#gender thalidomide

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir

Published: Apr 4, 2024

Across the United States, thousands of parents have consented to having their children’s puberty stopped with a class of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. Known colloquially as “puberty blockers,” these drugs overstimulate the pituitary gland to the point of preventing it from sending signals to the ovaries or testes to start producing the hormones responsible for puberty.

Parents who have consented to these drugs for their children love their kids dearly, but they’ve consented under entirely false pretenses. The doctors who’ve advised them say that puberty blockers are known to improve mental health — that they are even life-saving — and that they are fully reversible and just give kids “time to think.” None of this is true.

Major American medical associations say that “gender-affirming care” for kids is “medically necessary” and “life-saving.” Health authorities Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the U.K. disagree. Last month, the National Health Service of England decommissioned puberty blockers as a treatment of adolescent gender dysphoria. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” the NHSE explained.

Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQ and brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percent of kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.

There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.

How many parents would consent to puberty blockers under these circumstances? Very few, if any.

It is common for drugs to enter pediatric use after evidence of their success in adult medicine. The opposite happened in gender medicine. It was the failure of “sex reassignment” in adult men to achieve satisfactory cosmetic outcomes and improve life functioning that led a group of clinicians in the Netherlands to propose starting the “reassignment” process in childhood.

Their hypothesis was as technologically appealing as it was ethically dubious: since males could not reverse the effects of testosterone-fueled puberty to pass as women, it would be beneficial to these men to have their puberty bypassed altogether.

The Dutch recognized the dilemma but thought they found a way around it. Relying on their experience using puberty blockers to treat a condition known as central precocious puberty (CPP), they argued that blockers were fully reversible and thus part of the diagnostic process. If it turned out that the kid wasn’t “truly trans,” the drugs would be discontinued and puberty allowed to resume.

Their argument was dubious from the get-go. First, CPP has an objective diagnosis, based on a blood sample, whereas gender transition is based on the adolescent’s feelings and experiences, which are subject to change. In a political climate such as ours, in which mere exploration of the reasons for rejecting one’s body can be labeled “conversion therapy,” differential diagnosis becomes impossible.

As Dr. Jason Rafferty, author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ current policy statement on “gender-affirming care,” has put it, “the child’s sense of reality and feeling of who they are is the navigational beacon to sort of orient treatment around.” The AAP statement has been witheringly critiqued, and Rafferty and the AAP are now defendants in lawsuits by former patients.

Second, in CPP puberty suppression is by definition temporary; the goal is to delay puberty to its appropriate developmental window. In gender dysphoria, a “successful” prescription is where puberty is bypassed altogether. The assumption about reversibility, never tested and highly questionable form the start, proved to be the ethical foundation for the entire Dutch experiment, and it quickly crumbled. Over 93 percent of adolescents who are put on puberty blockers for gender issues continue down the medical pathway to cross-sex hormones. Some go on to surgeries.

Gender clinicians do not see this suspiciously high figure as a reason to rethink their approach. They see no possibility of iatrogenesis — a medical intervention that unintentionally induces harm, in this case by causing gender distress or confusion to persist artificially. On the contrary, they regard the high persistence rate as proof of their own remarkable diagnostic abilities.

More modest and scientifically-minded clinicians and researchers see things very differently. “Blocking puberty,” writes Sallie Baxendale, a professor of neuropsychology and author of an important new study on puberty blockers, “prevents the critical rewiring in the brain that underpins the ability make complex decisions. Puberty blockers may give children time to think but they simultaneously rob them of their developing capacity to do so.”

What is likely happening is that an ongoing youth mental health crisis whose origins predate and have little to do with gender is being misdiagnosed and mistreated with harmful and experimental drugs. Puberty blockers are the definition of a “quick fix” solution.

Researchers incorrectly refer to what the Dutch did as an experiment. In an experiment, falsifiable hypotheses are proposed, alternative interventions are tested, outcomes are monitored and competing explanations for observed results are thoughtfully ruled out.

The Dutch did nothing of the sort, according to a comprehensive scholarly examination of their study. Further, the only attempt to replicate that study, which was done in the U.K., failed. The researchers had to be forced to disclose their disappointing findings. Any scientific-minded person willing to put in the effort and read the literature will come to the same conclusion: Pediatric gender medicine is an industry built on fraud.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the Dutch pseudo-experiment with puberty blockers “escaped the lab” and became entangled in a fast-growing international social movement for transgender recognition. In the U.S., the drugs are being prescribed at numbers far exceeding anything the Dutch could possibly have imagined. Most adolescents referred to pediatric gender clinics are teen girls who have no history of dysphoria in childhood but who do have other mental health challenges that predate their distress with their bodies.

American medicine is no stranger to scandal — lobotomy, “recovered memory” and OxyContin are just a few examples. What makes pediatric gender transition unique is that it has been framed as a nonnegotiable civil right and defended by powerful civil rights groups, the Democratic Party and their ideological allies in the mainstream media.

A key reason for the divergence between U.S. and European medical authorities, as I’ve explained in a previous essay, is the latter’s greater willingness to follow principles of evidence-based medicine, including reliance on systematic reviews. Jack Turban, a prominent American gender clinician, revealed in a deposition that he seems not to know what a systematic review of evidence is.

Another reason is that in the U.S., doctors who practice child “transition” demand and often receive deference as the experts on the evidence for their practices; abroad, such clinicians are seen as having conflicts of interest. When the National Health Service of England appointed the highly respected Dr. Hilary Cass to lead its review of its youth gender service, it did so precisely because she was “a senior clinician with no prior involvement or fixed views in this area.” Sweden and Finland delegated the evaluation of evidence to experts with no personal involvement or stake in pediatric gender medicine.

Parents should never have been put in the position of having to decide whether to “allow” their kids to go through puberty. Those who would put the onus on parents are letting charlatans in the medical profession off the hook. Puberty is difficult for all teens, and it is not a disease. Puberty blockers offer teens in distress — especially girls with history of sexual abuse, autistic kids and gay kids — false hope by casting puberty as optional.

Puberty is a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood, responsible for the development of the body’s major organs and systems and not just its external sexual features. Puberty blockers rob children of their right to an open future.

[meepertonton]

"well why dont we ban tall people in sports too if you want to ban intersex people or trans people??? its just how their body is!! it just means theyre the better athlete!!"

the difference between height or any other host of characteristics is that the advantages imparted by certain disorders of sexual development or just being male are typical for males in general. the same can be said about being larger in boxing, or being able-bodied in general.

there is an obvious categorization that we can make based on these obvious sex differences, and the advantage typically lies in the male category.

being tall is a characteristic anyone can possess, but going through male puberty and developing in a male way almost always an advantage in most sports. its the same reason we have weight classes in boxing.

its like arguing that we should get rid of the Paralympics because its not Usain Bolt's fault that he has legs and they dont

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

To my knowledge testosterone doesn't render you infertile until your ovaries have atrophied from prolonged usage (and you can probably tell because that causes severe cramping). You can easily get pregnant on T, but it's advised to stop taking it during gestation to avoid complications. However, there's no telling what kind of long-term effects this might have on a child that developed in a woman's body that's been altered to an unknown degree, which is pretty concerning.

I once had a disagreement with a nurse friend of mine over my wondering aloud about the possibility that the elevated estrogen levels in the water supply (due to the massive production of birth control pills the past 60 years) that have led to observable birth defects in, for instance, frogs, might also be a contributing factor to the rise of subtler things like gender dysphoria and asexuality in humans.

Her only response was to repeat the Alex Jones "it's turning the frogs gay!" viral moment, even though, as I understand it, Jones was fundamentally correct in the information he was sharing, he just misspoke in the moment by saying 'gay' when he actually meant 'hermaphrodite'.

Thinking she might have some medical reason to dismiss the idea out of hand that I was unaware of, I asked for her to explain more, but she, perplexingly, had nothing more to add. She just entirely rejected the idea out of hand and wouldn't explain why.

It's been something I've been thinking on for a long time after finding out that around the same time thalidomide was being given to pregnant women (late 1950s-early 60s), large quantities of testosterone were also being experimentally given to pregnant women to help with morning sickness. The horrific 10,000+ birth deformities that accompanied thalidomide being administered are well documented, and quickly led to it being taken off the market, but the long-term effects of testosterone - and, in the pill and hormone replacement, estrogen - may have gone unnoticed because of them having no similarly obvious surface physical manifestations. The only example of this I'm aware of being studied is with testosterone given to mothers being linked to autism, which has, after all, itself been defined as the 'extreme male brain'.

I just want to stress my position is not that mass-produced male and female hormones are THE cause of any of the above, only that they may be an underlying long-term factor that is being completely overlooked.

[erebusvincent]

Something is going wrong in our genes. What if the problem isn’t naturally-occurring but rather the result of too many drugs in our systems, particularly those of pregnant women?

Unless drugs cause obvious birth defects—think of the thalidomide disaster of the late 1950s and early 60s that resulted in tens of thousands of babies being born with heartbreaking deformities such as limbless torsos—they seldom make headlines. Even widely used anti-seizure medications, known to cause physical and mental impairments in exposed offspring, are barely known for these effects. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this whole ordeal it’s that countless millions of you are walking around oblivious to the (sometimes massive amounts of) drugs you were exposed to in utero. Almost all of your records are long gone, and you will likely never know their impact on your development.

…

More importantly, we should consider other common medications that impact hormone signaling and also affect sexual differentiation of the brain. It’s not only synthetic sex hormones that alter how sex hormones work. This also includes anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anti-epileptic drugs, general anesthesia, and medications used in IVF and assisted reproduction. Add to that a whole soup of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment. To some extent, we are all still guinea pigs.

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day.

Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday.

‘Sushi’ means sour rice.

The ‘prat’ in ‘pratfall’ means ‘buttocks’.

Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.

69 has been sexual slang since at least 1790.

Optimists are, on average, cleverer than cynics.

Farmers get the most sex out of any profession.

The Roman Catholic Church is richer than Croatia.

People with bigger brains take more daytime naps.

Earth has lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years.

In the 1870s, New York had a school for aspiring criminals.

Houses in Britain numbered 13 cost £9000 less than average.

Your immune system has the ability to kill you in 15 minutes.

Entomologist John Midgely has just discovered a fly that can’t fly.

A gender-neutral equivalent of ‘sugar daddy’ is ‘glucose guardian’.

Athletes appear larger if they wear a bigger number on their jersey.

'Playing chess with the pope' is an Icelandic euphemism for having a poo.

One in four currently charting pop songs in the UK samples an older song.

In 1805, British manufacturers made a chamber pot containing Napoleon’s head.

45% of men in the UK would be uncomfortable saying “I love you!” to a male relative.

If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, we could save one million lives a year.

Students who complete a ‘Science Of Happiness’ course are happier than those who don’t.

In 2014, a pine tree planted in memory of George Harrison died after an infestation of beetles.

When a group of people are laughing, people tend to look at the person they trust/like the most.

In 1907, French waiters went on strike for better pay, more time off and the right to have moustaches.

According to new research, Vlad The Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, may have been vegetarian.

In 2010, McDonalds mistakenly packed and distributed 5000 Happy Meals with a condom instead of a toy.

When a drone bee mates with the queen, he releases his sperm with such force that it can cause an audible pop.

Due to their many customisation options, there are 383 billion different ways to order a latte at Starbucks.

The average woman absorbs up to five pounds of damaging chemicals a year thanks to beauty products.

Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.

When a woman no longer gets frustrated and upset with you, you can almost guarantee that she doesn't care anymore.

When German economist Edgar Jaffé died, D.H. Lawrence sent a letter to his widow saying he was glad Edgar was dead.

Fish from the Phallicthys genus (literally ‘penis fish’) can have phalluses as big as half their total body length. (Crikey!)

John Cena, WWE superstar, has granted more than 400 Make-A-Wish requests, more than anyone in the charity's history.

Scientists say the brain purposely forgets certain memories in order to avoid information overload and emotional hangovers.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has towns called Intercourse and Paradise. It takes six minutes to get from one to the other.

Stephen Hawking once held a party for time travellers. However, nobody came because he sent out the invitation after the party.

50,000 fake PhDs are estimated to be purchased every year in the United States, while only 40,000 PhDs are earned legitimately.

Studies show that by eating a big breakfast, you won’t feel as hungry the rest of the day, which can lead to more nutritional food choices.

According to a new paper in Nature Human Behavior, opposites do not attract. Over 80% of traits in couples were rated as similar and only 3% of their traits were substantially different.

Male palm cockatoos make drumsticks out of tree branches and rhythmically tap them to attract females. When they are done drumming, they tend to throw away their drumsticks.

In 2018, robbers in Belgium were told by a shop owner that he might have more cash for them to steal if they came back at 6:30. When they returned three hours later, they were promptly arrested by police who’d been tipped off.

Some football matches are now filmed with AI-powered cameras designed to track the ball during play. Much to the annoyance of viewers, during a 2020 Inverness Caledonian Thistle vs. Ayr United match, one camera kept confusing the ball with a bald-headed linesman.

Actor Jack Nicholson grew up believing his biological mother was his sister. When his mother got pregnant at a young age, his grandmother (who he thought was his biological mother) raised him as her son. Nicholson didn't find out this information until 1974, when he was already in his thirties.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

[thearbourist]

Children Are Bring Harmed - The Lack of Ethics in "Gender Affirming" Medicine

If you are violating one of the principles of human medicine – first do no harm – it may be wise to reconsider your position on ‘gender-affirming treatment’ regardless of how lucrative it is. “Children are being harmed. Young people are being harmed.  In many ways, this story is not new. From snake oil to thalidomide, from lobotomies to opioids, medicine has a long history of fake cures and…

[incoherentbabblings]

Sometimes I re-read my old undergrad essays from and nodding my head sagely as I read what I assumed made perfect sense at the time but now looking back I can only go wooft if you know what I mean. I both miss being that involved in academia but also thinking I didn't do enough I didn't hold enough of my own opinions. I needed more time in a way. To have a second wack at some of what I wrote knowing what I know now? Argh, that's the problem ain't it?

[metamatar]

relevant again.

For example, the number of fingers on a human hand or toes on a human foot is genetically determined: the genes code for five fingers and toes in almost everyone, and five fingers and toes develop in any normal environment. But the heritability of number of fingers and toes in humans is almost certainly very low. That’s because most of the variation in numbers of toes is environmentally caused, often by problems in fetal development. For example, when pregnant women took thalidomide some years ago, many babies had fewer than five fingers and toes. And if we look at numbers of fingers and toes in adults, we find many missing digits as a result of accidents. But genetic coding for six toes is rare in humans (though apparently not in cats). So genetically caused variation appears to be small compared to environmentally caused variation. If someone asks, then, whether number of toes is genetic or not, the right answer is: “it depends what you mean by genetic.” The number of toes is genetically determined, but heritability is low because genes are not responsible for much of the variation.

Conversely, a characteristic can be highly heritable even if it is not genetically determined. Some years ago, when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring were “due” to a genetic (chromosomal) difference. Now that earrings are less gender-specific, the heritability of having an earring has no doubt decreased. But neither then nor now was having earrings genetically determined in anything like the manner of having five fingers. The heritability literature is full of cases like this: high measured heritabilities for characteristics whose genetic determination is doubtful.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The inclusion of sex-specific information in textbooks is dependent on the availability of sex-specific data, but because women have largely been excluded from medical research this data is severely lacking. Even the very basics of sex determination have a sex data gap: since the landmark 1990 paper that identified the Y chromosome as ‘the’ sex-determining region, the female sex has – the irony – been seen as the default. But in this case, the default didn’t mean we focused on the female. Rather, research instead focused on testes development as the supposedly ‘active’ process, while female sexual development was seen as a passive process – until 2010, when we finally started researching the active process of ovarian determination. Most early research into cardiovascular disease was conducted on men, and women continue to be underrepresented, making up only 25% of participants across thirty-one landmark trials for congestive heart failure between 1987 and 2012. 

Women represent 55% of HIV-positive adults in the developing world, and in parts of Africa and the Caribbean women aged five to twenty-four are up to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men of the same age. We also know that women experience different clinical symptoms and complications due to HIV, and yet a 2016 review of the inclusion of women in US HIV research found that women made up only 19.2% of participants in antiretroviral studies, 38.1% in vaccination studies and 11.1% in studies to find a cure. 

Because of their routine exclusion from clinical trials we lack solid data on how to treat pregnant women for pretty much anything. We may not know how a disease will take hold or what the likely outcome may be, although the WHO warns that many diseases can have ‘particularly serious consequences for pregnant women, or can harm the foetus’. Some strains of influenza virus (including the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus) have ‘particularly severe symptoms during pregnancy’. There is also evidence that SARS can be more severe during pregnancy. It is of course understandable that a pregnant woman may be reluctant to take part in medical research, but this doesn’t mean that we have to just throw our hands up in the air and accept that we know nothing: we should be routinely and systematically tracking, recording and collating pregnant-women’s health outcomes. But we aren’t – not even during pandemics: during the 2002-4 SARS outbreak in China, pregnant-women’s health outcomes were not systemically tracked and ‘consequently’, the WHO points out, ‘it was not possible to fully characterize the course and outcome of SARS during pregnancy’. Another gender data gap that could have been so easily avoided, and information that will be lacking for when the next pandemic hits.

Like the failure to include women in anatomy textbooks, the failure to include women in medical trials is a historical problem that has its roots in seeing the male body as the default human body, but this traditional bias was radically enhanced in the 1970s, to the great detriment of women’s health, following one of the biggest medical scandals of the twentieth century. In 1960 doctors began prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women who suffered from morning sickness. The drug, which had been available as a mild over-the-counter sedative in many countries since the late 1950s, was considered safe because its developers ‘could not find a dose high enough to kill a rat’. But while it didn’t kill rats, it did affect foetal development (something that in fact the manufacturers knew as early as 1959). Before the drug was taken off the market in 1962, over 10,000 children had been born around the world with thalidomide-related disabilities. In the wake of the scandal, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidelines in 1977 excluding women of childbearing potential from drug trials. This exclusion went unquestioned. The acceptance of the male norm went unquestioned. The male norm continues to go unquestioned by many today, with some researchers continuing to insist, in the face of all the evidence, that biological sex doesn’t matter. One public-health researcher revealed that she had received the following feedback on two different grant applications: ‘I wish you’d stop with all this sex stuff and get back to science’, and ‘I’ve been in this field for 20 years and this [biological difference] doesn’t matter’. It isn’t just anonymous notes, either. A 2014 op-ed published in the journal Scientific American complained that including both sexes in experiments was a waste of resources; in 2015 an op-ed in the official scientific journal of the US National Academy of Sciences insisted that ‘focusing on preclinical sex differences will not address women’s and men’s health disparities’.

Alongside insisting that sex differences don’t matter, some researchers advocate against the inclusion of women in research on the basis that while biological sex may matter, the lack of comparable data arising from the historical data gap makes including women inadvisable (talk about adding insult to injury). Female bodies (both the human and animal variety) are, it is argued, too complex, too variable, too costly to be tested on. Integrating sex and gender into research is seen as ‘burdensome’. It is seen as possible for there to be ‘too much gender’, and for its exclusion to be acceptable on the basis of ‘simplification’ – in which case it’s worth noting that recent studies on mice have actually shown greater variability in males on a number of markers. So who’s too complicated now? Beyond the argument that women’s bodies, with their fluctuating, ‘atypical’ hormones, are simply inconvenient research vessels, researchers also defend their failure to include women in trials by claiming that women are harder to recruit. And it is certainly true that, due to women’s care-giving responsibilities they have less leisure time and may find it harder to make, for example, clinic appointments during the school run. However, this is an argument for adapting trial schedules to women, rather than simply excluding them, and in any case, it is possible to find women if you really want to. While reviews of FDA-mandated medical product trials found that women made up only 18% of participants in trials for endovascular occlusion devices (used if your foetal blood vessel hasn’t closed of its own accord) and 32% of participants in studies on coronary stents (which, incidentally, are another device where women have worse outcomes than men), women represented 90% and 92% of participants in facial wrinkle correction trials and dental device trials, respectively. 

- Caroline Criado-Pérez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

[americanmysticom]

Flawed CDC Study Wrongly Concludes COVID Vaccines Safe in Pregnancy

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that pregnant women get the COVID-19 vaccine is based on limited data, poorly matched cohorts and inexcusably low representation of pregnant women in their first trimester.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month recommended women who are pregnant, recently pregnant, who are trying to become pregnant now or who might become pregnant in the future get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The CDC made the recommendation after concluding, in a Jan. 7 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, that data support the safety of COVID vaccination during pregnancy.

By comparing COVID vaccination during pregnancy to those unvaccinated during pregnancy, the agency determined COVID vaccines were not associated with preterm birth or with delivering a child who was born smaller or less developed than expected, also known as small-for-gestational-age (SGA).

In this article, we examine flaws in the CDC study that led to the agency’s wrongful conclusion that COVID vaccines for pregnant women.

First, some background.

Including pregnant women in clinical trials

Pregnancy is a precarious time not just for the expectant mother but most importantly the developing fetus. Expectant mothers are advised not to drink alcohol or caffeinated beverages and not to eat raw foods such as sushi and deli meats.

A lot of medications are contraindicated during pregnancy including simple pain meds like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (Ibuprofen), antidiarrheals, decongestants, antihistamines, nasal sprays and expectorants.

Women are advised not to take these medications during pregnancy because they pose potential risks to the developing fetus.

For decades, expectant mothers have been considered a vulnerable group to be shielded from potential harms of research for the sake of their fetuses’ health.

In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines excluding pregnant women and women “with childbearing potential” from phase I and phase II clinical trials, where new drugs are tested for safety and efficacy.

This view stemmed, in part, from tragedies caused by two now-infamous drugs that were widely prescribed to pregnant women in the mid-20th century: thalidomide, which caused thousands of children around the world to be born with flipper-like limbs and other birth defects, and diethylstilbestrol, which was linked to higher rates of cancer in both mothers and the daughters born to them.

This view changed however in 1993, with the passage of the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act, which sought to increase gender and racial diversity in clinical trials.

Federal regulations currently require any study involving pregnant women to meet 10 criteria, including that, “where scientifically appropriate,” data first be collected on pregnant animals and non-pregnant human subjects to assess risk, and that any risk to mother or fetus be “the least possible for achieving the objectives of the research.”

Reproduction toxicity studies in animal models hinted at dangers early on

While the companies developing the COVID-19 vaccines have done preliminary studies in animals, their studies were limited to rodents. The vaccine makers did not conduct studies on non-human primates, recognized as the closest animal models to humans regarding genetics, physiology and behavior.

Nevertheless, Moderna’s own Assessment Report to the European Medicines Agency Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use on March 11, 2021, included a study for reproductive and developmental toxicology on female rats during gestation.

The report noted (page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) an increase in the number of fetuses with common skeletal variations of one or more rib nodules and one or more wavy ribs. Additionally, the number of pups born to vaccinated rats was lower than the number in the unvaccinated rats.

Most importantly, the authors explicitly stated, “In this study, no vaccine dose was administered during the early organogenesis [the period during embryonic development of an animal when the main body organs are formed], to address the direct embryotoxic effect of the components of the vaccine formulation.”

One month earlier, Pfizer reported in its Feb. 19, 2021, Assessment Report to the same committee that pregnant rats demonstrated a greater-than-2x increase in pre-implantation loss in exposed animals compared to controls.

The authors of the Pfizer report further stated (Page 50: Reproduction Toxicity) that “a very low incidence of gastroschisis, mouth/jaw malformations, right-sided aortic arch, and cervical vertebrae abnormalities” occurred in litters of exposed rats, and that these findings were within historical control data.

This finding brings up an important question: Why compare the incidence of these major congenital abnormalities with “historical” controls and not with the controls themselves?

As late as April 2021, the CDC still maintained there was limited data surrounding the safety of COVID vaccines for women who were pregnant or breastfeeding. The agency advised women who were pregnant or breastfeeding to consult with their physician before getting vaccinated.

But were obstetricians made aware of the potential safety signals appearing in animal models?

And how were physicians able to decide whether or not a COVID vaccine was appropriate for their pregnant patients if the CDC wasn’t offering any guidance at that time?

CDC’s latest study: a closer look at the details

Using data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink — a CDC vaccine safety monitoring system the public cannot access — the CDC study identified 46,079 pregnant women with live births and gestational age.

Of those, 10,064 (21.8%) received ≥1 COVID vaccine doses during pregnancy from Dec. 15, 2020, to July 22, 2021.

Nearly all (9,892, or 98.3%) of the pregnant women included in the study were vaccinated during the second or third trimester.

The authors found that among unvaccinated women, the rate of premature births was 7% compared to 4.9% in those who had received either one or both vaccine doses.

The rate of small-for-gestational-age in both vaccinated and unvaccinated mothers was equal (8.2%).

The authors thus conclude that “… receipt of COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy was not associated with increased risk for preterm birth or SGA at birth.”

5 flaws in the CDC analysis

On closer examination, we identified the following five deficits in the CDC study:

Cohorts were not well matched. There were greater than three times more African American women in the unvaccinated group than in the vaccinated group. The CDC acknowledges the African American race is a risk factor for preterm birth and may be as high as 50% greater than in white women.

There were also greater than 50% more mothers in the unvaccinated group classified as having inadequate prenatal care. Obesity, also a risk for preterm birth, was also overrepresented in the unvaccinated group (29% vs 23.9%) compared to the vaccinated.

No adjustment for mothers with a history of preterm birth of SGA. The authors did not address this potential confounder.

COVID infection, another potentially important confounder, was present in the unvaccinated group at a 25% greater incidence than in the vaccinated cohort (3.5% vs 2.8%). There was no mention of when in the pregnancy the infection was detected.Viral infections early in pregnancy are particularly deleterious to the developing fetus. This should have been an important risk factor to quantify independently, especially when establishing a risk-versus-benefit ratio of vaccination.

The CDC data indicate a 7.7% risk of preterm birth in mothers having received one of two vaccines. This represents a 10% greater risk than in unvaccinated pregnancies. This increased risk is not mentioned in the discussion. Moreover, the adjusted Hazard Ratio (aHR) in this population is given as 0.78, indicating a 22% risk reduction in preterm birth in vaccinated mothers, seemingly conflicting with the raw data. (A request for clarification from the corresponding author was not answered).

The most glaring deficit in the CDC analysis is the scarcity of vaccinated mothers who received a vaccine in the first trimester in this study. The risk of untoward outcomes (birth defects, miscarriages) in pregnancy is greatest during the first third of pregnancy, a time when crucial embryonic structures are developing. This is the period of time where maternal health is particularly important, and exposure to toxins, infections and certain medicines must be minimized or eliminated entirely if possible.

Only 172 of more than 10,000 (1.7%) vaccinated mothers in the study received a vaccine in the first trimester. The incidence of preterm birth and SGA were not mentioned in this small cohort because of limited numbers.

Nonetheless, the authors arrive at the stunning conclusion: “CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccination for women who are pregnant, recently pregnant (including those who are lactating), who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future (4) to reduce the risk for severe COVID-19–associated outcomes.”

CDC not required to provide access to its data or subject its analysis to peer review

The Vaccine Safety Datalink uses data reported from nine large healthcare organizations, serving only 3% of the U.S. population. The system collects electronic health data from each participating site.

This database is accessible only to researchers outside the CDC and only by request. Requests may be accommodated after a research proposal is submitted and approved by the Research Data Center of the National Center for Health Statistics.

CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports can, as in the case of the agency’s analysis of COVID vaccine safety in pregnant women, be based on data that is not necessarily publicly available.

The agency’s analyses are not subject to peer review. Nevertheless, the reports are often widely cited as the official scientific position.

Conclusions

The CDC’s determination that COVID vaccination is safe in pregnant women is unfounded.

Cohorts were poorly matched. There was an inexcusably low representation of women who were vaccinated early in their pregnancy in their analysis. This is a period where any exposure to medical interventions will have a greater potential for risk to the fetus.

Broadly recommending vaccination for all pregnant women including those who are trying to become pregnant is particularly unwarranted.

This report places the CDC’s purported commitment to its mission of disease control and prevention on full display. The agency’s conclusions arrive more than a full year after the CDC authorized COVID vaccinations and are based on retrospective data alone.

In other words, the CDC is willing (and apparently allowed) to make safety determinations only after the experimental vaccines have been widely and indiscriminately deployed.

This is a shocking departure from the higher standards of prudence that are demanded during pregnancy, a time where two lives are potentially at risk and poor outcomes can lead to a lifetime of potential consequences.

It should be noted that several of the authors of this study reported potential conflicts of interest.

One author reported institutional research funding from Pfizer, and another from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. A third author has a career grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-study-wrongly-concludes-covid-vaccines-safe-pregnancy/

BUY TODAY: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s New Book — 'The Real Anthony Fauci'

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Daniel Martin

Published: Apr 8, 2024

Children who believe they are transgender may actually have mental health issues, a landmark report is set to find this week.

It is expected to advise that children should not be rushed onto a path to change gender, and that they receive counselling that addresses the mental health issues they may have rather than being put on drugs.

Dr Hillary Cass, a paediatrician, will on Wednesday unveil her long-awaited review into how transgender children are supported and the medical treatment they receive.

It comes amid concern that children are being allowed to change gender in school without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and after the routine prescription of puberty blockers was banned by NHS England.

The Telegraph understands that the report will find that children who think they are trans disproportionately have mental health issues stemming from a difficult family situation or having suffered from abuse. They are also more likely to be neurodiverse.

Counselling to tackle issues holistically

It is expected to suggest that these children need counselling to tackle these issues holistically, rather than them automatically being put on a path to change gender.

The report is expected to warn that it is wrong to assume it is in the best interest of children who think they are trans to change gender, and urge extreme caution over the use of drugs such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to facilitate this, even once someone is over 18 years old.

The review is also said to express concern about a significant rise in the number of young girls wanting to become boys, and say this group needs more support.

On Monday, Downing Street said the Government would act on the basis of the report to ensure children and adolescents were kept safe.

“We have talked about the importance of children and adolescent safety and wellbeing being paramount,” the Prime Minister’s spokesman said.

“That is part of previous work such as the NHS announcement to end the routine prescription of puberty blockers, it is behind our robust and clear guidance to schools. It is categorical that social transitioning is not a neutral act and no one should be forced to use preferred pronouns or accept contested beliefs as fact.

“We’ve also said there’s more to do in this area and we will look at the review when it’s published.”

He added: “The Government has taken a number of steps in this area, recognising the effect that social transitioning can have on children and adolescents, and we’ve made clear that single sex spaces must be protected.”

The interim Cass report in 2022 said that children being allowed to socially transition in schools – changing their name and pronouns, and being allowed to use the lavatories and changing rooms of the gender they identify as – was “not a neutral act”.

It also raised concerns about the NHS’s gender identity and development service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust in London.

Children who think they are trans may have other problems

The interim review led NHS England to close Tavistock service and replace it with regional centres that take a more “holistic” approach to treatment and look at other mental health or medical issues they may have.

Dr Cass’s final report is expected to conclude that there could be many complex reasons a child may think they are in the wrong gender.

It is believed to advise therapists that children presenting as trans may have had other complex issues such as a difficult family situation, having suffered from abuse, or having been exposed to pornography too early.

For this reason, cases need to be judged holistically.

The review is also believed to conclude that if you allow a very young child to socially transition they are more likely to grow up to have a fixed trans identity later in life, rather than their gender distress being resolved by other means.

Dr Cass’s report is understood to say that prepubescent children should not be put on the same “pathway” as older adolescents who wish to identify as the opposite gender.

‘Psychological repercussions’

It is expected to warn that children may experience “psychological” repercussions as a result of being allowed to change their name and pronoun to the gender of their choice.

Last month, the NHS announced an immediate ban on prescribing puberty blockers to under-18s unless they are part of a clinical trial. Ministers said the “landmark decision” was in children’s “best interests” and would help to ensure youngsters who feel their gender is not the same as their sex are treated using medical evidence.

However, campaigners have warned of a loophole, as there is nothing to stop transgender children getting hold of puberty blockers from private clinics.

In 2021-22, the NHS reported more than 5,000 referrals to Tavistock, up from just under 250 who were questioning their gender a decade earlier.

[mi6021aidan]

research links

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2020/12/11/puberty-blockers-consent-treatment-analysis-high-courts-ruling/

https://www.contemporaryobgyn.net/view/gnrh-alternative-hysterectomy-uterine-fibroids

https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/puberty-blockers-high-court-ruling-under-16s-barriers-keira-bell-case-778622

https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1333735295309721600

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/sep/01/thalidomide-scandal-timeline

https://www.oncozine.com/thalidomides-secret-past-the-link-with-nazi-germany/

http://thalidomidestory.com/story/other-notables/historical-figures/hermann-wirtz-sr/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41419-018-0892-3

https://www.hse.ie/eng/health/az/g/gender-dysphoria/causes-of-gender-dysphoria.html#:~:text=Malfunctioning%20hormones&text=This%20could%20be%20caused%20by,working%20properly%20within%20the%20womb.

[hello-delveinsight]

Multiple Myeloma Market Size Forecast, Epidemiology Analysis, Emerging Drug Uptake and Key Companies Assessment by DelveInsight

(LAS VEGAS, US) The Multiple Myeloma Market size across the 8MM  i.e. the United States, Eu5(the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain), China and Japan, was $16.27bn in 2019 and is increasing with a modest CAGR during the study period (2017-2030), according to DelveInsight, a leading company in healthcare analytics and consulting.  

The market size for Multiple Myeloma therapies will increase dramatically by 2030 due to the arrival of upcoming therapies that will carve out niche roles in the drug landscape. DelveInsight's latest report on Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology and Market indicates that the impressive growth in market size is due to the rise in incident cases of Multiple Myeloma in 8MM, incorporation of immune-therapies in treatment landscape increased patient adherence and adoption of newer therapies. Also, rich emerging pipeline, better diagnosis, rising awareness and expected increase in investment in the R&D activities are some additional factors that are going to fuel the market.

Some key highlights from the report:

The     total incident cases of Multiple Myeloma are expected to reach 91,520 in     2020 in the 8MM

Higher     usage of bortezomib based regimen observed across the US, EU5 and JP;     Bortezomib + Lenalidomide + dex regimen is the preferred treatment choice     in the US and Japan in the first-line compared to Bortezomib +     Melphalan ± Prednisone and Bortezomib + dex regimen in EU5. In the case     of China, higher usage of thalidomide based regimen found in the     first-line setting

Among     emerging therapies, Bristol Myers Squibb and Bluebird Bio's anti-BCMA CAR     T Cell Therapy Idecabtagene Vicleucel (Ide-cel, bb2121) is expected to     result in significant revenues owing to promising results, one-time dosing     and premium pricing in heavily pretreated patients

Key     Companies fuelling the Multiple Myeloma market size growth are     GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Roche, Janssen Research     & Development, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Pfizer, Takeda, Amgen,     AstraZeneca etc.

Patent     expiry of multiple blockbuster drugs like Revlimid, Pomalyst, Darzalex and     Kyprolis is on the lines to expire from 2026 onwards, and this will erode     the sales value significantly and the market is expected to decline from     2028 onwards due to cumulative impacts of patent expiry.

Download Multiple Myeloma Sample: https://www.delveinsight.com/sample-request/multiple-myeloma-market

Though Multiple Myeloma is not common cancer; still, it is the second most diagnosed blood cancer in the United States. It is worth highlighting that it is a heterogeneous haematological malignancy in which epidemiology plays an increasingly important role. Over the past years, intensive clinical and molecular epidemiological research has extended the information about its pathogenesis, risk factors, and prognostic components which aided the approval of new drugs. Despite arduous research endeavors, the etiology remains enigmatic. The untimely or prolonged diagnosis has a severe impact on the clinical course of Multiple myeloma and a negative impact on disease-free survival. It's an unfortunate fact that approximately 95% of all the Multiple Myeloma cases are diagnosed at distant stages. The report reviews the changing epidemiology and provides the forecasts upto 2030, highlights treatment patterns, and the health disparity observed in important subgroups of Multiple Myeloma.

Multiple myeloma report contains epidemiological analysis segmented as the following: 

Total     Multiple Myeloma Incident Cases 

Total     Multiple Myeloma Incident cases by Age Distribution

Total     Symptomatic Multiple Myeloma Cases 

Cases     of Multiple Myeloma by Treatment Line 

Gender-specific     cases of Multiple Myeloma

Multiple Myeloma Market Scenario

The current standard of care of Multiple myeloma treatment includes stem cell transplant, conventional chemotherapy, targeted therapy, surgery, and radiation therapy. Chemotherapies can be given alone or in conjunction with other drugs including corticosteroids, proteasome inhibitors, immune-modulators, and monoclonal antibodies, anti-resorptive agents such as bisphosphonates and NSAIDs, or narcotics.  Currently, Lenalidomide is the market leader in multiple myeloma treatment landscape, and usage as monotherapy and also in combination with other therapies can be found across all the settings. Darzalex is also being used by the healthcare experts in combination as doublet, triplet, and quadruplet with existing therapies for the good treatment strategies and better result outcomes and has impacted the MM treatment landscape significantly. Label expansion along with higher usage of Darzalex has translated into higher revenues and expected to generate maximum revenue by 2025 before the competition and expected patent expiry would erode the sales value. At present, among the IMid's agents, Revlimid dominates the Multiple Myeloma market in the 8MM, where it is included in all lines of Multiple Myeloma therapy either as monotherapy or in combination with other drugs. In 2017, Revlimid generated a revenue of USD 7,140 million in the 8MM. Despite the loss of patent exclusivity among the major markets and approval of other potential pipeline candidates, it will continue to maintain a strong presence during the forecast period as a molecule. The novel emerging therapies are expected to bring a paradigm shift in the Multiple Myeloma treatment landscape by catering to larger unmet needs.

 Report includes exhaustive analysis of Multiple Myeloma Pipeline Therapies

Idecabtagene     vicleucel (ide-cel): Bristol Myers Squibb and bluebird bio

Venetoclax     (Venclexta, Venclyxto): AbbVie

JNJ-68284528     LCAR-B38M/JNJ-4528): Janssen Research and Development

Keytruda     (pembrolizumab): Novartis

Melflufen     (melphalan flufenamide): Oncopeptides

Cetrelimab     (JNJ-63723283): Janssen Research and Development

REGN5458:     Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

Iberdomide:     Celgene

NY-ESO-1     C259 T Cells: GlaxoSmithKline

Braftovi     (encorafenib): Pfizer

JCARH125:     Celgene Corporation

Felzartamab     (MOR202): I-Mab Biopharma

Chidamide     (Epidaza): Shenzhen Chipscreen Bioscience

The past couple of decades have shown vast changes in the treatment landscape of Multiple Myeloma, starting with the use of stem cells trailed by the availability of novel treatments such as immunomodulators and proteasome inhibitors that have transformed the natural history of the indication, leading to increased survival times. Ongoing advancements in  emerging Novel therapies such as CAR-T cell and monoclonal antibodies are showing promising results in treating multiple myeloma patients and are also expected to drive the growth of the market. Recent years have witnessed an influx of several pharma companies exploring the Multiple Myeloma market through novel targets and therapies. Although the emerging pipeline candidates will reduce the gaps however, the opportunities will still remain. As a ray of hope, the launch of new drugs have extended the median overall survival of Multiple Myeloma patients to 4-6 years; however the stark reality is that the ten year survival rate is 3%. The long term burden of the therapies makes life pretty difficult for the patients. There is a dire need for a permanent cure. Another hurdle is the existing expensive treatment options that create a barrier for the aged uninsured population to get hold of costly therapies. The factors like drug-induced toxicities, differences in clinical care, access to the therapies in real-world settings are the observed gaps between trial-based and real-world outcomes. DelveInsight believes that the Multiple Myeloma market is an attractive prospect for the companies due to the high unmet needs and low regulatory hurdles. 

Key Trends of Multiple Myeloma Market Report: https://www.delveinsight.com/report-store/multiple-myeloma-market

Scope of the Report

Geography     Covered: 8MM - The United States, EU5 (Germany, France, Italy, Spain,     and the United Kingdom), Japan, and Chine.

Study     Period: 3-year historical and 11-year forecasted analysis (2017-2030).

Markets     Segmentation: By Geographies, By Therapies (Forecasted + Historical).

Companies     Covered: GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Roche, Janssen     Research & Development, Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., Pfizer, Takeda,     Amgen, AstraZeneca, and several others.

Analysis:     Comparative and conjoint analysis of emerging therapies, Attribute     Analysis,

Case     Studies

KOL's     Views

Analyst's     View

The Multiple Myeloma Marketed drugs covered report are:

Sarclisa     (Isatuximab): Sanofi

Darzalex     (Daratumumab): Janssen Research and Development

Empliciti     (Elotuzumab): Bristol-Myers Squibb and AbbVie

Velcade     (bortezomib): Takeda

Pomalyst     (Pomalidomide): Celgene Corporation

Revlimid     (Lenalidomide): Celgene Corporation

Farydak     (panobinostat): Novartis Pharmaceuticals

Kyprolis     (Carfilzomib): Amgen

Ninlaro     (ixazomib): Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Blenrep     (Belantamab Mafodotin): GlaxoSmithKline

Table of Contents

1

Key Insights

2

Executive Summary of Multiple Myeloma

3

KOL Views

4

SWOT Analysis of Multiple Myeloma 

5

Multiple Myeloma Market Overview at a Glance

6

Disease Background and Overview: Multiple Myeloma 

7

Diagnosis of Multiple Myeloma

8

Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology and Patient Population

9

The United States Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

10

EU-5 Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

11

Japan Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

12

China Multiple Myeloma Epidemiology

13

Multiple Myeloma Treatment

14

Unmet Needs in the Multiple Myeloma Market

15

Patient Journey of Multiple Myeloma

16

Key Endpoints of Multiple Myeloma Clinical Trials

17

Multiple Myeloma Marketed Therapies

18

Multiple Myeloma Emerging Therapies

19

Multiple Myeloma 8 Major Market Analysis

20

8MM Multiple Myeloma Market Size

21

The United States Multiple Myeloma Market Size

22

EU-5 Multiple Myeloma Market Size

23

Japan Multiple Myeloma Market Size

24

China Multiple Myeloma Market Size

25

Market Access and Reimbursement of Multiple Myeloma (MM)  Therapies

26

Multiple Myeloma Market Drivers

27

Multiple Myeloma Market Barriers

28

Appendix

29

DelveInsight Capabilities

30

Disclaimer

31

About DelveInsight

Request a WebEx Walkthrough of the Report: https://www.delveinsight.com/report-store/multiple-myeloma-market

Related Report:

CAR T-Cell Therapy for Multiple Myeloma-Market Insights and Market Forecast-2030 : This report delivers an in-depth understanding of the CAR T-Cell Therapy use for Multiple Myeloma as well as the CAR T-Cell Therapy market trends for Multiple Myeloma. It provides current treatment practices, emerging drugs, CAR T-Cell Therapy market share of the various CAR T-Cell Therapies for Multiple Myeloma, the individual therapies, current and forecasted Multiple Myeloma CAR T-Cell Therapy market Size from 2017 to 2030.

About DelveInsight

DelveInsight is a leading Business Consultant, and Market Research firm focused exclusively on life sciences. It supports Pharma companies by providing end to end comprehensive solutions to improve their performance.  Get hassle-free access to all the healthcare and pharma market research reports through our subscription-based platform PharmDelve.

Contact Us: Shruti Thakur  info@delveinsight.com  +1(919)321-6187  www.delveinsight.com 

SOURCE DelveInsight Business Research, LLP

[gethealthy18-blog]

308: How to Use Your Hormones to Your Advantage With FloLiving

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/308-how-to-use-your-hormones-to-your-advantage-with-floliving/

308: How to Use Your Hormones to Your Advantage With FloLiving

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is sponsored by BLUblox. They create stylish and effective blue light blocking glasses for any time of day. Their BluLite lens is a clear lens designed for people who work under artificial light during the day, but they don’t want to look like they are wearing orange glasses. This one is designed to target the light that creates digital eyestrain, migraines, headaches and more. Their SummerGlo lens steps it up a notch for those who are exposed to intense artificial light all day and who suffer from migraines, anxiety, depression and SAD by blocking the light that contributes to those conditions. For better sleep, their Sleep lens is a complete blue and green light blocking full red lens that is ideal for use after dark. When the sun goes down, the red glasses go on. The studies show that by blocking blue light, you can increase your melatonin production and improve sleep. And lastly, if you can’t create a perfectly dark sleep environment, their REMedy blackout sleep mask is the next best thing, blocking 100% of light while staying comfortable and is easy to sleep in! Code wellnessmama gives 15% off at blublox.com/wellnessmama

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Katie: Hello and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about hormones, specifically for women, and how we can use our hormones and monthly fluctuations in hormones to our advantage. I’m here with Alisa Vitti, who is a women’s hormone and functional nutrition expert and a pioneer in female biohacking. She is the best-selling author of a book called “WomanCode,” the creator of “Cycle Syncing,” which is a female-centric diet and lifestyle program that leverages our hormonal patterns for optimal health, fitness, and productivity. As the founder of floliving.com, she has built the world’s first menstrual health care platform that helps women around the world put their period issues to rest using her natural protocols. She’s also the creator of an app I use all the time called MyFLO, which is a period tracking app. But it’s the first and only one that gives functional medicine period tracking advice, and it’s designed to help users eliminate symptoms and schedule our lives according to our cycles. It’s consistently ranked one of the top 10 paid apps in health and fitness. And in this episode, we are going to go deep on all things related to female hormonal health, and how you can use your hormones to your advantage. Alisa, Welcome, Thanks for being here

Alisa: I’m so happy to be here, Katie. Thanks for having me.

Katie: I’m so excited to chat with you, mainly because you’re so fun to talk to anyway. And also because you have so much important information to share This topic is increasingly important. I know you’ve just written a new book “In the Flo” and a term that stood out to me and I think we need to establish as a starting point is the idea of infradian biological rhythm. So, if you don’t mind, let start there. Explain what that is.

Alisa: Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, for me, so the infradian biological rhythm is the special biological rhythm that women have in their reproductive years. So, from puberty to menopause, you have this activated infradian rhythm. And, you experienced that, you know, across the month in your monthly cycle. However, it isn’t just something that affects your reproductive health. It affects five other systems of the body and really, you know, dictates the quality of your overall health. And it’s something that is a term that comes from, you know, chronobiology, but it’s not a term that we’ve heard about before.

We’ve heard all about the circadian rhythm. We know how important that is. We know we should be taking care of it with our blue-light-blocking glasses and with, you know, getting to bed when it’s dark, and waking up with the sunrise, and not messing with that. And there have been numerous studies, for example, the nurses study back…it’s been a multi-decade study confirming that if you disrupt that circadian pattern, you will develop big disease of inflammation. And what I was really so excited to share in this new book is just how critical, health critical it is for women to be caring for their infradian rhythm while it is active as really the foundation, the cornerstone of absolutely everything they do because it affects so many systems of their body while it’s active.

Katie: Yea, that makes a perfect sense and that’s actually probably a new term for a lot people. It was definitely a new term for me. And I’d love to hear, I’ve read some of the research and I hear from a lot of people daily about women who are struggling with health and especially with hormone related health issues. But I know, in your research, explain some of the stats. How big of a problem this is that we are facing now.

Alisa: Oh, my goodness. I mean, you know, 47%, and I think that’s a conservative number, of women are dealing with a hormonal health issue. You know, 90% of moms feel like they’re chronically stressed and exhausted. You know, almost all research, medical, fitness, nutrition research is being done on men, but then those suggestions and recommendations are being shared to women as things that are going to help them, and then they end up feeling worse because their infradian rhythm’s disrupted. And I think it’s just so important that we recognize that if we’re not specifically supporting and working with our infradian rhythm, we are actually disrupting it and making ourselves unnecessarily sick, stressed, fat, tired, you know, you name it, and, of course, hormonal. But nature really with this infradian rhythm has designed you to be super optimized, and it’s really the ultimate biohack, in my opinion.

Katie: Yea, I love that. I think understanding that gives us more tools in our toolkit to address these things. But to circle back, you mentioned that all these studies are done on men. Explain that. Explain why, because you’re right, a lot of studies I read even on Pubmed, are on male. Is there a reason this is the case?

Alisa: Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a long history of women being excluded from medical research. I mean, some of it is just some good old fashioned research bias in terms of whoever has been historically conducting research. You know, you have to keep in mind, women have only been allowed to practice medicine recently in recent history, so you had a lot of male researchers just coming from their point of view. But then there was also sort of a big, terrible crisis that happened with a drug trial for thalidomide in the ’60s that caused a huge amount of birth defects, and so women were then actively, during their reproductive years, excluded from drug trials.

However, in 1996, the National Institute of Health put out a special committee to request that medical research actively go out of their way to include young females in their studies, young being women, you know, over the age of 21 and not postmenopausal. And then, in 2016, VWC Women’s Health Collective published kind of a progress report following that mandate, and, you know, the unfortunate update was that progress has been basically slim to painfully slow. And, you know, we’re just nowhere being included. And that’s important from a medical point of view because, of course, you know, medications and all these things are not being developed or dosed, you know, within a female ecosystem, but then it also has transmitted this sort of gender bias into nutrition and fitness research.

So, again, here, all nutrition and fitness research is really mainly done on men and postmenopausal women because they find it to be, I guess, too difficult to try to figure out how to create experiments for women in these different stages of their infradian rhythm. But what then happens, of course, is that you’ll get, you know, some sort of new discovery like intermittent fasting is probably my favorite one to talk about because it’s so…you know, the promise of intermittent fasting is absolutely fantastic, right? It’s going to help with insulin sensitivity, it’s going to help with cellular health and anti-aging, and it seems to be this universally wonderful tool to help you stay healthy.

But the truth is that those studies are done on men and postmenopausal women for whom intermittent fasting is a fantastic health tool. But for women in their reproductive years, the few studies that have been done, which I sort of detail in the new book, they actually show that it has the opposite and adverse reaction in women in their reproductive years. Meaning if you do intermittent fasting while you have your infradian rhythm active, you will make your insulin sensitivity worse, right? So instead of improving it, which is what all the intermittent fasting research shows for men and postmenopausal women, for women in their reproductive years, you’ll have worse insulin sensitivity. You can gain weight. You can increase your cortisol levels dramatically. You can shrink your ovaries, stop ovulation, disrupt sleep, and dysregulate your mood. So it’s not like a little bad for you. It’s completely bad for you.

And I think that’s really important because we need, just like medicine is moving to more bio-individual forms of treatment for cancer, for example, for all sorts of diseases, we really need to look at making the nutrition information that we’re being given specific to the biological rhythms that are affecting that individual. And that sometimes can be gender-based.

So I love the idea of women sort of understanding that not everything is something that they should try. And it really should be much more detailed about, you know, “This study was done for men, or for postmenopausal women.” But if you’re in your reproductive years, I’d love to see that kind of coverage being shared in mainstream articles that, you know… You know, for example, and I know Mark Sisson has done this in some of his blogs when he shares about the ketogenic diet, and how that has…the few studies that have been done show that actually can disrupt women’s thyroid hormones and not have them have all the weight loss. It can disrupt fertility.

So to make sure that that is being presented to women when they’re reading about these health trends, I think, is so important. And it’s important because we have been sort of, you know, living in an environment, culturally as women, that basically has told us one story, which is, you know, “Your hormones are crazy and not to be trusted. Your metabolism is slower than men’s, and therefore, you have to compensate for that by just generally finding new and better ways to have some sort of restrictive diet and to work out more. And that’s how you’re going to ‘have the body or control your body in the way that you want.’

And that is just not accurate at all. In fact, in the book, I kind of go into how your metabolism actually is affected by the infradian rhythm and how you can eat to, you know, maximize your metabolism. It’s completely different than what we’ve been taught.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. And I get in the research sense why it’s easier to work on men because their hormones are more stable. But, like you said, it’s a disadvantage to women and I think a lot of women have turned to figure out what works for them individually because of that. Because there’s not a lot of knowledge of this in the medical system. I’m curious, you mentioned you can eat in rhythm with your infradian rhythm and that can be really beneficial. Is that also true for time restricted eating or for any type of fasting. Because like you said, the research is really amazing on what fasting can do in the body and I know a lot of women want to try it. Is there a time in the cycle that is less problematic?

Alisa: Yeah, you can do intermittent fasting much more safely in the first half of the cycle when your metabolism is naturally slower and you need less calories. But for women in their reproductive years, the only amount of time that is safe to do intermittent fasting is the 12-hour kind of like between dinner and breakfast fast. So, you wouldn’t want to…as soon as you push past the 12-hour mark, then you start to have all the adverse reactions that the studies sort of outline. So you don’t want to do like a two-day fast or, you know, a 13…even the 13-hour fast is too much. Again, once you’ve completed your…you know, once you’re postmenopausal, you can go to town and do as much intermittent fasting as feels good to you. But while you’re in your reproductive years, you know, let’s say you’re done with dinner at 7:00, just don’t eat breakfast till 7:00 the next morning, and that will be every-single-day intermittent fast that is hugely health beneficial and will give you all those great benefits without harming you. And that will be much easier to do in the first half of your cycle because of your metabolic changes.

Katie: That makes sense and I think that’s another important distinction. We all “intermittent fast” while we’re sleeping, no one is eating while they are asleep. I know there is good data, even for women, about not eating too late at night. Because that digestive system interrupt and how you want your digestion to be pretty calm so your body can do other things.I think that’s an easy, like you said, even when you’re pregnant, you can choose to not eat after 7pm and just eat a good breakfast.

It’s not like you have to eat every three hours while you’re sleeping, but it means you don’t have to do a super long fast either. I also think, I wonder if there’s an alternative side to this. Which is yes, women are harder to research because our hormones change, but because of this, we get so much more data if we pay attention to our hormones than men do. And I know you have an app that I use regularly, the myflo app, and seeing those hormonal changes and getting input on what you’re supposed to eat that time of the month, it makes a huge difference. And so I try to think of it, on the positive side, I think we also have this amazing benefit if we learn to pay attention to it of how our hormones change. So, walk us through some of those things that those monthly fluctuations and hormones tell us.

Alisa: Well, I mean, first of all, the fact that we think that our hormones are not stable, or that, you know, it’s harder to research, it’s just not medically accurate, you know, which I go into great detail in the book. You know, the truth is, the men’s hormones fluctuate, they just fluctuate in a pattern that mimics the circadian pattern, meaning…and I like to kind of contrast this to just…and I’ll go right in into how your hormones fluctuate in the infradian rhythm.

But for example, men, they make all their testosterone while they’re sleeping. They wake up with the full dose of testosterone that is concurrent with their big surge in cortisol that everyone gets in the circadian biological rhythm. So they wake up with all of this. And then they get, you know, two, three more pulses of that in decreasing concentration throughout the day. So you’ll get a big dose at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, then there’ll be another pulse at like noon, another one around 3:00, and then that starts to really taper off so that they can wind down for the evening and go to sleep.

But this is exactly why that it’s easier for them to, let’s say, do research on men because they’re just tracking the sort of one or two, you know, cortisol and testosterone, but they’re tracking it throughout the day. So they are factoring in time differences and hormone differences. So, for example, Olympic coaches who train Olympic athletes will have men do any sort of training that will help them gain muscle in the early morning when testosterone and cortisol is at a maximum. It’s going to make that happen more easily, and it’s going to help them be able to do that with less risk for injury versus, let’s say, having them train later in the afternoon. And they’re doing this based on all this research that goes deep into the fluctuating levels of hormones for men. It just happens in a shorter timeframe in a day, 24 hours, versus women happening over 30 days.

But the technology or the technique to create studies that factor in these changes already exists because they’re using them for men. So I think the medical community realizes they need to figure this out. They actually have created a menstrual cycle in a petri dish, you know, hooked up to a computer, and they’re starting to do some testing of medications throughout the cycle, which I think is a huge step forward. There’s a long way to go. But I think the more that women like you who are tracking where you are in your cycle, and I’m so thrilled you’re using the MyFLO app, you know, that we can actually participate in studies with the full knowledge of where we are in our cycle. And so people can do studies for women who are just in the follicular phase, or just in the ovulatory phase, or just in the luteal phase, or in the menstrual phase.

And these four phases have their own distinct hormonal signature, a ratio of hormonal combination that create a certain response in these six systems of the body, which include the brain, the metabolism, the immune system, the microbiome, the stress response system, and the reproductive system. So, you know, any sort of testing or research could be done on any of these systems of the body to see how they fluctuate. In fact, in 1996, Catherine Woolley from Northwestern University published a really important paper, you know, in psychoneuroendocrinology about her research looking at the fluctuating levels of estrogen throughout the infradian rhythm and how the brain actually changes 25% across the cycle. And just knowing that is really important because, you know, knowing that your brain is going to change throughout the cycle can help you set yourself up for, you know, better productivity, better workflow with less stress throughout the month, for example.

And, of course, this can be applied to your workouts, to your eating. And it’s just amazing once you understand these fluctuating patterns, just how easy it is to just work with that, to go with the flow, to get in your flow, and to start making everything just less of a push, less of a force, and more of this state of flow, which I just think is so important.

And I don’t know about you, Katie, but, you know, I’ve done all the fun, personal growth and development things. Like I’ve attended one of my favorite Tony Robbins, you know, the weekend, where you walk across the firewalk and, you know, listening to people and experts talk about these peak flow states and biohackers talk about these peak flow states. And I always found…I felt a sense of disconnection from achieving that because it was all predicated on this concept that you have to do the same thing day in and day out to achieve that peak flow state, to put you in a peak flow state, right, to optimize for that. And that really makes sense, you know, to have a morning routine, for example, that’s the same day in and day out if you have the male hormonal pattern that closely mimics the circadian biological rhythm. Because it does make sense for them to get up in the morning, to do a big workout, to do some of their big deep work first thing in the morning when their cognitive focus is really turned on. But it doesn’t make sense for women. In fact, I find it…it kind of feels like this…for me, that somehow I have to feel like I’m a failure already even though I haven’t started my day, right, because I don’t always feel like depending on where I am in my infradian rhythm, jumping out of bed in the morning and doing a workout. And the pushing and forcing myself to do that actually is infradian rhythm disruptive. And so what I want to say to women is you can achieve a peak flow state, but it’s going to look very different from that of men. And it means that instead of trying to force yourself to be the same every day, to do the same routine at the same time, to eat the same food day in and day out, week over week, month over month, that actually is disruptive to you and forces your body to perform sub-optimally. The way you’re going to achieve your peak flow state is to really work with your infradian rhythm and to optimize for that week over week. So, your state of flow is going to look very different from that of men.

And I also think it’s really interesting that biohacking is such a popular concept among men. And that also makes sense because there is a real energy cliff that happens for them around 3:00 in the afternoon when testosterone and cortisol really start to move toward their lower serum concentration levels in the body, so they’re less able to focus on deep project work, they have less energy and stamina for workouts. And, you know, using nootropics or upgraded coffee or things like that really do help in that timeframe to help with that natural energy cliff. But as women, we don’t have these energy cliffs. You know, because we’re the ones that carry babies when we’re pregnant, natures made our bodies extremely good at conserving nutrients and energy. And so if you support your infradian rhythm, what you’re going to find is that you don’t ever fall off the energy cliff.

And Katie, you might be saying now to yourself, “Well, what about PMS and all the things that happened to women around their period where they do feel so bad?” I’ve been taking care of women with their hormones and their periods for close to 20 years now. And myself, having suffered from a major, you know, bout of PCOS in my 20s, in my teens and 20s, and having recovered from that, what I can tell you is, the reason, the deepest reason why so many women are struggling with their hormones is because everything we’re doing, the way we’re eating, the way we’re working out, the way we’re organizing how we work during the day is disrupting our infradian rhythm. And when you disrupt your infradian rhythm, you disrupt all those six systems of the body, and you just can’t feel your best. You can’t be your healthiest. You can’t have the energy you want. It’s not in your head. And it’s not that you’re a failure and you have no willpower and you just can’t stick to these days, you’re just using the wrong system to support your biological rhythm.

Katie: That makes so much sense. And a couple of follow-up questions to that, a short one to begin with. So I do regular blood tests just to keep track of all my metrics, and I also track, like through my Oura Ring, for instance, and, like, kind of line that up with my cycle so I can see what’s going on. Is there a time of the month for women that’s the best to get blood test if you’re going to do regular blood testing, or is it more about getting it at the same time in your cycle?

Alisa: It really depends on what you’re trying to test. So if you’re trying to test progesterone levels, right, you would want to test those in the luteal phase, you know, because that’s when your progesterone levels are active. You know, if you’re doing fertility testing, some people will recommend that you do that on day three of your cycle. So it just depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re trying to test for cortisol levels, you can do that, you know, sort of in a 24-hour saliva testing situation. I really just think it’s about what you’re trying to test. And, of course, that’s for static blood tests where it’s a standard blood draw. I think there’s a lot more sophisticated things now that you can be using like Dutch testing and for urine analysis and saliva testing that gives you a spectrum of hormonal levels over time. That’s always the best way to see things, is, you know, how do your hormone levels rise and fall over the whole course of the infradian rhythm? And the first place to really start doing that, you know, every single day is just with some basic basal body temperature tracking to just see. Even though many people use that for fertility, it also will sort of indicate, you know, how your infradian rhythm is performing over the course of a month. Katie: Got it. Okay, that’s really helpful. So then you’ve mentioned several times, like, different ways we can start to support our infradian rhythm, through different lifestyle factors, through diet. I’d love to go a little bit deep on some of these, maybe starting with diet. I love and totally resonate with that idea that if you are having trouble sticking to a diet, it’s probably not really that you’re doing it wrong, it’s that you’re on the wrong type of system for your body right now. So let’s start with food. How can we support our infradian rhythm using food?

Alisa: So first, we have to understand how the infradian rhythm affects our metabolism. So in the 30-day period where the infradian rhythm makes ts like one rotation, right, as opposed to in one day, you will have a pretty dramatic fluctuation in your metabolism. So in the first half of your cycle, meaning the follicular phase and the ovulatory phase, your metabolism is naturally slower. So you can actually get away with fewer calories and, you know, lighter meals, in general, and I’ll go into specifics of what you should be eating.

In the second half of your cycle, the luteal phase and the bleeding phase, your calorie requirements are higher, in fact, up to anywhere between 16% and 20% more caloric levels are required during this time and your metabolism speeds up because there’s an epic amount of structural changes happening inside the body during this phase of the cycle from a reproductive standpoint. You know, the lining of the uterus is being built and maintained, the corpus luteum is growing, and, you know, all of this is happening, and it takes nutrients to make it happen. Plus, you have to build, manufacture bigger levels of estrogen and progesterone to have a healthy cycle.

So, again, the nutrient requirements are much greater in the second half of the cycle, and your metabolism speeds up. It’s important to know that for, let’s say, metabolic maintenance, or another way to say this, like weight maintenance or blood sugar stability, that when your metabolism is slower, right, you can eat lighter. So I always suggest in this phase of the cycle, you know, and I break it down by each of the four phases. But for today’s purposes, we’ll kind of just talk in sort of broader swathes here, that in the first half of the cycle, you can eat more, let’s say, raw foods, salads, smoothies, kind of like what you would associate your typical diet, healthy light eating, right?

You know, steamed veggies, and poached fish, and things that are going to be easier on the digestion because your metabolism is slower. It’s going to seek to conserve those nutrients. You don’t need to snack as frequently because, again, slower metabolism, you’re going to conserve these nutrients for longer. And you can just get away with a lighter, less fat in the diet, in the food preparation during this time.

Then when you switch to the luteal phase and the menstrual phase, this is when… I’m trying to think of like a dietary type that you could easily grab on to. This is kind of like the luteal phase, which is 10 to 12 days. I always say this is kind of like your macrobiotic phase where you really want to be eating proactively slow-burning carbohydrates, and whichever ones work for you. If they’re legumes, great. If it’s some grains, great. If you can’t do grains, you can do root vegetables, whatever your digestion and food sensitivities can handle, but making sure that you’re proactively eating more of them because your metabolism is so much faster and your caloric needs are higher, you have to put that in proactively. We all know what happens when we don’t, right, when you try to stick to this stereotypical lighter eating, the salad life, you know, in your luteal phase, what happens when you do that all day, right? You have your smoothie in the morning, you have a salad at lunch. And you get home from work, and you just start eating, and you don’t stop, and you don’t know what happened like four hours later. You’ve eaten chips, and crackers, and pasta, and cheese, and cookies, and your body is like trying to make up for its caloric requirement, but you’re now binge eating because you haven’t proactively been eating slow-burning carbohydrates throughout the day.

So we have specific meal plans and recipes to help you really understand what to eat when so that this is not confusing for you at all because I know this can be an adjustment because we’ve been told just to eat the same way every day, and that’s completely wrong for your infradian rhythm. And then in your menstrual phase, you don’t need as many complex carbohydrates, but you do need more fats and proteins. And so this would be more of like, let’s say your paleo or keto week, if you will.

So to help you kind of break it down into these diets that you are familiar with, that would be the way to think about it. And doing this stabilizes blood sugar throughout the infradian rhythm, optimizes your metabolism, works with the metabolic changes that are happening, and keeps your energy and your mood, like, supercharged, right? So instead of falling off the energy cliff around the luteal phase because you’re not nourishing your body the way it needs, and you’re now tired, PMSing, fatigued, stressed, moody, instead you’d feel the opposite. You feel good, you feel energized, you feel clear-headed and happy, and you don’t have PMS symptoms that, you know, certainly will balance that out because you’re also eating foods that are going to help you make more hormones and break them down more efficiently.

So some of us struggle with, let’s say, estrogen dominance. The foods that you’re going to be eating, the foods that are in the food chart in the book are going to help you, you know, both manufacture and metabolize hormones really efficiently as well. So that really helps stabilize any symptoms that you’re having throughout the cycle.

Katie: Yeah, when I learned of this concept from you, it was kind of like a paradigm shift for me because I started just paying attention to what was already happening but that I had never really paid attention to because I didn’t know to pay attention to, and I definitely noticed that shift. Like, in the first half of my cycle, I really wasn’t that hungry. I could do like soups, and salads, and light stuff and like generally not think about food. I’ve been on a pretty big, like, weight loss journey the last year as I’m finally now not pregnant or nursing a baby. And I’ve noticed that first half of my cycle, it’s easy to lose weight, and then that’ll, like, stabilize. I won’t gain weight in the second half, but it’ll just kind of like rest there for a while, and then the next first half of a cycle I’ll lose more weight. And I also noticed, like, when we start paying attention to our hormones, it’s like my cravings now are telling me what I actually need. So in the second week of my cycle, I’m craving like salmon, and sweet potatoes, and tons of olive oil, and like all the green things I can possibly eat for the micronutrients. Like I’ll make a pesto out of, like, so much parsley, and cilantro, and all these things.

Alisa: Oh, my gosh. I’m so proud of you.

Katie: But it’s just amazing when you have that lens to look through. I just, like, start seeing those patterns, and then it’s, like, I don’t have to stress about it. I can be like, “Oh, first half of cycle, I don’t have to really worry about getting enough calories. I’ll just eat when I’m hungry. It’s totally fine.” And then second half, I pre-plan, so I know I’m not going to hit that afternoon like, “Oh my gosh, I’m starving.” I have sweet potatoes pre-made or whatever it may be, and like just having that prep makes it so much easier. I’m also curious, are there different nutrient needs at different times as well? Like, are there supplements that can be beneficial at certain times, and is it also that we shouldn’t take the same supplements every single day?

Alisa: So that’s interesting because there are micronutrients that are, you know, pretty universally required by the endocrine system to function. So, you know, I think the endocrine system, we want to be supporting that too. So, I would say that yes, nutrient needs do change throughout the cycle, but certain baseline nutrients like B vitamins which are water-soluble, and you need to put that in every day. Magnesium, which is lost daily, again, water-soluble. So some of these very transient micronutrients that we tend to be very deficient in or easily depleted with due to stress, or caffeine intake, or chemical exposure, it is really helpful to keep putting those in on a daily basis, especially if you’re someone who’s dealing with a health issue. Giving yourself that extra boost of certain micronutrients, which I outline in the book can be really, really helpful. But from the food point of view, and taking micronutrients is one thing. Macronutrients, which are these food changes that you make, you know, we’re really talking about, for example, in the ovulatory phase as you know, Katie, because I know you’re a cycle syncer, is that, you know, you’re eating foods that are high in glutathione and in the most bioavailable form. And this is because estrogen is at its peak concentration, that it will be, throughout the cycle, that its most serum concentration that you’ll ever have. And so depending on how your body is functioning, right, if your liver is optimized, for example, for elimination, or if you’re having great bowel movements, or if you’re having constipation, you may be more sensitive to that estrogen, right?

So if you’re breaking out during ovulation, that’s a sign that you’re not metabolizing that estrogen efficiently. But by eating the foods in the ovulatory phase that I’m outlining for you in the book, you’re going to break down that estrogen as quickly as possible because you’re supercharging the liver with glutathione. So that’s a great example of these types of macronutrient and micronutrient intersections that happen throughout the cycle. And I think the more we leverage that like you’re describing in your own experience, you lose weight more easily. You know, you maintain your energy.

And I think this weight loss thing, this is like a personal thing for me because, you know, you know me. I used to be 60 pounds heavier, and I gained quite a bit of weight when I had my pregnancy. And I’ve lost all that without dieting, right. And I love saying that to people because that just doesn’t make any sense given the current cultural narrative about how you’re supposed to lose weight as a woman. You know, actually, it’s not really gender specified, though it should be.

So how men lose weight is just by restricting calories and working out more, but how women lose weight is not by restricting calories. So you actually have to nourish yourself in order for your metabolism to work optimally. And I love that you’ve already seen for your own weight loss journey that you are able to take advantage of that slower metabolic phase, right, the first half of the cycle, the follicular and ovulatory phases to slower metabolism, which, if we listen to the current rhetoric, would mean that you wouldn’t be able to lose weight during that time. But by eating the right way during that time, you do lose weight.

And then instead of eating the same way during the luteal phase, which would if you continue to eat the lower-calorie, let’s say, format in the luteal and menstrual phases, you jack up your cortisol levels, okay, because that creates internal stress on the body to be calorically deprived when you have new caloric requirements. And that cortisol increase signals to your fat cells to stay put, right? So now you’re gaining weight, or at least not losing any weight, and that’s why women feel so frustrated like they can’t lose weight. They’re like, “I don’t get it. I’m depriving myself. I’m counting my calories. I’m doing the same thing each and every day.” But if you do do it each and every day, you’re actually, again, disrupting your hormones, disrupting the infradian rhythm, and you’ll end up either, at best, not losing any weight or, at worst, gaining weight. And this also has big implications when we start talking about fitness as well.

Katie: That makes sense. And I want to…let’s jump into fitness in just a second. But to reiterate what you said as well, that was the other really staggering thing for me. I think there’s, especially for women, that we often underestimate how much the emotional and mental side really is important for stress, and for weight loss, and for everything. And I know that’s an area I fought for a lot of years. And when I finally addressed that, it was like my relationship with food entirely changed. And I was able to lose weight without dieting, without really changing my diet or exercise at all.

I think there was such a shift in my stress response, and so I think that’s another issue. I always say to women, like that’s really worth looking at, whether it’s therapy, whatever your process is going to be. That was hugely pivotal for me. And I want to talk about fitness too because I’m really curious now. So you said men have this 24-hour cycle, and they’re better to train in the morning. For women, are there times of the month that we should maybe look at different types of training that can really line up with our biology?

Alisa: You bet. In fact, not only is this like…And, by the way, this is like not just a nice idea or like, “Oh, this would be fun to try.” This is a must-do. Like just as much as we now know disrupting the circadian rhythm causes disease, disrupting your infradian rhythm really messes with your health. And so much so that the U.S. women’s soccer team is cycle syncing and training their athletes based on this methodology because they understand that there are metabolic changes and, you know, fitness requirements of the body that really affect performance as it goes throughout the cycle.

So what that means is in the first half of your cycle, let’s say you want to put on some lean muscle and lose some body fat, like who doesn’t want to do that right? And that’s just good for all-around well being. The way you want to accomplish that in the first half of your cycle is with cardio-based exercise, and then high-intensity interval training. However, if you were to continue to do the cardio and the high-intensity interval training, which, by the way, is kind of what we’re told to do every day, right? Like, I mean, think of any workout slogan like Nike, like “Just do it.” Push yourself. Don’t quit. Just commit. No pain, no gain, right, all of this like… Just even if you don’t want to, you should keep trying to do the same thing every day. That’s really good for guys, really bad for you. Because if you do cardio and high-intensity interval training in the luteal and menstrual phases, you turn on fat storage and turn on muscle wasting.

So, here you are. And I discovered this years ago in my practice because I routinely be like, 15 years ago, there was this trend for people to get fit by training for a triathlon, even if they weren’t like athletes. They just used it as an excuse to get in shape. And I had many, many clients coming in to see me say, you know, “Gee, I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m running five miles every day, I’m swimming, you know, four times a week,” and whatever else they were doing, “and I’m eating what I’m supposed to be eating according to my trainer.” And they’ve put on 20 or 25 pounds at the end of three months. And I, you know, looked into that, and, of course, the answer was very clear, “Because your metabolism changes. And if you do the same physical activity at the same intensity day over day throughout the infradian rhythm, you disrupt it, you increase cortisol, you mess with estrogen levels, and you end up gaining weight. And that’s the fact.”

So if you are somebody who’s been, you know…you know, New Year’s resolutions or you sign up for some online fitness program, and it’s the similar kind of workouts every day, high-intensity interval training, you should expect, at best, not to gain any weight, or sorry, not to lose any weight. But at worst, you’re going to gain some weight. And that’s what’s so frustrating because we’re told the wrong information. We’re told information that’s meant for men or postmenopausal women. And if you’re in your reproductive years, you need the right information. And that’s why I’m so excited about having written this book because it’s finally just clearing this up once and for all.

There is an infradian rhythm, you have to work out differently. First half of the cycle, you’ll do your cardio, you’ll do your high-intensity interval training. Second half of the cycle, you’ll do body resistance or slow strength training with no cardio component. So that could be lifting a heavy set at the gym or in your home gym, that could be just doing push-ups and, you know, squats up against the wall, or that could be doing pilates, or doing, you know, strenuous yoga.

And then in the menstrual phase, it could be walking, it could be just like a yin yoga stretching class, or it could be napping. And I say that, and I know that that might make some you laugh, like, “Oh yeah, I’d love to take a nap during my period.” But actually, depending on your hormonal status quo, meaning if you have hormonal issues, if you’re dealing with elevated levels of cortisol due to, you know, emotional or lifestyle stresses, taking a nap can be hugely restorative and actually boost your metabolism during the menstrual phase. So that is one of the exercises that’s listed in the exercise chart in the book during that phase because it is so beneficial. And it’s so important that I point that out because the truth of the matter is when you work out with your infradian rhythm, you can work out less and get more fit. And you can work out less at the right times, including napping during the menstrual phase and still, at the end of the month, either maintain the weight that you hope to maintain or lose weight if that’s what you’re trying to do.

And, again, having done this myself two times with big numbers, you know, 60 pounds the first time and 40 to 50 pounds the second time with my pregnancy again using this methodology, it’s just so effortless. It’s just so easy. It’s not a push, it’s not forcing. You don’t have to just do it. You don’t have to push yourself. There’s no pain and all the gain that you want. And I think that’s just such a comforting thought because I don’t know about you, but I’m just tired of this idea that you have to work so hard to achieve small results because we’ve been working for these little crumbs with the systems that were designed for men when if we simply use a system that was designed for us, we could really get the gold.

Katie: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I think that’s been a really big shift for me as well, the effortless part of this. My whole adult life, it feels like I fought my body trying to get it to do what I wanted. And then when I finally learned to love and support it, it just naturally started doing those things I had hoped to do all along. It reminds me there’s a beautiful quote online, I’ll have to look up who said it, but it’s basically the idea that, like, “I said to my body, ‘I want to be your friend.’ And it took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.’” And I think that’s what you teach. It’s so beautiful. And you’ve kind of explained the concept of cycle syncing. But for anyone who’s new to this, can you just kind of give us like the really technical definition and what that looks like?

Alisa: Yeah, so I created this term, gosh, many, many years ago now, but it was this idea that once I really understood the infradian rhythm, I wanted to create a term that would help women understand the active part of what it means to connect with that, to support it. And so cycle syncing, syncing your activities, your food, your fitness, your sex drive, your relationships, your career, your parenting styles, all of that can be synchronized with your cyclical changes with these fluctuating hormones, with these four phases of the infradian rhythm. And when you do that, things just get in the flow.

Katie: Makes so much sense.

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Katie: I know it’s not, or I’d love to talk about a little bit like the emotional and stress response side of the cycle as well, and if there are things we can do, A, to optimize those, and, B, like how we can use that to our advantage in relationships.

Alisa: So, you know, you are more sensitive to cortisol in the second half of the cycle, which is why it’s so important to do the right eating to stabilize blood sugar so you’re not, you know, adding the cortisol demand in the second half of the cycle and that, again, you’re doing the right workouts. Doing those two things will decrease your stress levels dramatically in the second half of the cycle. And, by the way, if any of you are struggling with, you know, luteal phase anxiety, or depression, or mood swings, or irritability, again, just doing these first two components of the cycle syncing method with the food and the fitness, you will see enormous impact in a positive way on your mood and your energy levels. And, again, it just it’s remarkable what happens when you start taking care of this biological rhythm.

So I think we have to look at stress as external stress, right, things that are like, I don’t know, the kids are driving you crazy, you’re having friction in your relationship, something is going on that’s stressful at work. And that these are things that involve other people that are outside of your control, and that’s just life, and we all have to learn how to balance our emotional reactivity in those situations, to not take things personally, and to really rise above and figure out how to navigate that with a lot of emotional intelligence. But then there are these types of stressors that can be managed by understanding the infradian rhythm.

So, for example, we just talked about how you can create unnecessary amounts of stress cortisol level in the body by eating and exercising incorrectly during the luteal phase, for example. But you can also have stress created at any point in the cycle by, let’s say, you know, not feeling…and let’s pick career or work, right? So I obviously cycle sync absolutely every area of my life, which I outline in great detail in the book and give you every chart that I created for myself. But in work, for example, because we know the brain changes by 25% over the course of the month, there are certain times that you’re more naturally inclined to do certain activities. You can do anything you want anytime you want, of course, but when you’re in the mood to bake cookies, right, that’s like more fun. But then when you have to make cookies for the class, you know, fundraiser and it’s late at night, you don’t feel like doing it. It’s stressful, right? So that’s a great example of doing things when you’re in the mood to do something. They feel effortless and pleasurable versus pushing yourself to do it when you, you know, don’t really feel like doing it.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could set up your workflow to just kind of always pick the things that you’re naturally in the mood for so everything feels like that joyful, like, “Oh yeah, I’m so happy to be baking these cookies right now, you know? I’m so happy to be working on this marketing copy, or I’m so happy to be doing this report for my boss, or I’m so happy to be doing this customer call because just really my verbal social center is being stimulated right now by my estrogen in my ovulatory phase. This is working for me I’m feeling really good.” It’s so fun since these changes are predictable, and they repeat, you know, every month. You can map out your calendar to optimize your work around this. And, in fact, I put in my own daily planner into the book because…this is another fun funny personal aside.

But years ago, I mean, I was always an eager student, you know, even at a young age, I remember I convinced an employer of mine. I had an internship in high school, I said, “I believe that the key to success is figuring out how to manage your time successfully.” So I convinced them to send me to a time management class, Franklin Covey. And specifically, you know, that’s that whole rhetoric of like, “You gotta sharpen the saw every day and do the same activities and big rocks and the whole thing,” right?

And I had the planner in the analog days, so, you know, it was a big notebook, spiral notebook. And I remember being so excited. I literally was holding this, like, “This is going to, like, change my life.” I filled it out, and, you know, I was, like, really diligent for a week or two and then something changed. I didn’t know what then because I was only in high school, I hadn’t yet done all this work that I now do, and I just felt like I couldn’t do the things that I had mapped out in my calendar. They felt like a burden, and I felt so bad. I felt so self-critical. I said, “Oh my God, I’m so lazy. I’m so undisciplined.” That inner critical voice just started raging, like, “What’s wrong with you?” And I kept trying for several months to just like really stick with whatever it was that I was… Like, every month would start off the same. Like, I’d be, like, “Okay, great. I’m in the zone. I’m doing what I said I was going to do each day,” and then something would change.

I didn’t realize then it was my hormonal brain chemistry was changing. Then I couldn’t follow those same plans in the schedule, and I felt so bad. I literally, after a few months, was so upset about the whole thing. I stopped using that planner. I broke up with time. I stopped wearing a watch. I was like, “That’s it. I’m just never going to be a success because I can’t manage my time.”

Then fast forward years later when I discovered the infradian rhythm, and I create the cycle syncing method, and I start, like, planning all of my work around my biochemical advantages throughout the month for each week. The amount that I could get done in a month astonished me. I mean, I just couldn’t believe it. Because I was enjoying what I was doing. Everything was flowing in terms of my work, and my productivity, and my creativity, and I wasn’t draining my energy, right? We cannot make more time, but we can make more energy. And by working and doing the things that are my natural proclivities based on my infradian rhythm at any given week, I never put myself in the energy hole, right.

Like, you know, when you bake these cookies at 8:00 at night, you don’t really want to do it. You feel exhausted afterwards, and you feel sort of energy hungover the next day. Because we’re not planning our productivity and our creativity around our infradian rhythm, we’re in an energy hangover, in fact, an energy crisis all of the time. And I did say earlier, 90% of moms feel exhausted and to the point where just last year, the World Health Organization made burnout an official medical diagnosis. We’re all working in a way that’s not supporting our infradian rhythm, and that’s really to our detriment.

Katie: It makes so much sense. And I’m so glad that there are people like you out there really breaking this down for women and giving us practical tools, even if the research hasn’t quite caught up to our hormones yet. I think that’s been the lesson for a lot of us. I know it’s part of my story and part of yours as well is that, at the end of the day, we do have to take our health into our own hands. And doctors can be amazing partners, and hopefully, we find some incredible ones to work with. But at the end of the day, we’re the ones responsible for those changes and having tools like this make it so much easier.

And that point we’ve mentioned several times in this interview of just not having to fight your body, that alone is just a complete paradigm shift for women. And so I love that you are spreading the word about this, and I highly recommend your new book. Of course, it will be linked in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm, but any starting advice for women who are listening to this going, “Oh my gosh, yes. I need to do this.” Obviously, get the book but what else? Where can we start?

Alisa: I mean, I think you’ve got to know where you are in your cycle. So like yourself, Katie, if you haven’t downloaded the MyFLO app, that’s a great place to start because it’s going to tell you…it’s the world’s first and only cycle syncing app, of course. I had to build one. So, you know, you’ll know which phase of the cycle you’re in, and it will start to teach you what you need to know about that phase when you go into the cycle syncing section. And it will remind you and send you reminders about, “Okay, you’ve just moved into this phase, you know, you want to think about eating these types of foods, etc.” And we also have content that, you know, you can get more recipes and meal plans, and workout videos, and all of that as well with the cycle syncing membership. So that’s a place where you can get more support. But I would say start with just being aware of where you are in your cycle.

Of course, we didn’t get a chance to talk about, “Well, what if you have hormone problems, or what if you’re on the pill?” And I’ll just quickly say that if you have hormone struggles, you know, I would say, you know, if you have a diagnosed condition like PCOS, or fibroids, or endometriosis, or you have irregular cycles, you do need to do kind of the cleanup work that I describe in my first book, “WomanCode,” to help your body, your endocrine system, let’s say, recalibrate or get back to homeostasis so you can get yourself to a regular cycle so your hormones are giving you the opportunity to have a healthy infradian rhythm.

If you’re on a hormone suppressive birth control, whether that be a pill, or a device, or an insert, unfortunately, then you will not be able to…it kind of really messes with the infradian rhythm, and so you’re not going to have the cycle happening over the 30 days. You’re kind of in this like phaseless no cycle zone, and so you won’t experience these changes. And, of course, I go into detail about what you can do in the book to kind of understand what you need to know about that.

So first things first is just to understand where you are in the cycle, and then pick a lane, right? So there are five different areas in the book that you can start with. You could start with food. You could start with fitness. You could start with the new daily planner, the time and, like, your work, your monthly project list. You could take this into looking at your sex life and relationships, romantic relationship, and you can look at motherhood.

So there are these five charts in the book, then you can just pick one of them and decide that you’re going to just do an experiment for that month. You’re going to just change your food for one month and see how that makes you feel, or you’re just going to do the workouts for a month and see how that makes you feel, and then you start to slowly add, right, because this is really about a system that allows you to really optimize every area of your health and life. So, you can’t expect to make all the changes at once, but you want to build on them over time. And using the charts in the book are really going to help with that. In fact, we also have a great, like a starter, you know, in the flow quick start guide that people are getting when they order the book that’s on the book website. So before the book arrives, you can start to figure out, you know, which life area you want to address, health, work, or relationships, and start to make these changes for that week that you’re waiting for the book to arrive to see how you can apply this in each of these four phases. It’s much easier than you realize once…like, Katie, you’ve been saying, you just start to have that awareness, and then it goes from there.

Katie: I love it. And we might have to do another round one day to address those specific hormone-related, like if you have PCOS, but I love that we covered this for now. And lastly, is there a book or number of books that have really dramatically impacted your life besides obviously your own?

Alisa: Oh, well, yes. There are… I mean, my books are my, like, prized possessions, I would say, and I was really thinking about this. So I think, for me, the very first book that woke me up to the idea that our bodies are special and sacred were “Daughters of the Earth,” which is a book about Native American menstrual rights that I came across as a junior high schooler in my local library, and just something about that was really like a call home in some way. And then Natalie Angier’s book, “Vagina,” hugely eye-opening, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, “Women who Run with the Wolves.” Also a very game-changing book for me.

Katie: I love it. Those are all great recommendations. I’ll make sure they’re in the show notes as well. But Alisa, thank you so much for your time and being here. I love the education and the work that you do. And I’ll, of course, make sure everything we talked about and a link to our website are in the show notes so you guys can find those if you are walking, or running, or driving while you’re listening to this. But thank you so much for being here.

Alisa: Thanks for having me. It’s always a joy to have a conversation with you about cutting-edge health information.

Katie: I love it. And thanks as always to all of you for listening, for sharing your valuable resource, your time, with both of us. We’re so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/floliving/

[dupuytrens-org]

New Post has been published on https://dupuytrens.org/dupuytren-and-rare-disease-research/

Dupuytren and Rare Disease Research

Is Dupuytren disease common or rare?

I recently attended the Rare Drug Development Symposium in Philadelphia. Why? Is Dupuytren really a rare disease? Yes and no. Mild Dupuytren is common but very severe Dupuytren is rare – in the same way that cats are common but chimeric cats with crazy colors are rare.

What does “mild” or “severe” Dupuytren really mean? People usually think of severity as severely bent fingers. While it’s true that fingers that are very bent don’t function as well and are less likely to be made straight with treatment, the more important factor is biologic severity. Biologically severe Dupuytren is prone to recurrence after treatment regardless of how bent the fingers are or the type of treatment. Biologically severe Dupuytren is also called treatment-resistant Dupuytren. It’s more likely when a person’s story has certain details: young when diagnosed, a parent or sibling with Dupuytren, disease outside the palm such as knuckle pads or Ledderhose. These details are called “Dupuytren diathesis factors“. They’re not perfect predictors. Some people with diathesis factors have mild Dupuytren. Some with no diathesis factors have terrible problems with Dupuytren recurrence. Right now, there’s no sure way to tell whether someone has treatment-resistant Dupuytren until after treatment. Retreatment for recurrence is the real elephant in the room. The problem with retreatment is that it is progressively less effective and riskier. One in four people who have had three open Dupuytren surgeries on the same finger will have suffered a permanent surgical complication along the way.

Overall, Dupuytren is common, affecting ten million Americans and millions more worldwide. Most people with Dupuytren have a mild version. They may have a lump or a slight finger bend as the only issue of their lifetime. They might have one finger affected, have a successful procedure, and never another problem. At any one time, four out of five people with Dupuytren only have a lump in their palm or a slightly bent finger. Only one in five people with Dupuytren have fingers bent enough to even consider treatment.

The severe version of Dupuytren isn’t common. Only a few percent of people with Dupuytren – a few hundred thousand Americans – have severe treatment-resistant disease. Severe Dupuytren is considered a rare disease, and because there is no effective long-term treatment it’s also classified as an orphan disease. This is why it makes sense to explore rare disease research tools to develop better Dupuytren treatments.

A common obstacle in rare disease treatment research is a lack of understanding of the root biology, not knowing where to start even if it’s clearly a genetic issue. This is true for Dupuytren. Clues to Dupuytren biology are scattered across systems involved in immune mechanisms, inflammation, effects of aging, gender, injury, and normal body maintenance. For Dupuytren, stumbling across an effective biological treatment through blind trial and error is unlikely, as the last 200 years of failure have shown. Recognizing this problem is the first step in moving past it.

Which leads to this: I bring good news from the Rare Drug Development Symposium. Even if we don’t currently understand the complete biology of Dupuytren, there is a possible way to identify existing drugs which might also work on Dupuytren disease. Most drugs have a variety of effects on different areas of biology. What we call these effects depends on context and marketing. If a drug effect helps a disease, it’s called a therapeutic effect. If it does something else, it’s called a side effect. Sometimes what’s first considered a side effect of a drug is more valuable than the original use. This is the path that repurposed aspirin from anti-inflammatory to blood thinner, thalidomide from sleeping pill to the treatment of leprosy and multiple myeloma, and sildenafil from blood pressure medicine to Viagra. The process of using a side effect of an existing drug to treat a different disease altogether is called drug repurposing or repositioning.

There were several examples of drug repurposing given at the Rare Drug Development Symposium. Most impressive was how to find unexpected drug candidates to repurpose. The traditional approach to finding drugs is to compare what’s known about the cause and effect biology of a disease with a class of drugs known to act on this biology. The symposium demonstrated a fascinatingly different approach for drug discovery. Rather than waiting to understand all of the biologies of a disease, researchers used brute-force computer analysis. Researchers gathered all gene and protein related tests of a disease, whether or not they were thought to contribute directly to the disease. They compared this data with a database of all known molecular effects of over 13,000 drugs – whether or not they were thought to act on this disease. They then studied the list of matches and why they matched. In one case this approach matched a rare treatment-resistant pediatric brain tumor with a 250-year old heart drug, now being tested to improve outcomes.

This approach dovetails perfectly with the Dupuytren Research Group International Dupuytren Data Bank (IDDB). The core cause-and-effect biology of Dupuytren is still not known. Our upcoming pilot study will collect gene and protein data to develop a blood test to measure the response to drug treatment. At the same time, this same data can be used to search for existing drugs to repurpose for Dupuytren disease. We are clearly on the fastest logical path to a breakthrough in Dupuytren care.

Charles Eaton MD

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Apr 10, 2024

The review into paediatric gender treatment by Dr Hilary Cass has finally been published. Its conclusions should herald the end of “gender-affirming” care in the United Kingdom, and its impact is likely to reverberate around the world. 

The review has shown that 89% of girls and 81% of boys referred to GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service) were either homosexual or bisexual. The NHS has been practising gay conversion therapy in plain sight, and this has happened because politicians have been too ignorant or too afraid to do anything about it.

Cass has explicitly noted how fear of standing up to ideologues has resulted in a situation in which “attempts to improve the evidence base have been thwarted by a lack of cooperation from the adult gender services”. We have long suspected that the “gender-affirming” model of healthcare has persisted because its critics were too intimidated to speak out. This has been confirmed by Cass’s final report.

The report finds that vulnerable young people who should have been supported with therapeutic treatment were fast-tracked onto lifelong medicalisation. The risks of puberty blockers are now clear, and Cass notes that there is no evidence to justify them. Most crucially, we now know that the common assertion that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones reduce the risk of suicide is completely false.

Cass refers to the influence on the NHS of the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH), and how its guidelines have been found “to lack developmental rigour”. The recent revelations of the “WPATH files”, internal messages and videos from the organisation, have shown that leading practitioners were aware that children could not give “informed consent” to the treatments they were prescribing. In addition, they were also aware that gay or bisexual youth and those with mental health and autistic conditions were disproportionately affected. More details about the WPATH files can be read here.

Given the significance of WPATH’s influence, now confirmed by the Cass Review, it is remarkable that the BBC has yet to report on the WPATH files. Like the NHS, the BBC has been promoting gender identity ideology as though it were uncontested fact. In the light of the Cass Review, surely an investigation into the ideological capture of the BBC should be initiated. 

School policy is beyond the remit of the report, but Cass notes that “social transitioning” – that is, adopting preferred names and pronouns – can increase the chances of a child proceeding on a “medical pathway”. It would be prudent for the Department for Education to bear this in mind when drafting future guidelines. 

Cass offers an important recommendation for patients aged between 17 and 25. At present. young people who turn 17 are treated as adults and can be prescribed cross-sex hormones without parental consent. Given that the human brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, the risks here are obvious. Cass had recommended that “NHS England should establish follow-through services for 17-25-year-olds at each of the Regional Centres, either by extending the range of the regional children and young people’s service or through linked services, to ensure continuity of care and support at a potentially vulnerable stage in their journey.”

In light of the Cass Review, we now need an urgent investigation into how ideological zealots were able to dominate the NHS and branches of government to the detriment of children. Those charities who once supported gay rights – most notably Stonewall – have been complicit in this scandal which has mostly harmed gay youth. Any government departments and quangos still associated with Stonewall should sever all ties immediately.

Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party ought to ditch their commitment to a ban on “trans conversion therapy” and recognise that this will effectively stymie the therapeutic efforts of medical practitioners to support gender nonconforming children. The proposed ban on “trans conversion therapy” is tantamount to a new form of gay conversion therapy. You can read my thoughts on this subject here.

Above all, there now needs to be a concerted cross-party effort in parliament to identify those responsible for harming so many children and to hold them accountable for their negligence. The NHS should never have been in the business of practising pseudoscientific methods at the behest of activists, and we must ensure that this never happens again.

Download the Cass Review here.

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Even the BBC hasn't been able to just ignore this.