Dr. Deb Muth 0:03
Welcome back to let’s Talk Wellness. Now, I’m your host, Dr. Deb. If you’re a woman who’s doing everything right, eating clean, exercising, taking supplements, yet you still feel exhausted, inflamed, or like your body suddenly stopped cooperating, this episode is for you. Today’s conversation challenges one of the biggest myths in women’s health. That midlife struggles are just about hormones or worse, just part of aging. My guest today is Dr. Deb Heald, a naturopathic physician with one of the most fascinating backgrounds I’ve ever encountered. Yeah, she’s got a really diverse background, which is kind of exciting. She’s been an ER nurse, a stockbroker, a Silicon Valley data analysis, teaching machines to learn from microbiome research. And yes, she holds an mba, too. But it was her own menopause crash that changed everything. When the protocols she had been teaching stopped working for her, her, she didn’t double down on templates or trends. She did what she was trained to do. She followed the data and what she discovered reframed menopause, metabolism and women’s longevity in a completely different way. This isn’t about willpower. It’s not about another diet, and it’s definitely not about copying what worked for someone else. It’s about learning to listen to your body and finally understanding what it’s been trying to tell you and all along. So grab your cup of coffee or tea, settle in, and let’s dive into this amazing conversation about women’s health and menopause. And right after our guest is arriving with us, we’re going to get a word from our sponsor quick here. And then we are going to come right back to having this conversation with Dr. Deb Heald. Ladies, it’s time to reignite your vitality. Primal Queen supplements are clean, powerful formulas made for women like you who want balance, strength, and energy that lasts. Get 25% off@primal queen.com Serenity Health. Because every queen deserves to feel in her prime. But okay. All right. Welcome back, everybody. I am here with my new friend, Dr. Deb Heald. And she has such an amazing background, like I shared with you a few minutes ago. But I would love for her to give us her insight in how she got where she did, because it’s rare that you find somebody with a data background and a medical background. So, Dr. Dove, welcome.

Dr Deb Heald 2:30
Thank you. I am so glad to be here, and it’s a real privilege to meet you.

Dr. Deb Muth 2:34
I feel the same way.

Dr Deb Heald 2:35
Yeah, it’s. I think that the more of us that start to think and practice this way, the easier it’s going to be for women going forward. Because it’s not easy.

Dr. Deb Muth 2:44
It is not easy. I mean, I’ve been in this industry a long time, over 25 years. And every time I think it’s getting easy, it’s getting harder for a variety of reasons. It’s the medical system, it’s the. The clients we work with are sicker. It’s taking longer to get them to a place where they feel good. There’s just so many variables these days. So tell me a little bit about what got you here.

Dr Deb Heald 3:06
Well, I made the decision when I was graduating from high school to be a nurse instead of a teacher, because those were really still the two options that were common for women. I thought about medicine at that point, but my sister convinced me that if I would spend all that time learning and practicing medicine, I might not be as good of a mom. So I took the path of nurse, because nurse works around kids schedules and that sort of thing. I’d only been practicing about six months before I thought, oh my gosh, there has to be more to it than this, and toyed with the idea of starting med school at that point, but then married and started having children, and I just sort of fell into that pattern. But I typically work emergency room. There was a short stent in the post anesthesia recovery room as well. And emergency room was a place where western medicine actually shone. Right. People come in, they are no longer capable of functioning, they’re having a heart attack, they lost limb. Whatever else, they do need the, the bells and the whistles of western medicine. But when you think about it, western medicine was derived out of the Civil War where you didn’t have to say what’s the cause of the problem. It was a bullet or a bayonet, and it was, it was about patching up the soldiers and getting them back on the front line so they could continue to fight. And naturopathic medicine, which had been a lot around for an awful lot longer than that, just didn’t work in the battlefield then. The assessment was done in the early 1900s as to which style of medicine got people back to work faster. The Flexner report was all about how corporations could maximize the value of employees. And naturopathic medicine didn’t win because nutritional fixes take a long time. Taking away somebody’s stress so that they can just function more capably is. It’s a, It’s a big ask, right? So the funding of naturopathic medicine went away and western medicine became all that we knew. So in context to the emergency room, it worked. But when I saw the same person coming in, having their third heart attack, I just thought, how is this happening? Has no one told this person what, what’s going on in their lifestyle that’s creating this environment for them to continue to have heart attacks? And so that’s when I made the switch. And that was after 17 years in practice as a nurse to head on over to the naturopathic side. There was a little bit of a, a segue there, but we’d need a much longer interview to get into the details of that. I was a stock broker for six years. Anyway, when I jumped into the idea of med school, it didn’t make sense to be practicing the same thing that was already being practiced because I saw where it worked and I saw where it was failing. So hopped into the naturopathic tract. I also had one child that had a lot of physical and emotional ailments that western medicine couldn’t solve. Their answer to everything was putting her on amoxicillin. And I, I just absolutely could not convince the medical system that she didn’t have a deficiency of antibiotics, but that was their only solution. And so while she was on the antibiotics, her sinuses were clear, her sleep apnea was not an issue, and she appeared better, but her microbiome got decimated. She was on antibiotics for seven years. So, yeah, so my pursuit down the naturopathic pathway was in large part to try and figure out what else could be done for my daughter. And I did take her to a naturopath or I embarked on the field myself. And her GP threatened to call social services. Oh my gosh, yes.

Dr. Deb Muth 6:22
You hear these stories, I’ve heard these stories from clients before over really dumb things that they’re going to call CPS for. And it always blows my mind that we think it’s appropriate to call CPS on somebody who’s truly not injuring their child.

Dr Deb Heald 6:38
So anyway, that started my 17 year path in the naturopathic realm. And after, after I’ve been in practice about 10 years, an opportunity came up to move to Silicon Valley and research the microbiome and then take what we were learning from the microbiome and program it into AI. So I did that for a few years and it was amazing. There was a huge disconnect between the funding model and what its expectations were and what the research was able to do. There was a time gap, there was a funding gap. And so I thought, medicine doesn’t understand what’s important to business. And Business isn’t understanding what’s critical to research. So I went and did my MBA and wanted to be able to be the translator between those two worlds. And then the pandemic hit and then.

Dr. Deb Muth 7:24
Everyone’S life got turned upside down, right?

Dr Deb Heald 7:26
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m back in private practice. My, my practice always tended to be more autoimmune focused, which is predominantly women and predominantly middle aged women. But through my own experience of menopause and looking at how I assisted people that were in menopause before I was, you know, that the success rate wasn’t as high as it needed to be. And I started to really drill down into the biochemistry behind what was going on and then also realized that my menopause was very different than even my sister’s menopause. There we were, the same genetic template, the same lived environment, though very different lived experiences in that environment. And realized that we have to find ways to make it relevant to the person in front of us. And it’s not so much which herbs will or won’t work historically, it’s how is this person’s body responding in the immediate term to the diet we’ve put them on, to the nutritional plan we’ve suggested to the supplements, and because we’ve come so far in the data world, our whoop straps or aura rings or whatever else, there’s so many devices that are actually able to let us know whether somebody’s burning carbs or fat in this moment or ketones. We can see how an individual’s body is responding and course correct right now. And it isn’t that a ketogenic diet may not be helpful down the road. It’s right now it’s actually putting more stress on your body than it’s already under, which puts yo...