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Business Talk
Role of Diet and Exercise in Hormone Health
Unlock the secrets to balanced living with Dr. Manny Herrera and Katie Herrera, the pioneering minds behind Horizons OBGYN and Aesthetics. Our engaging conversation traverses the nuanced world of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), spotlighting its transformative potential for both men and women facing hormonal shifts with age. Dr. Manny shares his expertise on testosterone’s pivotal role in brain function and energy levels, while Katie provides a personalized touch with insights into individualized treatment plans. Together, they emphasize a holistic approach, ensuring each patient receives tailored care that integrates nutrition, exercise, and comprehensive health assessments.
Explore the cutting-edge transition from synthetic to bioidentical hormones, promising a closer alignment with the body’s natural chemistry. This episode also highlights the Herreras’ diverse wellness and aesthetic services, offering a convenient, all-in-one location for comprehensive care. From facial aesthetics to pelvic floor therapy, Horizons OBGYN and Aesthetics demonstrate an unwavering commitment to enhancing patient well-being. Join our community of listeners to stay informed on the latest advancements in health and wellness, and contribute by nominating topics and businesses for future episodes.
Welcome back everybody to another great episode and I am delighted to introduce to you Dr Manny Herrera and his wife, katie Herrera. They're the owners of Horizons OBGYN and Aesthetics. Man, that's a mouth load right there. How you guys doing.
Speaker 2:Doing great. Thank you so much, hi everyone, everyone. I'm Dr Meneher.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're very, very, very, very welcome. So, basically, for our listeners, you know I'm your host DDA. In every episode we sit down with business owners from diverse industries to uncover what makes them, their companies, thrive, what makes them successful, right, we all want to know what is behind the scenes here, so, basic. Also, we want to learn about the services you guys use everyday, listeners, and discover ways to get the most out of them. And if you like this information, you want to see more videos like this with this type of content. Please like, subscribe and comment on the video. So, with that being said, let's dive right in. This episode's all about hormone replacement therapy and kind of educating our listeners a little bit about what is hormone replacement, and we'll start with that. Go ahead, dr Manny or Katie, take it away.
Speaker 2:You want to start.
Speaker 1:No go for it you start it away.
Speaker 2:You want to start. No, go for it, you start. So hormone replacement it's the idea of. We all know that there is a decay in the hormone levels of both men and women after we are 30 years old and older. So from there on, we all our hormone levels decrease, at different rates from person to person. Some of these hormones and probably the most important one, the one that everyone talks about is testosterone. And yes, testosterone is not just a male hormone, but it's a very important hormone for women as well. Male hormone, but it's a very important hormone for women as well. Testosterone is a hormone that we find receptors to, that hormone in many cells in the body, from the brain to bones, to muscles, et cetera, which tells you the importance of testosterone for the development of these areas in the body, and that also goes and associates with the symptoms that we see start showing up after age advances. I don't like to say that.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, that's fine, you're getting on.
Speaker 2:That's the reality. As age advances, we start seeing these symptoms more and more, and they include some of them, and the most common ones are going to be like brain fog, lack of mental clarity and also feeling fatigued. Feeling tired Also a decreased libido, for both men and women. And when we go to the anatomy and the physical body, there is an increase in the amount of fat that we start conserving in the body and a decrease in the muscle mass and a decrease in the bone mass. But that's an example of a. That's why we're replacing hormone levels to optimum levels and that's the idea to bring you back to the optimum level, to where those symptoms disappear. So it's a combination not just of checking the numbers, doing the blood work and see where the hormone level is, but it's also associating that with the symptoms and fixing those together.
Speaker 1:Interesting, well stated. So what are some potential risks or side effects, dr Herrera, that come along with this type of hormone replacement?
Speaker 2:If we start a patient on hormone replacement, definitely there is going to be a series of follow-up labs and follow-up with the patient to make sure that some of these potential side effects are not happening. I can give you examples At four weeks, between four and five weeks after the first hormone replacement therapy, we will be checking on labs to make sure that there are some values that are not becoming abnormal. I mean, we could go into detail on that but it's a long conversation. But that's our role to monitor and make sure that people are not having those side effects In terms of symptoms or signs, just like when you're younger.
Speaker 2:So if there is an increase of testosterone that goes to a certain level, patients may see more acne, either in the back or acne in the face. There could be a little bit of loss of hair, but that one many times is transient. Interestingly, when you replace testosterone, it will improve the quality of the hair follicles and then patients don't realize sometimes that we are losing hair because they now we are bringing healthy follicles and the old hair is actually falling and then they will get a new hair and and there are changes in the skin as well. But yeah, the answer is that, even though the chances are rare, there are some side effects that can occur with the therapy. That's where the physician and nurse practitioners with expertise on the area that's our role to make sure that we monitor them and keep the patient safe from having those side effects, and not necessarily they need to come off the therapy. But that's where you go and reduce the levels for the follow-up therapy.
Speaker 1:Katie, did you want to say anything? You said it very well.
Speaker 3:Very well. The first thing that we also do as a physician and nurse practitioner is we assess each patient individually, so we customize the plan for them to minimize any of the side effects or the risks for them too. So not only do we monitor them throughout the whole journey, but we do a really good assessment and physical exam before starting anything and to really deep like dig, like deep dive in there to see what their symptoms are and like what their goals are too.
Speaker 1:So all of our treatments are customed to each patient, and you know what I love about this conversation. I love it that you, you know, husband and wife have, you know, developed a business model right and helping people with different things. I mean, not only are you doing hormone replacement therapy, but obstetrics, well-woman services. Well, I asked you about this. I'm going to mess it up, but it's called Labia Plastic, right, labia Plasti.
Speaker 2:Labia.
Speaker 1:Plasti yes. Oshad Emsala Pelvic Floor Therapy. I mean your website really in detail kind of goes through all the services that you provide. It's a professionally done website. It's very nice, by the way. So, getting back to hormone therapy, it has evolved over the years, I'm sure, just like medicine has right, just like technology has over the years. What advancements have been made in this particular therapy?
Speaker 3:They've done a lot of research. We have like 15 to 20 years of research that they've done specifically on the types of hormones that you're the type of replacement that they're doing. So bioidentical hormones are the safest to replace with hormones. It's the closest medication or replacement that's closest to our hormones that we have inside. So it really minimizes any risks for the patient. And they have a ton of studies on like the benefits of testosterone therapy and estrogen therapy. For example, there's some studies that show that testosterone therapy may decrease the risk of dementia. It may decrease the risk of osteoporosis, which is thinning of the bones, like the bone density, especially super important for women that are menopausal because, as after menopause, the risk of osteoporosis increases a lot too. So I think there's a lot more studies to come on it and I think we're just getting to the. We're only at the surface right now and you know the research and the evidence is going to be even more as time goes on too.
Speaker 2:This is different too. I think it's very important to mention that. So the testosterone that we heard in the 1970s et cetera, was a different molecule that was synthetic and that one created kind of a bad reputation because the side effects were some of them were catastrophic. So this is different. Now we're using bioidentical hormones which basically the molecules are as identical as possible to our own testosterone molecules, estrogen, et cetera.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. I'm learning a little bit here myself, it's good. So when we talk about age and gender and overall health, influence the decision. When is it the decision to use hormone therapy?
Speaker 3:decision to use hormone therapy. You know when you go. So basically after the age of 30, if there's, if you're having symptoms, if you're having fatigue, brain fog, low libido, there's different ways to replace hormone replacement therapy. Even younger, sometimes, you just kind of modify which, which modality you use to replace it. Definitely women that are perimenopausal. So 40s to 50s, that's going to be the patient population that's going to benefit the most, and after menopause as well. So postmenopausal women, men also around that same age, 40 to 50, and even older. You can start it even if you're older than that too. But definitely some of the studies are saying that when you first start getting the symptoms and you start hormone replacement therapy, it shows a higher benefit to those patients.
Speaker 1:Interesting yeah, go ahead, doctor.
Speaker 2:Something interesting that we're finding is that we're having patients, and sometimes it's the lady and a week after she's bringing the husband, and then sometimes has been the husband and then a week after. So we're seeing that couples, they're bringing the partner because they start feeling well and highly energized.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what? I bet your diet or nutrition plays along with that too as well, right? Could you expand on that?
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely, and that's part of it.
Speaker 2:So when we do a consultation, once again we ask what the patient is going to fill up a form that has some of the symptoms that they can notice, if it is mild, moderate, absent or no and then we review that and we can start talking about that.
Speaker 2:But you just touched on a very important aspect of what we do, of what we do, no matter when we sit with patients. We cover all that. We start at least the basics of diet and give recommendations the importance of eating several small meals throughout the day versus the one or two large meals that many of us have a costume to do. But anyway, we will go on the basics of that, the importance of eating a lot of protein, et cetera, trying to avoid certain other aspects. And we also talk about exercise, about basics of exercise and even from the common sense, exercise, the little things that we know but don't do, like use the stairs instead of the elevator, try to park far away from the door of the market. You need to walk, you need to become active, and we cover many of those things. I will remind patients about it.
Speaker 3:The one thing that we also do is check for different vitamins. So we routinely check for B12, vitamin D deficiencies and then if those are deficient, then we replace those two and give we give guidance on not just the hormone replacement therapy but the whole thing to optimize your vitamin D levels, your, you know, if your hemoglobin A1C, which is like checks your sugar levels, if that's high, we're going to go deeper into like low sugar, low carbs. So we really we check. We check all of those things Like when, when the patients come in for, even if they just ask for HRT or hormone replacement therapy, we cover all the other bases too.
Speaker 2:And one, I think, another very important aspect of what we do. Once again, I'm a physician, the care is an expert teacher. Just because a patient comes with one of those symptoms, it is not necessarily because of lack of the hormone. So we have to make sure that we do a thorough assessment because they may have another issue that needs to be addressed and it may not be necessarily the hormone. So that's that's where it comes, the importance of getting a thorough, a very uh like the whole history of the patient and a physical exam, et cetera.
Speaker 1:I like that and basically it comes to being able to diagnose right when a patient comes in, just starting from the from the beginning asking questions kind of, you know, do your due diligence and then you'll be able to kind of make a diagnosis. Once you find the diagnosis, then you can go ahead and prescribe the right form of a remedy. I guess that's not how you do it. No, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have to make sure that it's not another underlying condition that is actually causing what we think it could be.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that. You know, I love talking to you guys. This is our second time speaking and I love having you back. So what should someone look for when choosing a provider or a clinic?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think expertise is always important. You want to have somebody that's knowledgeable. You want to have a provider that has different options. So in our practice, we have non-invasive options, we have medical options, and then we also have surgical options too, for different things. So I think if the provider or physician can be as thorough as possible and also be willing to do a shared decision making with the patient, I think that's super important. We obviously we practice together. This is our, our, our practice, this is our life, so we're very passionate about it, and so I think that dedication shows to through like our conversations with patients as well. So that's something to look for as well.
Speaker 1:I love I actually wrote it down where you said shared this decision making. Yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty powerful, where you're actually, you know you guys are working together with, with your, your client or your patient, you know. So that's, that's awesome. So, as we wrap up, is there anything else that you kind of want to share with our listeners as we wrap up?
Speaker 3:I think I don't think. Menopause and even men around that same age I don't think it's talked about enough. People don't have to suffer through hot flashes and fatigue and brain fog. Even if you don't want to have HRT therapy, there's other options. So I think we should make it like the new normal to talk about these things 40 and older, I think, I think, because there's many different options. So don't suffer. Reach out, try to get some help if you're having any of those symptoms or if you're just like not sure. I think just bringing up that question is the first step to feeling better.
Speaker 2:That is very important, so bring it up to your physician, either male or female. If you're a female, when your OBGYN is doing an annual exam, it's okay. It's not just about the pap smear or the mammogram. It's bringing up those complex issues that sometimes we are afraid of talking about. No one better than the physician or the nurse practitioner to help you with it.
Speaker 1:I love that and one thing I. Another thing I caught from what you were saying, katie, was hot flashes right, and particularly, of course, with women. Is there an age that hot flashes go right and, in particular, of course, with women? Is there an age that hot flashes go away?
Speaker 3:So the average age of menopause is 51. And symptoms can last for like seven to 10 years. So it really depends on when it starts. And some women go through menopause and don't have it at all, and some women have horrible hot flashes that are like 10 to 15, 20 times a day. So it really depends on the specific patient.
Speaker 1:Well, awesome guys, I am very, very happy to be able to you know, have this discussion with you, to learn more about your business, for you to share with our listeners a little bit about hormone replacement therapy, and it's very, very well stated. And if you could please provide our listeners with your phone number and your website, that would be great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so our phone number is 407-696-2496, which is 407-MY-OBGYN, and then our website is horizons OBGYN FLcom.
Speaker 1:Love it. Hopefully we can have you guys back on in the near future and talk about one of the other services that you provide. You have so many. I'm so confused. I got so much I'm looking at. I'm looking at wellness services, facial aesthetics, body aesthetics. I mean my gosh, it's just one stop, so much one stop shop, all right. Well, very good. Look forward to having you and much success to your business, and thank you so much for being able to take time out of your business schedule thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 4:Thank you, you're very welcome thank you for tuning in to First Media Consulting Podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, subscribe today To nominate a business you would like to recommend to be on our show. Go to firstmediaconsultingcom or call. Thank you for.