I'm— then we all go to the airport to pick up my mother. My brother Bill is eating a roll that the stewardess had given him. We all cry. Now I'm interviewing at Yale Medical School and my father starts to get chest pain. They take him to the cardiac center at Buffalo General. And after 2 days, he calls my mother. IV is infiltrated. He's got— so the arm is blown up. He's getting phlebitis from that. He has a fever. He calls my mother. He says, come get me. They don't know what's going on. She goes in. She picks him up. Chest leads hanging off of him. Like he walks right out of the CCU. Okay. And comes home and sits up in a chair. So I'm driving home from Yale Medical School. I come in the house, he's sitting up in his chair, he can't lie down, he's got fluid 2/3 of the way up in his lung fields. And indeed, they didn't know what was going on. He had infectious pericarditis, completely misdiagnosed, and he healed at home. Okay, so imagine I have—

with or without antibiotics?

Without. So I have these two massive experiences before I go to medical school. See, God said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to fully weaponize you against this system where there's no hope, where they, they do all these incredible things. I knew in my bones, childhood indoctrination is so powerful, and many people go to medical school because someone died in their family and they're going to make sure that never happens again. But I went to medical school with this. I remember I'm ironing and my parents are very upset that I'm going to medical school. Think about it. Oh my God, you're going to turn into your aunt or your uncle who were so dogmatic, right? And so I said, no, Mom, I'm ironing. I'm just going to find out why doctors don't talk to you. Why doctors don't go into the whole everything. So yes, that was my early pre-med school indoctrination. Then once I went home and I said to my dad, I just, I'm learning bacteriology, right? And I say to dad, what antibiotic are you using for the oral infections you're seeing? And he goes, yeah, pretty much whatever is cheap down at the pharmacy. And I learned later, from the chief of family medicine, John Randall, at Maine Med. He said, I would never say this publicly, but an antibiotic can just stun the germs so that your body can take over. Now, you remember how they tell you, you must take the full 10-day course? The truth is you probably don't need to, but you did not hear that from me.

It's a funny— it's a funny observation that when they because I remember being in Maine Med specifically in the infectious disease service. I almost did an infectious disease fellowship. I at least flirted with the idea. Yeah. When they look at what antibiotic do we use and how do we use it and how do we administer it, it's all about we've got to make sure there's a very low failure rate. And somehow along the way I got interested— actually, I remember now, I was curious about why some people failed antibiotics for Lyme disease. And so I started to look into the history of failure of antibiotic treatment for syphilis in the HIV, early HIV days. And that's a whole nother kettle— isn't it— fish can of worms. We don't want to open that one today. It's— we would spend the rest of the time.

I love that you're interested in that. Yeah, and that back then, oh my God. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, So it was interesting. They noticed this high failure rate of antibiotics and syphilis in these patients with HIV, and that essentially, in my mind, confirmed the— this idea, this concept that the idea that antibiotics cure infections is just not fair at all to the immune system. Does the antibiotic stun the bacteria? Does it disable them? I will leave that to the bacteriologists and the pharmacologists to debate. Split hairs over. I just have always been shocked by the number of people who have some kind of amazing story like your father's of recovering from an infectious illness that's quite profound. And I say that as a general internist who's managed things like that. And if the patient like your father said, hey, you're my family doctor, I'm home from the hospital against medical advice, what do you advise me to do? I'm not sure I wouldn't say you should go seek, you should go back to the hospital.

Oh, I know. I love it. But think about it. We are, we're a medical family. So Uncle Robert was the great white doctor and his son Robbie did infectious disease in the third world. And so we, and all of our physicals were done by my uncle at Thanksgiving. Okay. So we just, and it was the time when I remember taking a boyfriend home who was an orthopedic surgeon resident and my uncle greets him. Welcome to the fraternity. It was that kind of thing. And my dad occasionally went to chiropractors. That was like anathema. You never did that. So then I became— I joined the board of the American Holistic Medical Association, founded by Norm Shealy in 1979. And he was a neurosurgeon, and he said there'd be a lot less back pain if there were a lot fewer neurosurgeons. Norm was incredible. He worked with Carolyn Myss, the medical intuitive, who would tell you the emotional aspects of healing and wrote a book called Why People Don't Heal and How They Can. So then I'm spending all of the '80s and early '90s with all these holistic physicians from all over the world, and we're terrified that our licenses are going to be removed just for talking about the mind-body connection. I met Candace Pert, who discovered endorphins and kephalins, the chemicals that the brain makes when it thinks. Deepak Chopra was brand new out of the chute. He had practiced in a little hospital out of Western Mass. He was just coming out.

I imagine you must know my friend Russell Jaffe. No, I don't. Really? That's so funny because he went to Boston College, I believe, or maybe it was BU. Don't quote me on that. Yeah. So you guys ran in the same circles and he was— I'm not sure what years he would have been up in New England doing all that. Now he lives in Virginia, but we could talk about this corner of your life probably for the rest of the hour. But I'm so— what I'm most curious about, because you've set the stage for, okay, you're coming out of this holistic integrative family and you went in knowing that this was what you wanted to do. And then you had these very profound experiences. That you describe around birth that set your trajectory for obstetrics and gynecology. Yeah, but there's much more in terms of the— that we haven't talked about yet that I'm really curious to hear. What— and this comes down to two of the most controversial things, I think, in integrative medicine today, maybe ever. Number one is bioidentical hormones, and number two is vaccines. And I'm not sure which I want to tackle first. So I think I'm going to ask you instead— I'm actually curious before I even ask you, of all the things that you think are controversial in medicine, is there anything else that ranks up there with bioidentical hormones and vaccines?

Probably if you got into it, there would be, but they're not on the— the CABG procedures, right? Oh, sure. Yes.

Elective cardiac stenting. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's not my field.

So I'm sure. And then also thyroid cancer. We're finding all these women have these tiny little things that are not really cancer. I would say cancer being parasites, that's coming out as a big one. And I did a webinar called Parasitism with Jeff Wolfman, integrative doc from Vermont, Lee Merritt. And I'd say the other thing that's controversial, really controversial, is do viruses even exist? So now we're in the vaccine world. And if you look at vaccinology, did you happen to see, what is her name? Suzanne Humphreys.

Yes. Oh, the Rogan episode. It was phenomenal. One of her books. Yeah.

Suzanne started her career here in Maine anyway. Yeah. Did she really? Where did she work? Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. And that's when they mandated a flu shot for everyone who came in. And so what she was noticing is— I recall. Suddenly these people with no kidney problems, she's having to put on dialysis. I know. So she does something no one— she reads the package insert. I know. And goes to the head of the hospital and says, can we just wait on this until— if you give someone a flu shot when they come in with a heart attack or a broken femur, the body's already stressed. Don't give them this. Anyway, the rest is history. Then she wrote Dissolving Illusions. She had death threats. She had to get out of the country. And then she circles back finally after COVID to be on Rogan.

Have you— you're friends with her somehow? I don't think it—

but she's good friends with Sherri Tenpenny, and I'm good friends with Sherri.

Okay, great. Yeah, it's a small club. Yeah. Okay, so that— but I'm curious, when did you start to question the vaccine narrative as a medical student, resident, practicing physician?

When I started to question that, when I began to follow Joe Mercola and Sherri Tenpenny, and I was on Joe's show early on, and he was one of the absolute best integrative medicine guys with his newsletter, by the way, to this day, X will not let Mercola post things on X. So he was— you always know who the real people are because they're targeted on all the main channels, even the alternative channels. So I learned about Sherri Tenpenny. Oh, actually, where I learned about vaccines was with the macrobiotic community. I met Michio Kushi in Boston and I became the doctor for all these macrobiotic people. And then I got into the work of Harold Buttram and all the vaccine stuff from way back and realized this was not a good idea. So I never vaccinated my own children, and that was in the '80s. So I would say in every book I wrote, vaccines are neither 100% safe nor 100% effective. And I'd say make sure that you do your research, and the deeper you get into that hole, the more horrifying it becomes. So you realize that the polio that they had was from spraying DDT and neurotoxins in the summertime. It's not what you think. And then when you look at even the smallpox epidemics, that vaccine killed millions of people. So they had whole towns in the 1800s in England that said, we're not vaccinating. It's been a big deal. Big. Got it. Yeah, I would say, but it's taken on religious fervor because here's— let me tell you what was shocking to me. This is shocking. So COVID comes out and I'm thinking something's really off here. And I began to do this sort of nightly, which I, in retrospect, realize is a ministry where I tell people, is your child coming home from college and calling you a racist? Because I'm not sure How I managed to write 3 New York Times bestsellers being the terrible racist that I have become. And on and on it goes. And then Clay Clark asked me to come and tell people at the Reawaken America tour what's in the shot. And I'd learned from Carrie Maudé what was in the shot. And it was held at Rhema Bible College. And I was not used to having Christians real Christians pray over me. Real Christians.

I can't even unpack what that means. You can't, you can't.

But I'll tell you what, okay, to me, if you are a— okay, not a Christian— if you are a follower of Christ, okay, there's a few stories that you want to remember. Probably the biggest was Lazarus dies and he goes, don't worry, I'll, I'll be— I'm coming, right? Lazarus is in the tomb for 4 days. And Jesus just says, "Get up, get up and walk." So he comes out. And then there's the well at Bethesda. This is in John chapter whatever. And he says to the crippled guy who's trying to get into the— every time the angels are stirring up the water, but he can't get over the other people. And Jesus says, "Get up and walk." And so suddenly I'm in this world where I know that Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead and said to us, "These things and more ye shall do also." And suddenly I'm watching all these churches become vaccine clinics and getting huge amounts of money to do this, especially Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Interesting. And I'm saying to myself, there's something that isn't clicking here. If this— if you are a follower of what Jesus taught, I don't care if you call yourself a Christian or not, if you are a follower of this— and, and by then, by the way, I've seen people like my father get over stuff. My brother, by the way, who the doctor said he's going to die and he's going to be mentally Retarded. You've seen miracles. Yeah. And I know Dannion Brinkley, who's been dead 4 times. Dannion wrote a book called Saved by the Light. Dannion was a Marine assassin who got hit by lightning, and his story, Saved by the Light, what he saw when he left and died and then came back, he is unbelievable. And he's been dead 3 more times, so he knows what's on the other side. And he said we are magnificent, creative beings made in the image of God. And so you hang around people like that, which I always have, and then you go to a, a Christian church and they're having vaccine clinics. And I'm like, I don't understand. But at the same time, we have all these people going to Waldorf schools who've never vaccinated their kids, and they followed Rudolf Steiner And suddenly COVID comes along. Oh, this is different. And they're posting—

I know. Would you like a, would you like an mRNA vaccine with your gluten-free, non-GMO, soy-free, dairy-free, vegan coconut milk yogurt?

Sad. Well said. And then posting pictures of themselves having spiritual experiences, getting this shot. Including the guy who started— oh, I can't remember his name, but he started Metagenics.

Oh, this guy, Jeff Bland. Jeff Bland.

Jeff Bland. I watch him on Instagram. Yeah. Getting his mRNA shot and talking about what's happening as his heart rate goes up. And so it was like some giant— I guess we would call it a spirit of deception came across the world. And so I was— okay, if you've been in holistic medicine as long as I have been and you're afraid that there's going to be a pink slip in the doctor's lounge at Maine Med every time you go in there, that's going to— by the way, I lost my professorship at the University of Vermont after I wrote The Wisdom of Menopause. Really?

That's another episode in and of itself. Yeah.

So they sent me a little letter. You're no longer an assistant clinical professor. Okay. So I've been under the gun for a long time. I've been in the crucible. So I think when COVID hit, God had really— iron sharpens iron. I was ready for it. It was almost like my whole career had prepared me to stand in the fire of this. And then I, my favorite credential of all is being named one of the Disinformation Dozen, one of the 12 people on the planet responsible for 70% of the disinformation on COVID on the planet, which is absolutely incorrect. If you look at it, it's 0.5%. But I was targeted and I used to believe that if you choose the thought that feels better and you kept your vibration high, nothing bad would ever happen to you. Now I realize that when those things happen, that is your opportunity to decide. Are you made in the image of God? Is the indwelling Holy Spirit more powerful than the enemy? That's the choice. Yeah.

Powerful stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we talked about vaccines, the other key, the controversial issue in medicine that I'd love to get your thoughts on, because you're one of few people I can talk to who really over the course of your career, first of all, we didn't have any drugs for menopause when you graduated medical school?

Oh, we did. We had Premarin.

Had they just— they just must have just come out.

They had Premarin, believe it or not, in the '70s. And I'll tell you why I know this. I am a young medical student, and I have had to go to Claremont, Vermont, in order to do a family practice rotation with a local family doctor. And I'm in the library, and I climb up onto the thing, and there's a book called Feminine Forever. Oh, Suzanne Somers? Uh, no, this was long before Suzanne Somers. Feminine Forever was written by an OB-GYN, and here's the backstory. And his wife reaches menopause, and what happens at menopause is that the filter comes off because you've had it with all this stuff that you haven't been saying for all those years. And So his wife started to tell him what she thought, and anyway, he decided that's when you're no longer feminine, meaning submissive. Anyway, he started promoting Premarin, and it was made by Wyeth-Ayerst at the time. And so this book Feminine Forever basically said every woman on the planet requires Premarin in order to stay forever feminine. Seriously, sounds like a great—

he must have been on their speakers bureau, right?

Absolutely. And then So my mother's best friend developed very low-grade endometrial cancer on Premarin because here's what they were doing. Everyone was put on Premarin, but they didn't oppose it with a progesterone. So then in the '80s, they added medroxyprogesterone acetate, Provera, which they did just as— to take off the waxy buildup. They just didn't think that progesterone did anything, and they used a synthetic form, medroxyprogesterone acetate. And so that, that led to Prempro, Premarin and medroxyprogesterone acetate, so that you could do both things. Then I met Joel Hargrove, who ran the Menopause Center at Vanderbilt, and he said Premarin is a natural hormone if your native food is hay, because it's I love it.

What a great way to put that. Yeah, I love it.

He said, 'I grew up on a farm,' and so his best friend ran a pharmacy, and the two of them came up with bioidentical hormones, the first ones. In fact, Joel Hargrove patented the first oral natural progesterone, bioidentical progesterone, and there was a pharmacy in Madison, Wisconsin that was the the first formulary pharmacy that made all of these things. What's the name of it? Oh, I can't remember, but it was the— anyway, you've heard— it was— they were the natural hormones. But Joe Delk was the roommate of Joel Hargrove. So Joe Delk had the Delk Pharmacy in Tennessee. So I used to call Joe all the time, and they had created a transdermal 17-beta estradiol, progesterone, plus or minus testosterone if you needed it. And you could titrate your own dose by your symptoms. If you were having a lot of hot flashes, you needed more estrogen anyway. And it cost like $60 a month. And it was— and so Joel had tried to get the big pharma people to patent You can't— okay, you and I know you can't patent God's creation. Think about it. You can't patent a naturally occurring hormone. So then we're trying desperately to figure out how to get this, the natural hormones to women so they don't have to go through pregnant mare's urine or medroxyprogesterone acetate. And by the way, that's what they're using for, you know, those pellets they put in for birth control. Joel Hargrove said about that Provera as birth control. He said, "It makes women so ornery, no one wants to come near them." That's how it works for birth control. He was such a great guy. Just like a good Southern farm boy who's got common sense.

I'm not sure you could say that at Vanderbilt today and not get fired. You couldn't. You couldn't.

No. All the people like us, I'm sorry, but they have to put us on a farm somewhere. Anyhow. What they came up with, they patented the adhesive for the patches. So the Vivelle Dot and Climera, that's all bioidentical hormone. You should have seen me on Oprah. I got Suzanne Somers on the one hand, I got the head of OB/GYN at Northwestern on the other hand, and I'm like the referee because yes, you can get bioidentical hormones at a regular pharmacy. You just need to know what you're looking for. And then Suzanne Somers says, "Oh no, they're all poison. If it's Big Pharma, it's poison." Not true. But here's the way I think about it. And I met John Lee, and John Lee was at one of our holistic medical meetings. One of the greats. He's the guy who formulated 2% natural progesterone, which by the way, works like a charm for women with premenstrual migraines because it's the lack of natural progesterone because you're not ovulating. Or you have estrogen dominance and your estrogen is turning into a catechol estrogen from all the stress hormones in your body. And Joel taught me that one. You know that if you've got a bunch of estrogen and not enough progesterone, it's going to go down the pathway of an androgen and a catechol estrogen, which makes like PMS. And so you just need a little 2% progesterone, which you can get on Amazon. As Emerita or Progest. Thank God Vitex, chaste berry, will eventually do the same thing because it works in the pituitary gland. God has given us everything we need.

Question for you then. Yeah, you met all these people, but what was it like to— I'm sure you had the teaching in your— actually, I wonder what your teaching was in your OB/GYN residency. And then afterwards, like, how did that all play out? And how did you wind up sort of the outlier still using bioidentical hormones while 99% of your colleagues basically just throw 20 different pharmaceuticals at all the 20 different symptoms of menopause instead of just using the 3 hormones that—

or 4 hormones that women are missing? Well, what happened is in 1982, there was an article in the journal Family Circle about PMS. And suddenly, women had a name for what they were suffering. And so I became the PMS queen of New England. Because I realized, wait a minute, if this is a natural process of the human body, then This is an aberration. And this is what led me to write Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom. How is it that the cycle responsible for all human life on Earth, how is it that it's so pathologized that all these women suffer? This doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, I understand in the Bible there's the old Adam and Eve, she'll bring forth in pain and suffering because she ate the fruit of the— I'm now realizing what that is. Just this minute, I finally get that. It's, "Oh, okay, this does hold water." If you are living in the way that Jesus taught us to live, a righteous life, then you're not going to suffer from all of this stuff. But we also know there's epigenetics, and we know that there's all this, all these hormone imitators and all that. But anyway, I learned that you could easily cure PMS, easily, and women would get better. And then listen to this part: after 3 months, they couldn't hold the lifestyle changes. Why? That's when I learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences study that Vincent Felitti had pioneered in San Diego. And he's— and it came from one woman in a weight loss clinic. She's 18 years old, and she says— and she was successfully losing weight, and then the weight loss stopped. And she said, "Overweight is overlooked, and that's what I need to be." And he realized that the excess weight was her protection because she had been raped at the age of 18, and then she wanted to be sure that never happened again. So Felitti posited that the things people do, the addictions and so on, alcohol, smoking, and all of this, these are actually solutions to the emotional pain that they can't deal with. And until we understand that— and by the way, so then that old Adverse Childhood Experiences, the CDC bought it or something, so you can still see that pyramid. And by the way, they were able to show that the number of adverse childhood experiences— a mentally ill parent, watching your mother get beaten, any of those, divorce, the number of adverse childhood experiences was directly correlated with the number of emergency room visits and premature death. Now we're back to the childhood that I had where I watched my brother heal despite the best doctors ever, okay? And right now, by the way, he runs a global HVAC business, and he does have some autoimmune stuff back from that time of really bad nutrition. And he's working very nicely with a carnivore diet, by the way, because we know simple carbs and all that are a problem. Anyhow, I learned that PMS was a lifestyle disease, and that's when I learned about adult children of alcoholics, dysfunctional families, Adverse Childhood Experiences. So when I taught the medical students, I would teach them that the— what they were seeing in a person's health with the testing and the screening, that was the tip of the iceberg. Their whole life was the 3/4 underneath the surface, and that if they really wanted to get well, we had to address what's underneath the surface. Now I know that all of that is in a library around your body called your biofield. And there's enormous amount of research on the plasma and ether around the body that is incongruent vibrationally. So I like to think of our adverse childhood experiences as pure gold. They're pure gold when you can transform them.

Anything is possible. That said, they are— I've certainly found the— I'm— it brings to mind actually a podcast I just listened to. It was Tony Robbins who was interviewed by a gentleman whose name escapes me. And Tony talks about his childhood and how horrific it was.

Oh my God. It was, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And look at what he's gone on to do. And he's very clear that he would never have done all this if he'd grown up in a happy white picket fence. You wouldn't. Perfect. Yeah, I know. We— this was such an interesting experience for me as a practicing physician because I came out of a very biochemical, biomedical paradigm, and mind-body medicine, emotions, they were not things that we talked about when I was a kid in the house. They weren't things that any of my mentors talked about in academic medicine. I certainly had no one talking about mind-body medicine until I got to residency. And then I started to become aware of really just how, you know, emotions could make people sick. And I actually sought out a mentor who you may know. Do you know Luis Maldonado?

Yes, absolutely.

Wow. Yes. I spent— wow. His stuff's great. I spent a few weeks or maybe a month in an elective rotation with him during residency up in Bangor. And read all of his books and thought it was totally fascinating. Anyway, fast forward into my career in integrative medicine, I found that I could get people great results with vitamins and minerals and amino acids and all the nutrition, light therapy and getting outside and lifestyle and diet and et cetera, et cetera. But then I had these cases that wouldn't respond, or we would get, like you describe in the weight loss case, improvement, and then it stops. Yep. And I started to realize, okay, this is where I have to pivot the conversation into, well, what emotionally, spiritually is going on in these cases? What we've ended up doing is— and it's very interesting, I never thought I would get so deep into psychology as a physician, but if you don't get very deep into examining patterns of how people speak and what they say— and one of the toughest things I've found is trying to figure out Sometimes I find, because I find that the people who make people the sickest are in the Cluster B personality disorder camp.

Oh my God, that's why I wrote Dodging Energy Vampires. Oh great. Oh my God, that's it right there. And that's 1 in 5 people, 1 in 5.

Everyone listening to this podcast, it's that— I thought it was more like— but I think this is interesting, Chris. So I I wonder if it's 1 in 5, but what I found was that there's a lot of people— I think the genuine psychopaths, narcissists, I remember the figure was like 3 to 5% of the population. But yeah, no, that's true.

But there's a spectrum of the others. They rub off on everybody. It's like Asperger's. Exactly. It's a spectrum. Yeah.

But I think more than that, in my mind, I think of it as there's the genuine narcissists and psychopaths who truly don't have any empathy. But then there's the people who they rub off on. That was their parent. It was their father. It was their mother. They patterned off of that, so they might actually care deep, deep, deep down. And these are the parents who only cry when the child is dying or whatever. It takes some kind of catastrophic problem to get those emotions out into the open. And even then there's this, oh my gosh, I have emotions, feelings, what do I do with these? So anyway, I started to talk to patients about this and the strangest things started to happen. Stories like, I know last time I had a headache was when I— the day I broke up with my boyfriend, or all these symptoms doctors had diagnosed me with is Lyme or Candida or mold or whatever. Not that those don't cause problems. I don't want to gaslight anyone who's been poisoned by these things. I know. But they would say, oh my gosh, all these problems went away. And so that's what I find so particularly interesting and challenging about treating patients. And with women, the hormone piece is so many moving parts. It makes it very nuanced, very challenging.

It's very nuanced. It's very nuanced. I am in complete— yeah. Because here's why, the perimenopausal time is a crossroads, grow or die. That's why I wrote "The Wisdom of Menopause." I finally figured it out. Why? Because I went through it. And I said, "Oh, that's what this is about." See, every disease is biosymbolic. The degree to which you suffer at perimenopause is the degree to which Your life is already out of balance and your body is finally saying, "Oh really? You're gonna keep doing this and you think I'm gonna serve you for the next 50 years? Uh-uh." This is a big reset. You have to look at your marriage. You have to look at your job. I, at that time, I had a fibroid. I used to say this. I had a fibroid as big as my husband's head. So we don't escape from this personally. You got to always be looking at your own. What does it say in the Bible? Take the stick out of your own eye. Yes. Kind of thing. If women could understand, we can give you either bioidentical hormones or the herb Pueraria mirifica or one of the things, right? There's homeopathy, there's all kinds of things. But the last thing you need is an antidepressant. Frankly. But as long as you know you're moving toward the wisdom years, like, life really actually gets better. But it won't get better if you're listening to the voice of the enemy, which says, "You're too old. It's too late." All of the ageism stuff is intense. That's why I wrote Goddesses Never Age, because I was gonna defy everything they told you about getting older.

So yeah, I've gotta go see patients cuz I still have a practice.

Okay. God love you.

I'm thrilled to meet you. This has been so much fun. We'll have to do another interview. I'll have to think about what we're gonna focus on for a whole hour because we had so much good material here. We could talk for another hour about almost any little corner of what we talked about today. Any parting words of wisdom for the audience? And please, Where can everyone, where's the best place for people to connect with you and stay up to date on what you're up to?

Just go to drnorthrup.com, N-O-R-T-H-R-U-P dot com. That's got everything, connects to everything. And my, so here's the thing. This wild man named Cliff High says, "2025, stay alive." We are in the midst of this enormous ascension process for consciousness and so on. People are waking up to things that have been going on. For centuries, for centuries. This is nothing new. So I want you to stay positive, understand how the enemy works, and the best really is yet to come.

Very good. Thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to finally get to meet you and connect with you and hear your story.

Great to meet you. All right, bye-bye.