Hormones, Balance, and Influencers

The world of hormones is complex and also full of shady pseudoscience, as well as influencers. What's real, what's fake, what should PTs know about. Listen to our video here and sign up for our courses today! Transcript below:

Hey y'all, it's Dr. Wells here again from St. Augustine Beach. Another gorgeous day here. I want to talk today about hormones and influencers.

There seems to be more trends going around on TikTok and Instagram about your hormones and how they should be balanced, particularly for women, to some degree in men, but let's kind of go into some of the myths. I think it's definitely a trend or a fad. The first kind of myth is this notion of like renal or insufficiency or cortisol burnout.

Yes, while people are stressed, people can have sustained or higher levels of cortisol, but there's no current literature showing that by being stressed, you're going to be in a state where you're burning your adrenals out. In some of those rare cases where there's adrenal failure and things, typically you know about it because you're in the trauma bay in the hospital and the physician's managing you and taking care of you, not because you feel a little tired or you feel a little sluggish or feel a little worn down. That is not the case.

Moreover, if you did have renal insufficiency or cortisol burnout or whatever term you want to use from the trendy TikTokers and Facebook people, I would suggest that adding more hormones in is not the case that you need to do or adding some sort of herbal hormone supplement, because in the end of the day, if you have stress and that's driving up your cortisol, take care of the stress, not the cortisol or hormonal imbalance. It's like trying to add cologne or perfume to your stinky body instead of showering. Moreover, there was a cool podcast I listened to called Science Versus, and they had a really good listen on this recently.

They had a physician on there who was talking about a woman who had marked fatigue, and well, she reported her physician and said, you know, I'm really tired. I think something's going on with my body, my hormones, and the physician did some lab testing and said, oh, my God, yeah, I think you have Cushing's disease, right? So, she had really high cortisol levels. And so, the physician's trying to figure out why, like what drugs are involved in things.

Needless to say, she's about to do an adrenal biopsy on her, and finally, the physician asked, hey, what kind of medicines are you on? And one final thing, are you taking any supplements? Because if there's any supplements on board, that could be affecting it. And sure enough, the lady turns around and says, yeah, I'm taking this herbal supplement that helps with hormone balancing. And come to find out the lady was concerned about her hormones, had started taking it, and this hormone herbal supplement was tainted with cortisol.

Effectively, jacking her cortisol rates up so high, the physician thought she was on a corticosteroid and really thought she had Cushing's disease and was ready to biopsy your kidney. Long story short, she stopped the herbal supplement, hormones rebalanced, and she went back to feeling good and being normal. So, needless to say, hormones are slow to change.

Ideally, they're best left to kind of manage themselves. If it needs to be tweaked, go to a physician, particularly a physician who's not going out and trying to experiment with things. They're trying to actually diagnose and find the problem. And usually, good physicians, they'll intervene only when necessary because hormones, again, are slow to act, slow to change, and they have powerful impact across the body. Anyhow, hope you enjoy this content. More to come.

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