The Crackin' Backs Podcast

How Everything you Thought about Aging and Longevity is Wrong with Dr. Lindsey Berkson

• Dr. Terry Weyman and Dr. Spencer Baron

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In this compelling episode of the Crackin' Backs Podcast, we welcome Dr. Lindsey Berkson—a pioneering expert in functional medicine, specializing in hormones, nutrition, and gut health. With a career spanning over four decades, Dr. Berkson has not only contributed extensively to medical research and education but has also faced profound personal health challenges. Exposed to the synthetic estrogen DES (Diethylstilbestrol) in utero—a drug later found to cause significant health issues—she endured 15 surgeries, the loss of multiple organs, and a battle with breast cancer. These experiences have fueled her relentless dedication to understanding and overcoming complex health issues, particularly those dismissed as 'normal' by conventional medicine.

What to Expect in This Episode:

  • Personal Triumphs and Professional Insights: Dr. Berkson shares her transformative journey from patient to healer, revealing how her personal battles have shaped her empathetic and informed approach to functional medicine.​
  • The Gut-Hormone Connection: Explore the intricate relationship between gut health and hormone balance, including unexpected ways gut microbiome dysfunction can lead to hormonal imbalances and overlooked signs of disruption.​
  • Beyond the Basics: Delve into lesser-known hormones like pregnenolone, DHEA, and oxytocin, and their emerging roles in promoting longevity, cognitive function, and disease prevention.​
  • Environmental Toxins Unveiled: Learn about common environmental toxins that disrupt hormones and practical steps to minimize exposure for better hormonal health.​
  • The Future of Hormone Therapy: Discuss the evolution from synthetic to bioidentical hormones and the potential of personalized hormone protocols based on genetics, gut health, and AI-driven precision medicine.​

Connect with Dr. Lindsey Berkson: 

Website: drlindseyberkson.com Consult on Menu Bar

Join us for an eye-opening discussion that challenges conventional wisdom and offers actionable insights into reclaiming your vitality through informed hormone health strategies.

We are two sports chiropractors, seeking knowledge from some of the best resources in the world of health. From our perspective, health is more than just “Crackin Backs” but a deep dive into physical, mental, and nutritional well-being philosophies.

Join us as we talk to some of the greatest minds and discover some of the most incredible gems you can use to maintain a higher level of health. Crackin Backs Podcast

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Feeling exhausted, foggy or like your body has betrayed you. What if everything you thought you knew about hormones was wrong? Today, we expose the shocking truth with Dr Lindsay burkin, a functional medicine doctor who's not just studied hormones, but fought for her own health after multiple surgeries, lost organs and battle with breast cancer is your gut secretly working against you to wreck your hormones are environmental toxins aging you faster than you think, and is customized hormone therapy the future of longevity. We're pulling back the curtain on The Real Keys to vitality, and trust us, you won't hear this from your regular doctor. Stay tuned. Dr Berkson, good to have you on the show. You are an expert in the field of functional medicine, and the most fascinating part of it is the study of hormones, gut health, longevity. Very few have lived though through what you've been through, and some of the extreme challenges. So I would love to hear more about certain things like what I was absolutely shocked about, the Diethylstilbestrol, which was synthetic hormone that was prescribed to pregnant women in the 1940s and 70 up to 71 to prevent miscarriage. And I remember seeing time in life when life had the big picture magazine and that I saw congenital malformations and things like that from D, E, S, babies. That was to this day. Here I am 64 and I'm still I still remember it vividly. So aside from that, you had related complications of pregnancy and from being in the womb and then undergoing 15 surgeries, losing multiple organs and battling breast cancer, you've not only studied health, you've had to fight for it, and yet here you are, now healthier than ever before. Please start the ball rolling with that conversation and share with us your story.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

So thank you for having me. These are very important conversations because the saga of diethylstebestra, which the acronym or the short nickname, D, E, S, which stands for diethylstrol, is no longer taught med schools, osteopathic schools, naturopathic schools, chiropractic schools, and it's the story of giving pregnant women something that is not natural during pregnancy and how it can affect their offspring and their offspring's offspring transgenerational effects. And I ponder, if it's it was one of the biggest health tragedies we've had. They gave diethyls to best role from 1938 to 1971 to 38 million pregnant women, and then it was banned in 1971 as the most cancer causing substance ever invented, even though the company knew in 1938 that it caused cancer in lab initial testing. So I wonder, I ponder, are we not teaching this health tragedy in any of our medical oriented schools so that women will feel more comfortable getting vaccines during pregnancy or taking certain medicines. I just was reading an article yesterday warning women about not stopping antidepressants during pregnancy because they could get much worse with no discussion of the fetus. So I think this is a major story of things that are not natural going into a woman, especially in the most vulnerable time of all, that first trimester. So my story is unusual in that most people bump into functional medicine when they've been living a typical American life, and then they get a nasty, horrific diagnosis, and they want to figure out how to stay well and stay safe. So they learn about functional medicine, which is a different viewpoint than allopathic medicine, but I had an opposite story in that I'd heard about organic food when I was 18, 1718, years old, so it made sense to me. I'd been eating organically when I went to Western states and when I got my master's in nutrition, I had raised all my own food, organically. I had my own goats. I built a log cabin. I was a Yogini. I was teaching yoga, detoxing, meditating, forgiveness. Went to India, studied Ayurvedic medicine. Was owning myself into congruent. Calm, and then I started getting cancers. And so I've had, I've had many health issues that arose after I already was well embedded into a natural, clean, calm lifestyle, which is the opposite. So lot of my friends said, If disease is a message to for change, maybe you should ditch this organic food and live on a mono diet of truffles and bon bons, you know. So, um, yeah. And I nobody knew why I was Yeah. I had breast cancer. I had kidney cancer. I lost a kidney and an adrenal gland, and I'm living my life on one adrenal gland that's probably looking much like a raisin at the moment, because I'm just turned 76 because

Dr. Spencer Baron:

you made it this far. That's fantastic.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

And I now have the youth in my older age that I didn't really get to enjoy in my younger age, and therein lies an entire journey of how that evolved and what I learned to accomplish that. And I'm still in practice, still lecturing. I specialize in seeing breast cancer patients and renal patients. When I got my kidney out, I had normal kidney function going into that nephrectomy and Adrenalectomy, which he promised me he wouldn't take my adrenal gland out, and when I came out, I had stage three renal disease, and I had to figure that out, and I ended up working in a dialysis center for 10 years and inventing a drug for dialysis patients. So I've had a very unusual life. A lot of what was spun off of initiating a spiritual, grounded life when I wasn't ill, and getting very attracted to natural answers without being ill, and then getting multiply very ill and losing body parts and figuring out how to protect myself. And in the midst of all that, I ended up writing, I have 21 books out. I just finished my 22nd book this week, and one of those books was one of the very first books on endocrine disruption. And nobody knew about endocrine disruption when I was writing that book, it was an unknown and in a three month period, three books came out on this topic about pollutants that can assault your hormones and create nasty issues. And the first book was Theo COVID is our stolen future. And then there was my book, hormone deception. And then there was hormonal chaos. And based on that book, I was invited to become a distinguished hormone scholar at an estrogen, environmental estrogen think tank at Tulane and Xavier universities in New Orleans. And I ended up working with the scientists who were unveiling the field of endocrine disruption. And lo and behold, the model compound that all of this field is based on is diethyl stvesterol. And I was telling them, I live incredibly I'm the most conscious aware for giving organic person you'd meet. And I had kidney cancer and breast care with it was in different sequences, and it turned out that my I had very rare tumor types, histologic types, and when I spoke with some of the researchers, in fact, main researcher, Research Triangle Park was reason Newbold. And I said, Look at I've got this rare kidney tumor. She goes, I see that all the time in Syrian hamsters and in monkeys that are exposed in my lab to des in the womb. I went, What's D E S? And she said, Boy, you know, do you think maybe your mother was given D E s, maybe this has nothing to do with the way you're living, but this is based on what your mother was given. Why don't you send away for your mother's birth records? And in the olden days, in the birth records, they wrote everything that a mother a woman was given, from prenatal vitamins to injections to etc. And I, I was born in Chicago, Illinois, at Michael Reese hospital, and I wrote away for my birth records, and I got them about six to seven months before the hospital shredded them all and was torn down to make way for a new building. Because I'm so old, the building I was born is now another building. The main deal is, can you be old but still be young, no matter what you've gone through? So it turned out that while I'm. Right? You know, finished, finishing up writing hormone deception, working at an estrogen think tank with the scientists who are developing the field, John McLaughlin, William Toscano, Theo COVID, developing the field of hormone disruption. And then I got to work with the scientists who discovered how hormones work, because only a few years before that, everyone thought it was just enzyme reactions. No one knew how hormones work, but Elwood Jensen and yanaki Gustafson said, Hey, hormones speak to receptors and cell membranes, and those are what can get blocked by things that a pregnant woman is exposed to or that we get as pesticides or herbicides or fluoride in our air, food and water. So I got to work with all those guys, and I run away from my mother's micro fish film, found out that my mother was given two injections of D, E, S, and that was the compound at Tulane. They had two controls to test to see if chemicals were endocrine disruptors, and one of them was des diethyl esterol, and the other estrogen that was a control was ethinyl estradiol, which is the major estrogen used in most birth controls, which are now sold over the counter ever since July 2023 and a young woman can walk in and buy this wonderful endocrine disruptor without even a prescription from her doctor. So this led me on an entire journey of cancer, hormones, endocrine disruptors, and I am a and one of the side effects of DES is you can't have children. The women that were exposed tremendously in the first trimester were born incapable of having children. And so my books are my children. And it ended up that I had that the energy, because I didn't have children, to dive into this entire field and specialize in it with myself, getting myself solidly well that no doctor could do for me, because nobody knows anything about any of this. It's no one knows anything about any of this. This is very clear cut. We know that endocrine disruptors are it part of the reason we have obesity epidemics and mental health epidemics and even violent young kid epidemics. But all countries are writing on this, but nobody knows what to do about it. So it's ended up becoming a focus in my career. At the same time, I was healing myself and learning how to really stay well, because I was so sick for so long. If you're going to occupy an incarnation, you want to have some fun and good times out of it and quality legacy out of it. So it's ended up being my legacy. So it's been quite the journey.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Wow, that is a story.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

I didn't mean to write a movie, but

Dr. Spencer Baron:

no, it could be. It could very well be, and it's fascinating

Unknown:

such an underachiever.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Good lord, you know, it's

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

this was happened to an overachiever? Yeah, for sure, it's a

Dr. Spencer Baron:

good thing. It's a good thing, but it's fascinating, because, you know, we talk about history repeating itself, and we have all these issues with today's medications that people that doctors are just prescribing at will, you know, at any given time, you know, vaccines and things like that. But the point being is, if we look at history, that what they thought worked back then, that causes tremendous trauma and challenges in life. You know, it's almost no different than what we hear about today. So let me, let me steer you into some concepts about harm the hormone hormones impact on gut health. You know? Can you know? We talk about, we hear more about microbiome dysfunction and how it drives hormone imbalances. What are some of the overlooked signs that someone's gut is disrupting their hormones? Can you share some thoughts on that?

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

Well, it's actually a two way street, but there are no tissues that are not influenced by hormones, none. Absolutely every tissue in your body, hormones are the most powerful signaling molecules in the body, and that's because they can dive into archival information in your genes, where everything you inherited from your parents, your grandparents, your lineage, they can dive into that information, and they can signal genes, and they can alter the signal of genes, and they literally give genetic signals. So if you think of hormones, think of them as the Wi Fi system of your physiology, and they deliver the email that tells cells what to do to keep you well, or they give if something's going wrong, they give aberrant information so tissues do not stay well. So they run the Wi Fi of our body. And if you wake up in the morning and you open up your computer and your Wi Fi isn't working, you. Cannot get anything done. Pathological states and aging, senescence, or which is another term for aging, really, is when the Wi Fi of your sis, of your physiology is starting to freeze up. And when you have less hormones, you have less emails to tissues, and the messages don't tell tissues what to do, and you have more aging than you have recovery and repair. And so hormones are incredibly powerful. There's no molecules in the body as powerful as them, and hormones speak to tissues, in your brain, in your eyeballs, in your kidneys, one of the reasons you have more renal disease after the age of 40, you lose 1% of your filtering function or your kidneys every year. Why? Because you're losing your hormones every year, and you have much more vulnerability to ophthalmologic issues. Why? Because you have receptors for hormones all over your eyeballs, and you're getting less email to those tissues. So the problem is that in medicine, medicine is now such a large body of information that it's compartmentalized into genres that you get board certifications. We have cardiology, gastroenterology is what you're talking about right now. We have gerontology, nephrology, and each of these doctors learns this huge body of information, but they don't learn anything about hormones that have an amazing amount to do with the tissues, those local tissues. But our adjudicators of hormones are the OBGYN neurologists and endocrinologists, and they don't know anything about Nephrology and cardiology and gastroenterology. So this compartmentalization of medicine has left hormones in the dust, and then with the misinterpretation of the first Women's Health Initiative, which is, we're an aging country, so we were studying women, looking at them every which way to not topple Medicare, we developed the Women's Health Initiative. And up until that time, women used hormones as an anti aging tool, because hormones speak to every single cell in your body, not just your skin and your eyes and your kidney, but to your brain and even your vocal cords. Women on hormone replacement have less little old lady voice. I don't have little old lady voice because I've been on hormones now for such a long period of time, but with the compartmentalization of medicine, nobody really knows hormones anymore and how to use them to prevent or to treat disease. I just gave a 16 hour CME continuing medical education course for MDS and nurse practitioners with Dr David Brownstein on everything, hormones, that was the name of the course. And we had 16 hours of CME, because doctors need relicensing hours. And then we had 11 hours of non CME and lots of bonus materials. And we had lots of information on the gut, because you have the hormones speak entirely from your mouth, your your north, to your south, to your sigmoid colon. They speak to everything, your your liver, your pancreas, not the gallbladder, because it's a piggy bank, but all throughout your entire digestive tract, you have receptors and cell membranes that take genomic and non genomic, which I'll explain in just a minute. You have multiple ways of getting hormone signals that protect your entire gut tissue and your microbiome, so much so that it's the loss of those signals, especially estrogen receptor beta, which was the second receptor discovered by Inaki Gustafson, and I had the honor of working and hanging out with him at Tulane. And then your immune system in your gut. You have most of your immune system in your gut. It's run by testosterone, and when you have the loss of testosterone by pollutants like glyphosate roundup in your food, or you have the loss of estrogen receptor beta because you're on birth control pills, or your would shut up your hormones, or you eat foods with a lot of pesticides. When those hormone signals start to shut up, they silence the Wi Fi emails to the gut, shut up, and you start to develop polyps. In polyps, chronic inflammation and ultimately vulnerability to colorectal cancer. So hormones have everything to do with the gut. My new book that I'm publishing in a month or two is called oxytocin medicine, and I've invented a drug for bares esophagus and based on the idea that you have receptors for oxytocin and estrogen and other hormones in your esophagus, and you can use hormones to treat different diseases, but that's not how we teach it. We only teach it as perimenopause menopause. We don't look at what hormones really do as such a crime most of my colleagues in my space, the whole. Hormone space. All feel that if hormone balancing and replacement was something that took place in all patients life from early on, not just in older age, because with endocrine disruptors, we have youth. We have 14, 1516, year old kids that don't have enough hormones, and their hormones aren't working right. Harvard and the neuroendocrine Institute of general mass just published a year and a half randomized trial of looking at young girls with anxiety, insomnia, body dysphoria, what we're seeing in young kids all the time, the beginning of osteopenia. And what did they do? They gave them hormones like a 60 year old woman, and got rid of all that stuff in a randomized trial for a year and a half, we have youth that have no hormones, but we have no doctors to take a look at what to do about any of that in our course, Dr Brownstein and my course, we put it online, and we had almost 300 doctors from seven countries take that course, mostly urologists and OB, GYN, I think, one chiropractor, a few nature paths, and lots and lots of nurse practitioners, and they all said we know nothing about hormones, nothing. We don't know what to we don't know about them. We haven't been taught them in school. We're fearful of them. We're taught they cause cancer, but you can utilize hormones to reboot the microbiome. You can utilize them for inflammatory bowel disease, but this is a whole nother body of understanding of information that very few people have. So I'm kind of on this mission to get it out there in basic conversations and then more. I'm actually working on a textbook right now to try and get this information on the gut. I'm at 800 pages so far. I am really a glutton for punishment. It's not fair. I must have been a bad person in my other lifetime.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Well, you're certainly at the opposite end of the spectrum now as a great person. But you know, it was very cute. She her energy and bouncing around in the chair is like, like a 20 year old, excited,

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

so much energy. The one thing everyone says to me, that's fantastic, and I have one adrenal

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Yeah, congratulations. So with the idea of you mentioned the most common ones, estrogen and testosterone. They're widely discussed. But can you comment on some of the lesser known hormones, like pregnant alone, DHEA or even oxytocin, like in you were mentioning about your book, and what kind of research for longevity, cognitive function and disease prevention, there is, oh,

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

my God, that's a really broad question. Well, first of all, there's a there's a huge family of hormones, and all hormones are part of a family. You have thyroid hormone, insulin, they're part of the sexter. Sex steroid hormones are the ones we think of the sexy guys, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and maybe, you know, oxytocin is part of that sexy stuff. It's certainly part of birth and reproduction, and it's certainly part of orgasm, that your O hormone for orgasm. But you also have pregnant alone, which is a parent hormone. You have dehydroepiandrosterone, which is another form of male hormone, or the adrenal male hormone, DHEA, and you have oxytocin, well, every man and woman and baby and and very few old elders. Elders are very low on hormones. We should be robust in hormones, because they're running our Wi Fi system. And everybody, men, women have these hormones. Of course, you have more sex hormones when you go through puberty. You don't have them when you're younger, but we're going through our hardwired reproductive milestones like puberty are changing. They're changing because we're exposed to chemicals and ultra processed foods, and what human being takes into their body is passed on to the next generation. So our hormones are changing. They're de evolving to a less healthy humanoid state, and they run everything. So we're having more disharmony in our offspring. And oxytocin is just an extraordinary hormone. Very few people know anything about it. We think of it as a pregnancy and lactating hormone, because it's a contractile hormone, and it helps the uterus contract for the baby to be born and the breast to squeeze for milk to let down. But it also lowers lactic acid in the uterus so that you won't get difficult births. It also is an anti aging hormone. It squelches zombie cells, which are aging cells that don't go away, but take up space and drive more aging than youth. It's quite an extraordinary hormone, but it's mainly the hormone that the baby is. Wash in when it's first born, because it's a hormone of birth, and so the baby is completely awash in oxytocin, and in that first blush of birth and welcome to planet earth, the baby is supposed to with the right amount of oxytocin. Say Earth is a welcoming place to be. We're wonderful. Love your fellow man, be empathetic, be communal, and also it before the first there's tremendous possibility for a lot of damage to the GI tract between birth and the first feeding. The the baby GI tract is immature and it's not well developed, and it's very vulnerable to oxidative stress. And oxytocin protects the whole lining of the gut in the baby because it's washed with it from the oxytocin that mother's body made, and it literally protects the baby's gut. And that's how I first came up with the idea as well. If it could protect the newborn gut, why can't I use it to protect a pathological gut in patients with some gut diseases? I mean, if you look at physiology, that's where you learn how to utilize different moieties or substances in the body to apply them when a patient is sitting across from you, from, you know, the desk, but unfortunately, in today's medical environment, doctors are not trained to think like that, to really honor physiology and then translate that into the root cause, and trying to get well, patient well and off of a medication. We We think in algorithms, and we get a ICD 10 code diagnosis, and then based on that, we're given five or six pharmaceutical choices, and it's all about what's name the disease, and here's to the drugs for the disease, and you aren't thinking about the physiology, to backtrack to the patient's history to see if you can figure out how to get that patient, not only well, which is what I did with myself. I didn't just get over my issues. I got better. I got younger. I opened up a woman's kayaking team here in Austin, and all the ladies are 30 years younger than me, and we kayak five to 10 miles a week in very rough circumstances. This is not a recreational you know, just get your bikini on and relax, but I can still wear a bikini. I'm a hard body, and I'm always I'm four years from 80, and it wasn't easily earned, but it was this kind of thinking, I think being ill like that, and then getting the honor to work at that Think Tank, because I wrote a book, and, you know, took six years to write that book because nobody knew about it, then I've learned how to be a thinker. And we need providers, which is why I like these conversations. We want thinkers. We We need thinkers. And these conversations let the public get in on the thinking that we all share with these conversations, and who knows what can happen from that.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Could you share? You know, I'm sure people are still hung on the fact that you were a diethyl still or des baby, and with all that you've been through. What are some of the strategic things that you've done for yourself to be so vitally so alive and energetic and and you know people, you're inspiring people just in your conversation. And so what have you done since then to become healthier. I know that's what

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

haven't I done? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, really the most important thing my health really changed when I balanced my hormones. But because I had breast cancer, 29 years ago, almost 30 years ago, everybody said you could never have hormones. Done, done. Store. You can't have hormones if you had breast cancer. But that is not what the science says, and that's certainly not what my case report of an n of one, and is the number of people in a study. And I'm just being kind of light about it, saying I'm a case report of one. So once I really got my hormones balanced, and I wasn't frightened of hormones, so I didn't do the lowest dosage to get the least amount of just get rid of some annoying symptoms, but I really took a proper amount, and I knew how to track it in my body, to know that my hippocampus, where my memories live, was enlarging, and that my my gut is improving, like the silent benefits of hormones that are not just based on symptoms, you know, not just hot flashes and sleep and so forth. That's when my health really changed, because I have always my mother, worked out and always eaten organically, which is kind of the point. My story. My mother was state champion in Illinois in tennis and in fencing, so I was raised to be an athlete, so I've always worked out. And then I got into organic gardening and farming. I have done all those things right. And I was still ill, very, very ill, because you can be ill by altered epigenetic changes in the womb and the way and choices your parents made. And the problem is in my book hormone deception, I write about one study from Mount Sinai where they took some amniotic fluid from healthy American young women, and the average woman in my book came out a number of years ago, has anywhere from 200 to 300 chemicals in her amniotic fluid, which all together act similarly to D E S. This is the geo D E S is the canary in the mine, and we are now having children with multiple health and D E s and chemicals aren't the only issue. I mean, we have ultra processed food. We have a fear based environment. We have vaccination schedule that that I don't understand, and I think it's horrific that even papers from the CDC honestly state that we're seeing issues. Japan has just outlawed the measles aspect of the MMR vaccine in the country of Japan, because they were seeing meningitis from children getting it, and we still have it on the schedule, and don't like to hear people talk or want to investigate vaccines, we look down at those people and denigrate them when they're trying to protect your children. So we have many things going on in our environment today that it's very, very hard to be healthy today in the United States, and a lot of that can start before you even were born. And we really need detox prior to getting pregnant. My call for green pregnancies. I think that's really important, but it's also not safe to get sick in the United States today, the hospital situation, one of my close, dear colleagues in town is a retired hospitalist. Become functional doctor because it was such a toxic environment for doctor and patient both. So it's a very new world, and you got to be very strategic to keep yourself and your loved ones well and listen to conversations like we're talking about here. But what you're exposed to prior to birth is a very big deal, and reducing exposure to multiple chemicals, my book hormone deception, the last third of it is all about, how do you do that? How do you do that without going insane and keeping it simple? So I interviewed many, many scientists in this field and asked them what they did, and translated that into the last third of the book to reduce exposure. And then I've really focused a lot on detox. Detox must move mainstream. Must move mainstream. Detox prior to pregnancy and daily detox because we live in a toxic, dirty planet, and these chemicals all together have additivity and synergy and act a bit like des and we're all at risk for these things that I was at risk for, but was my journey to figure out. So we live in a world today where you have to have strategies to stay well, and conversations like this are so helpful, hopefully not driving anyone crazy and scared, but you have to be knowledge is power. Knowledge is power, and once you know, you can decide what you want to do about it, but if your head is in the sand, then you if I wasn't a very, very inquisitive thinking person, I remember my Endocrinologist, Dr blevin, when I was 50 years old, put his hand on my shoulder when I was at the height of ill and didn't have any of this all figured out. And he said, If life is a book, you just have to suck it up and realize you're in your last chapter, and you have a lemon of a body, and you're never going to be well. He was well intended. He thought he was guiding me well. And he was a well known endocrinologist in town. This stuff that you need to know today to be well is not known by your most physicians. You might have a really cool physician that knows this stuff, but on the whole, most don't, because it's not taught in med schools, and one of the things you have to care take is your hormones, because they run your Wi Fi system. And I'm on a path trying to teach at this point in my career, trying to educate providers to know how to do intakes with this and then, how do you track, prescribe, basis, the delivery routes, how do you help somebody's hormones stay really well? And it's not just about diet. It's much more complicated than that. I was already. A great diet, my hormones were completely run them up. So that's kind of become my mission in life, I guess. And I really honor these conversations a lot.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Well, alright, Doc, on that. It's a it's like the muds out there, and people are so confused. And let's, let's, let's give some information for the average person with with the evolution of synthetics, you have bioidentical hormones, you have aI driven precision medicine. You have custom hormone protocols based on genetics and your gut health. How does the average person navigate this? And can you give us like just what this to get out of the mud and get to some clarity where this, where the average person can start and how to navigate this. Because you hear, Oh, you're 50. You shouldn't be squatting. Your your your ligaments are falling apart. You just have to be an old lady and and say, All right, well, the bioidentical hormones. Well, how do you how's that? How they navigate that? Where do they find the right person? Can you kind of walk us through a good strategy?

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

Great question, and I'm going to be giving in April, I think I haven't figured out yet, a three and a half hour course on a Saturday afternoon to take the public through. Now that hormones are vindicated again, how do you go about it? I am going to give a course on that on a Saturday for the public, but the best thing to do is to reach out to local compounding pharmacists. They work with all the doctors in town that do hormones, and it doesn't matter what their title is or what their training is, they know who works, who's got a great bedside manner or not. I would go in and compounding pharmacists are fabulous, fabulous human beings. There's some. I dedicated my new book to them, and my editor said, you can't dedicate a book to a field of people. You have to dedicate it to a person. I went, nope, I'm dedicating it to the field of compounding pharmacists, because they are so fantastic. So if you call them up and ask to speak with the pharmacist, not the person who's answering the phone, and say, I would look, I would like to find a great doctor, and this is the way I like to interact with my doctor, let them know. They'll know the bedside manner, type of that doctor. They'll know what scripts that doctor orders. You don't have to know all that stuff, but they'll know who's getting the best results. Because the patients come in and pick up their scripts and they talk to the pharmacist and they say, I feel good or I can't. This doctor is getting me nowhere. And that's a great place to start. And you can also subscribe to my sub stacks. I write every single almost every morning in a non sensible platform called sub stack, because a lot of my podcasts were being removed during the pandemic, I was being banned and sent threatening letters, and it was pretty brutal. There's a lot of censorship that went on in the last administration. Let's face it, that's the reality that happened. You know, even Zuckerberg is admitting that he was really pressured. He was bad. You know, what? Muscled by the Biden administration to do all the censorship that he did. Now, you know, a lot of people are coming forth now admitting it. They were scared to death not to admit it. Then I got some of those scary letters myself. So you have to be open to the fact that whoever you're going to talk to doesn't know everything, because things are so crazy right now with this kind of mishmash of information, but getting your hormones straight is really important. And no one taught hormones in naturopathic school, osteopathic school or medical school for the last 20 years, no one taught hormones for the last 20 years. So you would ask your compounder, who really knows hormones in my town? And do they also do functional medicine? Because a hormone specialist might not necessarily be looking at your gut, looking at your transit time, how often you poop, which has a lot to do with breast cancer risk and prostate cancer risk. I mean, you want somebody who can also dive into your physiology and look at it and evaluate it. That might not be a hormone person or it, I happen to do all of that. But I'm getting more into the teaching. I've been in practice, one way or another for 53 years. So I'm getting more into teaching of professionals, but you can even ask your compounder, is there somebody that does all of this? We have a few hormone specialists here in Austin that do all of it. Or can you give me the name of a great hormone doctor and a great nutritionist for a functional practitioner? Nurse Practitioners are fabulous. Chiropractors have been fabulous, but the strengths have been ruining it for us for so many years that we've ended up having a lot of chiropra. In my era, you were trained to be a physician, and in Portland, all of the practices are primary care. Or but now you know, because of the way things have changed, even from internal pressures, you don't know who you're going to no matter what the profession is, so you need to ask the great mouth pieces, to ask compounding pharmacists, and then even say to them, is, is there a patient or two? I can call for a reference and chit chat with them, because everybody likes to have a different relationship with your doctor. But it isn't an easy time for anybody. And if you come to a doctor and you have a demanding, entitled attitude, it is harder to get a win win from that practitioner, no matter how great they are. I've been noticing I still see about five or six people a week, but it's two to three hours because I'm doing deep, deep dives with cancer and kidney patients. It's very difficult. If a patient is very difficult and entitled, you end up putting a wall to protect yourself. So today, stop being bitchy yourself. If you don't want a bitchy Doc, I'm sorry that I have to say that you want to be an intelligent, proactive patient, and you want to find, in my opinion, an intelligent, proactive practitioner. It's not easy for any of us. We all need an eye doctor, and we, at some point in our lives might need a specialist doctor, and we're all in this boat, but the better you meet you come forward with body mind spirit, the better you'll be met with body mind or spirit to go on to the next doctor. But we all need doctors and team players, because hospitals are not an easy place to get well anymore. So it's extremely important, and the environment has come in on our health. You cannot be separate from your environment or your food or what you track in on the bottom of your shoes in your house. It's all part of whether you have wellness and cognition or you don't. So it's a it's a big responsibility occupying a body, and I'm still dating at my age, if you could believe this, and on the dating apps, I'm always chuckling alone at night while I'm scrolling through where they go. I want someone with no baggage, easy going, no drama. There's no you own a bottle. It's dramatic.

Dr. Terry Weyman:

Hey, Doc, I gotta interject for a second, what you hear a lot about, and can you clarify this? For the average listener, you have a lot you hear a lot about hormone replacement therapy, bioidentical hormones, pellet therapy. For the person that's not doesn't know what to turn can you explain those three and is if the people aren't ready for that, is there any other strategies they can take about taking pills?

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

Well, there are some products when you're early on in your aging process, some herbs that do help make your hormones work a little bit better. They certainly don't work when you're in your 70s and 80s, and for a lot of people, they might not work even when they're younger. But there's herbs, like maca. Biotics has a product that has a control trial on it called B vital, the letter B, A, B, the second letter in the alphabet, B vital, that elevates testosterone in males, but most of the time, people feel better on hormones. And the way you get your hormones into your body is called a delivery mode. And they could be creams. They could be injectables. Bioidentical are hormones that look exactly like the hormones your bodies are used to. Where we get into trouble is when companies based on profits for their shareholders, alter the molecular structure and make a synthetic version that's been altered and your body hasn't ever seen it before. So how are you going to respond to it? We don't know, and that's the problem. Is, our country is in bed with Big Pharma, and a lot of the synthetic hormones are pushed by big pharma. Everything single year, the North American menopause society meets in Chicago for their annual meeting, and they are the group that tell OBGYN what to do. They're like the overseers of everything. And in their first few slides this year, they said, I want to we want to thank our allies in health. And was moderna Pfizer, Merck, they're completely they get all of their money and funding from big pharma. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists received $11 million grant from the CDC during COVID to try and teach doctors that it was safe to give COVID injections during pregnancy. And the caveat was, if they ever changed their mind on that, they would have to return that $11 million back. And they took that $11 million so there was a big invested interest to push those vaccines. So it's very. Hard to know who to listen to, because the doctors don't even know how much money is running everything. They're trying to do a very good job, and they don't even realize this. But it's always better to stick with bioidentical hormones, but the North American menopause society disses them, says they're un they're too difficult to manufacture. They can be toxic, untrue, untrue, untrue. And so you don't know, you hear that and you get scared, because fear drives us more to purchase something that will make more profit for a company. But if you don't know any of these details, then you you know it's easy to get scared, because we all want to stay safe. So bioidenticals are better delivery modes. Whether you get an injected, a pellet, a cream, that all depends on the patient, and a great provider has multiple has a bigger tool bag, so they know multiple delivery modes. But there's pros and cons to each, and some patients do better with one. I don't really like pellets ideally, but I have some patients that love pellets, and it's the only way that they respond. It's always the patient and how they respond. So a great doc knows multiple ways to get a hormone into you, or if they specialize in one or two ways, like transdermal, which is a topical cream, and the patient's not responding, then they need to know somebody else who does another way, like a pellet. There's no perfect way, and I don't like to dis a lot of what went wrong in chiropractic, for example, if the straights dissing the mixers and all that stuff. And now in hormones, someone will say, never do pellets. Always do. Pellets. Never give testosterone to women. Always give testosterone to women. And it's understandably very nerve wracking of what to do. The really intelligent doctor doesn't dis anyway. They go, well, there's lots of ways to do it. Let's find the best way for you. Let's talk about what you're comfortable with. You know, do you want to get a little cut on your tushy every six months? Do you scar easily? Do you you know, if it does go really high and we can't get it out with that make you anxious, there's questions to ask to see what works for you. Sometimes you try one delivery mode, and if that doesn't work, you go to another. We're a very small community. Hormones have just recently been vindicated by the 10 million study that came out in April 2024 in menopause. It was a huge you know, there were the plate tectonics of the planet moved because hormones were back again and but nobody's been taught them in school. We were such a reactive society, we we stopped teaching it. So I really love doctors that are gentle with each other. Don't say my way is the only way or the highway. And those doctors are doing wrong. We're a small community, and we're just getting our legs again, and we need to be kind to each other, professionally and among patients. And I teach that I just was in the first time I lectured in Austin at the lens conference for doctors data this weekend at the Hyatt Regency, and it was half medical doctors and half nature pass. And I was talking like this, and I just got this lovely letter yesterday from this woman, Linda Isaac, is a medical doctor here in town. She said I could use her name, and she said, I haven't really been to a conference before where somebody had a depth of knowledge in so many different ways. And you urged us not to make anybody else wrong that didn't do it like us. You urged unity. And it struck me, I came home and I was so calmed by that and given hope by that. So you want somebody that's got their head on their shoulders right, so that you can have these conversations and figure this out and realize we're all just getting our legs with hormones. Don't be worried that you don't know anything about it. Most of the doctors don't, and we'll take baby steps and get you there, but you need to keep your Wi Fi emails going, because that makes your health so much better.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Will you be attending the a 4m conference in West Palm Beach? By any chance? You

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

know, I was a major speaker for a 4m for years, but in the last two years, they haven't asked me to or year, I guess it's year and a half, they haven't asked me to speak. They kind of rotate speakers in and out. I hope I get rotated back in, but I haven't been asked to speak for them. And I have such a I have a huge speaking schedule, and I'm gonna, I'm, think, pondering relaunching my podcast. But you guys know, you've got a podcast. It's a tiger that needs to be fed, and I do still want to have fun in life. What is that gonna be? I'm like,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

You're doing really good so far. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned. Up. This is very gratifying. You mentioned something about compounding pharmacies, and I hadn't told Dr Terry this, but in a very serendipitous and very ethereal way, I have two patients that were referred in by an accountant, and these two patients are husband and wife. One's a pharmacist, and they're both own, one of the biggest compounding pharmacies in the country, create pharmacy, and it's not too far from my office. They took me on tour. They're moving into they have a huge facility, and they're moving into a 37,000 square foot facility because peptides and injectable nutrients and IV theft is going haywire. And she they are very particular about who they're bringing in, so I am fascinated that you brought that up, because they've been a storehouse of information on peptides, and they're referring me. That's who actually urged me to go to the a forum.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

A forum is really great, but, um, it's also, it's big. It's a big business. A 4m they make a lot of money training these doctors, and they charge a lot of money for their modules. So it's a little bit of the fancy schmancy version of all this, but it's still very high quality. But they have their way that they say, only do it this way. Only do this way. So it's very good as a practitioner to go to everybody's talks and hear, you know, they really don't talk. So I should backtrack a bit. They talk very much about only test this way, only this testing assay, the way that we test this valid. The other testing methods are valid, but a lot of doctors use the other testing bound and that's the problem with these going to one place, is you kind of hear one point of view, and lots of doctors do very different ways of measuring hormones, tracking them, and they get a lot of patients well. So I don't like to really dis people, but the biggest thing I learned at Tulane, so I worked with, as I said before, not to be repetitive, Elwha Jensen discovered the first estrogen receptor called er alpha, because it was the first so alpha this beginning letter of the Greek alphabet, and er beta was the Second, discovered by unaki, and they all said, testing a hormone that's well and good, whatever way you want to test it, but is that binding pocket domain where the hormones going to swim into? Is it available? Is it functional? We're functional practitioners. Is that receptor functional, or is it filled with Bisphenol A and phthalates and mercury and cadmium. And even though the hormone level is perfect, the hormone can't get in or is you have to have a lot of cofactors that allow transcription, the email from the hormone to be transcribed to your genes. And that requires iodine, vitamin A, magnesium, zinc, it's hormones are a tapestry of nutrition and digestion. Otherwise, even though your levels are perfect, your hormones won't work. And almost nobody teaches hormones like that. And the last so we put on 33 years at at the Center for bio Environmental Research at Tulane, where I was a distinguished hormone scholar, and so I have this big academic background in hormones. We put on 33 years of seminars called estrogens in the environment, but the last three were called E dot hormone, and they all sounded naturopathic. So Elwood and yanaki would say you got to have nutrients and botanicals can work, and you they can't be occupied with other chemicals, or cortisol is a bully and you're under stress, cortisol will occupy all your hormones, besides your thyroid hormone, your insulin, your sex steroid hormone, and you go to a bioidentical hormone replacement specialist, and you pay all This money and your hormones don't work, because there's all these complexities to hormones. So you want somebody that's got and you know, that's where people that can't prescribe can have a great role in hormone practices, because the prescribing doc doesn't really talk that much about digestion and those supplements and detox. So there's great ways for many of the providers to work together to get our hormones working better, but they are a complicated phenomena that is not really taught in many places. And it takes an educated person and take with a grain of salt everybody you learn from, and then a practitioner translates that through their gut and figures out the way that they want to translate it so it and we're in baby steps because hormones were just now. I've been a fan of hormones for all these years. I didn't drop them when everyone else did, but, um, nonetheless, they're vindicated now by everybody. But nobody knows how to do it, so we're all in a learning curve together. So try not to get overwhelmed. Just take it baby steps at a time to get into it, but it is the most powerful way to stay younger and healthier longer.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Dr burchin, Dr Terry and I now have a go to person that we can talk to about this. In fact, I'm part of the seminar committee for a few different programs that I am absolutely going to talk to you more about the future and having you expand on these conversations. We're near the end of the show, but we're actually nearing the most fun part of the show. Now the first part, the first part was educational. Now we're entering the rapid fire questions. I have five questions for you to end the show with, fun, fun, fun. And I believe that because you think so well, quickly and on your feet like that, you'll do well with this. And if you're ready for question number one, let me know you got it all right. If you can have her, yeah,

Unknown:

I do. She's great.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Dr B, if you could have dinner with any historical figure to discuss health and wellness, who would it be, and why? Hippocrates,

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

Oh,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

that's great. Wow. How come? Because

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

I'd want to talk to him about why is nobody, no guest of a neurologist ever asked you, how many times you poop a day?

Unknown:

What the Why was more fun than the

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

oh my gosh, in working with breast cancer patients, and I could, I could talk on this for a few hours, but I'm not, but they have been elegant studies run on transit time of women and discipline. They would you, if you squeeze a healthy breast, you can get a little bit of fluid out. It's called a nipple aspirate. And they would look at for damaged versus healthy cells, and how often you go to the bathroom, translates directly into healthy and unhealthy breast cells. I specialize in breast cancer, and I see a very similar background and number of risk factors and women who get breast cancer, and one of them is having history of chronic constipation in their past. And I, you know, no one really cares about any of that stuff. It's so beneath all doctors these days. And you know, gastroenterologists really don't ask you what you eat and and it, it's just, and I, like, love my gastroenterologist, Dr zieber, but we have conversation. He let me go and give a talk to a group of gastroenterologists at Austin Regional gastroenterology. And it was such an interesting evening, because they are not into anything functional, but you got to get scoped at times. You You have to get image, you know, colonoscopies and endoscopies at various and they do wonderful things in their lives, but they're so separate from the functional life style of most of their patients. And Hippocrates set the, you know, he said all these things, and everyone takes a Hippocratic Oath, from chiropractors to naturpaths to medical doctors. But I don't think we really are taught how to live that when the patient's in front of us,

Dr. Spencer Baron:

no so our listeners can take away that you need to poop every day and twice a day, twice a day, at least twice okay? And I'll never, I'll never forget a patient that we had problems with. I had a particular problem for weeks, and I finally realized that I asked her if, in the beginning, do you move your bowels regularly? And she said, Yes, and then two to three weeks later, I go, wait, wait, wait a minute. I know you move your bowels regularly, but what is regularly to you two weeks, once every two weeks, she told me, and I go, how do you not go to the bathroom more than every two weeks, and that was part of her problem, and so I can imagine she's probably got a breast probably eventually will have a breast cancer problem or something. But all right. Question number two, what's one unconventional health or longevity tip that you swear by but most people find surprising.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

Well, I guess it's a combination of balanced hormones with having I really believe you should have something in your life that makes you push so hard in your exercise that your cardio respiratory fitness is pushed to its end degree, and you feel like the last few minutes, you don't even know if you could do this anymore. And I do that once or twice a week with heavy, heavy kayaking, even in windy, you know, I go all year round, even in high winds and rainy weather. And I think that. A lot that has changed my life greatly. And if you don't do that, most women, when I ask them, what they do to work out, they walk, and there's nothing wrong with walking, but it's not enough. So I would say pushing yourself regularly, cardiovascularly and but the foundation of that is hormones. If you don't have your hormones balanced and functional and signaling, your Wi Fi system is freezing up, and you're wondering, Where did my old self go?

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Great question number three, if your life had a theme song,

Unknown:

you would love this one that played every time you walked into a room.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

What would it be?

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

She blinded me with science.

Unknown:

Science, yeah. Science, right.

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

He blinded me with science. You I love science and I love somebody. The other day, I was doing an interview with the ex breast cancer surgeon Jen Simmons, and one of the doctors that listened to it wrote on Instagram, you are a scientific, hormonal unicorn. I had to look up what unicorn meant, right?

Dr. Spencer Baron:

It's a good thing. It's a good thing. All right. Question number four, Oh, Dr Bergson, what is the most profound or unexpected lesson that your patients have taught you over the years?

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

The patients that really, really want to get well do everything that you say, and it's a joint venture, and they end up usually getting well, and the patients that don't do much of what you say or take a really long time to get into it, they don't do as well with that. So it's a win, win. It's a two way street. It's a relationship. That's why I said, you know, the more you come forward with respect and graciousness and proactivity, that more that the great position, and there's less and less great physicians, because we lost a lot of our thinkers during COVID. Yeah. You know, we lost a lot of incredible people. We are trying to dumb down our population and our medical providers. There is a movement. So the people who are left, you gotta, God bless them. It's not easy to be the patient and it's not easy to be the provider, and it's a two way street. So the more you can have your dance frame, like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. This is my dance frame. This is your dance frame. The more we can come together and make our dance frames together, the better off. It will both be fantastic.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

And the last of five questions, you know what I love that she does. She's so chatty, but when I ask her a question, she pauses. It looks down, right? Thanks, so, and I know something explosive is going to come out of that mouth next. So, all right, this, this could be your favorite one. What? What? All right, if you could instantly master a skill outside of your expertise, what would it be? And how would you use it? And don't say kayaking or rowing or

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

sex. Everybody should be fabulous at sex. The more great sex you have, the more better life you have. But most ladies, my most women these days, even in their 30s and 40s, often don't want sex anymore, and certainly most of my lady friends around my age, none of them wants it anymore. And the drive to have great connection, and I think it's sexual, doesn't have to be sexual, the drive to eat, the drive to produce, these are things that keep us young and vital we have really lost, except for the lifestyle and some of the polyamory that's in Austin. And I'm not talking about that, talking about great connection with the person you want to be connected with, maybe because I'm a hormone expert, but the majority of people come into me aren't having great sex, aren't interested in having great sex, and their affect is low, and once we reboot all that. And I wrote a book called sexy brain, where I have a chapter for the man and a chapter for the woman to help you know how to do all that. When you get your hormones back, then their affect goes high, and they are enjoying each other and their lives much better. I think we've lost the art of phenomenal connection. Yeah, and I wrote a book on it called sexy brain, because sex steroid hormone through the brain and intimacy is part of nature's way of giving us more hormones. We each give each other a lot more hormones when we have lovely, respectful connection, and if it's not that we don't make the same hormones. So I think life is to be savored, and that's one of the ways of savoring it. And we've, kind of, we've, we've and, yeah. Men think porn is sex that you know now that that's what they think those movements and that action, that's what they think is sex. But really true, coming together when you have a lovely core like that, the glue of a wonderful relationship, which then goes over to the other members of the family, is is delicious connection, and I wish that for everybody.

Unknown:

What a great way. That's how we ended that. Right? That's a highlight, yeah, because I look back

Dr. Spencer Baron:

at we had a gynecologist on the program, and she, Dr sonayanu, made mention that most divorces happen when the woman because the woman initiates it, it's usually around menopause. Yeah,

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

no, yeah, no one wants sex anymore. If you're not on hormones after menopause and it's painful, who would want to have sex if it's painful, right? But with proper and there's so much that can be done, but you have to have a really knowledgeable practitioner, Dr

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Burchard, thank you more than you possibly know for your knowledge base, your energy level that you bring to the table today. This is a great show. And thank you again, because this is not the last time you're going to hear from I'm

Dr. Lindsey Burkson:

sorry that we weren't in my studio, but I still think it went. Went great. It was wonderful. You know, we're, this is an hour out of each of our lives. So we're each you gave back to me as much as I hope to give to you. So it's a win, win win, and we have this gentleman here facilitating the win win. So thank you, David,

Unknown:

all right, doc, thank you.

Dr. Spencer Baron:

Thank you for listening to today's episode of The cracking backs podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you follow us on Instagram at cracking backs podcast. Catch new episodes every Monday. See you next time, bye.