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Dr. 50 Something
S1 E1 Navigating Midlife: My Journey Through Aesthetics, Hormones, and Health Transformation
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Welcome to the Dr. 50 Something podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Norris. This is a show where I share my knowledge gleaned in family medicine, preventative medicine, and aesthetic medicine. To shed light on aging, or better yet, how not to feel or look like you're aging. I will divulge studied and safe ways that you can look younger, feel fabulous, and put off the tolls of chronic disease. My listeners are not proponents of growing old gracefully or letting nature take its course. This show will unravel the mysteries of aesthetic procedures, the mystique of bioidentical hormone optimization, the secrets to getting fit in midlife, and controversies associated with navigating healthy living in our world. My wish for my listeners is to always be mistaken for being 50 something or even less in mind. Action and appearance. Here we go. Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Dr. 50 Something podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Norris and this is episode one. I'm so grateful if you are listening to my first podcast and if you are listening, you must be in my inner circle because honestly, no one knows I'm doing this. So this first podcast is not going to be super long. It's going to be pretty short and to the point. I just wanted to give everyone a little background on me and why I decided to add this to my list of things to do. So I am a Midwest farmer's daughter. I am a family physician. I'm the founder and CEO of an aesthetics practice and most recently the mastermind behind a concierge preventative medicine practice that I've created within my aesthetics practice. I'm a mother, a daughter and a wife and a woman who has struggled in silence with perimenopausal symptoms and undiagnosed pcos. But more on that later. So as as you will learn, I am also a multitasker and a type A personality. I love listening to podcasts to better my and my business while simultaneously doing everything else like doing household chores or carrying out mundane tasks like putting on makeup or ordering groceries online. I like to make good use of my time, so I'm assuming you are that type of person as well, since you're listening. I turned 50 last year and I decided to make some changes in my life to feel better and just to try to be as healthy as I can be. I decided to put my health first and myself first. Crazy, right? Do something for myself. Self care, self improvement. Ahead of my family, ahead of my business. Not my normal. So with starting to face 50, my goal at 49 was was really Just to get healthier. And I changed up my diet, my exercise, and of course I started a little semaglutide. I lost 40 pounds of body weight and truly about a third of that body weight loss was muscle. I was now skinnier and weaker and, and I looked older. But fortunately, through procedures in my aesthetic practice, I was able to reverse the older look, but not the loss of muscle. I started researching how to use semaglutide to get the positive health effects but not lose muscle and not look older. You know, is that possible? At the same time, I was having every symptom there is of perimenopause. And this podcast will spend a lot of time teaching and educating about the symptoms of perimenopause, what is the underlying cause and how we can reverse reverse those symptoms to live our best life. So some of the symptoms I had were fatigue all the time, brain fog, I thought I was developing dementia, terrible sleep, night sweats, zero passion for intimacy, bloating, anxiety, and overall just feeling terrible about myself. Despite the fact that I had lost a significant amount of weight and despite the fact that I have access to every non surgical cosmetic procedure there is in my office, I still just didn't feel good. So. So I came to the realization that my aesthetic medicine practice was truly missing something. Over the last 13 years of learning and perfecting all my skills to be the best aesthetic provider I could be and making all my patients look amazing and more confident in their appearance, I had not stopped to think about how they were feeling, how was their physical health. I'd only been focused on looks. So once again using myself as the guinea pig, I set out on a mission to figure out that feeling good and how to treat my perimenopausal symptoms. Once I figured out that's what they were. I was on a search for why I was having such difficulty restoring my muscle mass, despite weight training and a very high protein focused diet. So where did my research lead me? It led me straight to hormones. I am a retired family physician, but I still keep up my board certification and do all the testing and continuing education for family medicine. I spent 16 years of my life in a wonderful family practice environment, caring for all ages. And as a female gp, I remember many women complaining to me about perimenopausal or menopausal symptoms. And I said things like, hormone replacement is dangerous, let's try some herbals or an antidepressant for your symptoms. I think I also said, checking your hormones is not going to change anything. Maybe just Try date night for your poor libido. Oh my goodness. If any of my 5,000 patients that I might have told that to are listening, I am so sorry for my misinformation. And to be fair, I was not told anything different from the conferences I attended, the journals I read, or all the drug reps that came into my office in medical school and residency circa 2002. We were all brainwashed by the Women's Health Initiat study published in JAMA and People magazine. All of those messages were Hormone replacement therapy is all bad. Think breast cancer, stroke, clots, heart attacks. So if that is still your current mindset, you really need to keep listening to this podcast because there is a lot more to know. So right now I'm not going to get into the details of that study or how that study was actually debunked a few years later because of police poor research methods or what further publications showed once that data was truly looked at in the right light. So that however was not in People magazine. And so many of us still hold the belief that hormones are bad. Hormones cause all sorts of terrible things for women and men and as we lose them, you should just suck it up and not be on them. But I found out that the key to feeling good as a perimenopausal 50 year old was exactly what I had poo pooed to my family practice patients. My extraordinary confirmation bias. That's what it's called, that bias that you have that when you learn something once that that's just the be all end all and that's the way it is. And it is so hard to change biases like that in our society. But my confirmation bias was very, very strong, developed over my career in medicine and it was the only thing between me and feeling like I was 20 again. It is said that you must always be willing to truly consider evidence that contradicts your beliefs and admit the possibility that you may be wrong. Intelligence isn't knowing everything, it's the ability to challenge everything that you know. And that's exactly what I did. So despite being an extremely busy woman and CEO of the company that I run and seeing patients every day, as an experienced inject laser medicine physician, I decided to go get 80 hours of education on bioidentical hormone optimization. I did that through the Academy of Preventative and Integrative Medicine this past year. And I was educated by Dr. Neal Rosier, who has been educating physicians his entire career to try to change that confirmation bias about hormone replacement as we age and how it's actually not just about treating symptoms. It's truly about turning that path around that we all start when we lose hormones and head down that path of aging where we become just unfortunately just set on a path to have chronic disease. So that training was so eye opening to me, not just because of how I could improve how I feel, but how I could improve the path of my entire life by changing things now. It was truly the best training I've ever had as a medical provider and truly as a lifelong learner. I have been in a lot of classes. So to say that was one of the best trainings I've ever had. It means a lot. So last year, when I got this idea that I wanted to start my own podcast to educate people such as myself, I initially thought, okay, it's gonna be about, you know, what I do every day. It's gonna be about Botox and fillers and sculpture, which is my favorite. It's gonna be about laser resurfacing and how that's really not as scary as it sounds. We're even gonna talk about, you know, PRF and natural skin and hair rejuvenation with, you know, your own body in charge. All the things that I love to do and just love for my beautiful patients. But then, you know, as the year passed and my knowledge about bioidentical hormone optimization just flourished, I knew the content of this podcast was not just going to be aesthetics focused. Don't get me wrong, we will talk about aesthetics. I love giving patients natural, rejuvenated results and I just love watching patients walk out of my office with more confidence than they walked in. So we will definitely talk about esthetics, but I just want everyone to know that we are going to talk about not only what can make you look better as you age, but also what can make you feel better and truly live life to its fullest potential. So ever since I left my family practice office, I have been living on the edge of medicine. Esthetics was definitely on the edge of medicine when I started my medical SPA back in 2016. 2016. But every year now it seems to becoming more mainstream. It's like normal to have all these things done that I do and you can do them at any age. People are not so afraid to let me use their pictures on social media or to tell their friends, yeah, you know, I had some filler done. So now once again though, I'm back on the fringe of medicine. I am offering a preventative approach to health and well being and what I believe is the future of medicine in this country. This practice of medicine is so controversial. Heal though, because it's not focused on illness. In my spare time this year I have started a concierge preventative medicine practice that houses three different programs. The first I lovingly call Get Fit. This is a 12 week program with all the tools that I use to lose fat, gain muscle and get healthier at 50, which really, if anyone has ever tried that, is one of the hardest things you'll ever do. Get Fit includes weekly coaching visits, microdosing of GLP1s, which I've gotten really good at, and close monitoring of your body composition. The second program that we are just recently rolling out is called Get Fabulous. Yes, of course, Get Fabulous. Not just Get Good, not just Get Great. Get Fabulous. This program is for women with or without perimenopausal symptoms who want to optimize their health and reduce their risk of chronic disease and cancer as they age. And lastly, our third program we're rolling out is called E Get Firm. Men go through a form of menopause too. It's called Andropause and it's it starts when men start producing inadequate testosterone and start that steady decline towards loss of muscle mass, themselves not able to work out like they used to, sexual dysfunction, depression, fatigue and sadly due to hormone disruptors in our environment. Which is actually going to be probably several podcasts during my time getting to educate you. Men and women are having symptoms of hormone deficiency at younger and younger ages due to hormone disruptors in our environment. So truly this podcast is not just for people in the middle of their life like me. It's really for everyone that wants to learn how to have healthy hormones from childhood all the way till the end. So get ready to start the most important educational journey of your life. It is never too early or too late to come with me to the Edge of Medicine to learn how to add life to your years and not just years to your life. Thank you for joining this episode of the Dr. 50 Something Show. If you are intrigued by this show and never want to miss an episode, click Follow. If you are a really great friend, share it. The content of this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider to answer any questions you may have about your personal medical conditions. Until next time, Get Fit, Get Fabulous, Get Firm and take care of yourself. Sam.