#480: Revitalize Your LIFE with Hormone Therapy with Dr. Erika Schwartz, Founder, Disease Prevention & Anti-Aging Pioneer, & 8x Best Selling Author

0:00How crazy when you have this huge tool at your fingertips that you're not using it. and then you're saying, oh, let me give you a pill. What are we thinking? Your mind and your body are one. How could we think that they are separate? I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with us this week. Let me introduce you to one of our exciting guests. Okay, Dr. Erica Schwartz, she's the founder of Evolve Science, a world-renowned medical practice based in NYC, built on the recognition that bioidentical hormones are the foundation for better health.

0:48Once hormones are balanced, the practice focuses on optimization and longevity through disease prevention, patient advocacy, and coordination of care. Dr. Erica is a pioneer in the use of bioidentical hormones for preventing illness and recognizing their direct link to overall wellness and their interconnection with diet, sleep and stress management. I need all those. Her focus on treating patients as a whole person began more than 30 years ago with her understanding that bioidentical hormone replacement is the safest, most effective path to increase health span and to achieve the highest quality of life.

1:20Dr. Erica, thank you so much for being here today. Heather, it's my pleasure. Thank you. I will tell you, I'm so hyped selfishly, right? Like all, I'm 15 years old and all of my - And you look 35, so don't even tell me. Oh, you're so sweet. And by the way, I think the chronologic age just sucks as an idea, so hop the door. However, it is helpful. One thing that I'm learning, and I didn't know this five years ago, and that's why I think it's important we're doing this episode. And I truly am doing this episode for any woman in their 30s and 40s, because I didn't know any of this stuff. I found out, I don't know how, I just didn't know about it.

1:57I found out when I was 49, when I started hearing all of my friends complaining about the same things, hair loss, weight gain, low energy, bad mood. And then one of my friends started saying hormone replacement, hormone therapy. And I'm like, what does that even mean? And so it was just interesting that a group of people, people my age, a lot of us didn't even know about what you literally spent so much of your life studying. Can you talk to us a little bit about how did that all come about? How did you learn about this early on? Well, clearly not from medical school and clearly not from medical education.

2:31I learned it because like everybody else, it had to happen to me. So while I was trained and I knew what I was doing and I ran a major trauma center as my first job at 28, which was unusual for a woman. Think about it. This was in the late 70s, early 80s. Women did not do jobs like this. So I ran a big trauma center. And then I went into private practice and I did internal medicine. And I was just kind of ping ponging patients. And when I wasn't referring them to specialists, they would say to me, why aren't you referring this patient to specialists? And I'd be like, because I know how to take care of them.

3:11And why do I need a specialist that the patient's healthy? So anyway, what happened when I turned 46 and I'm 74 now. That's why I said to you, age doesn't matter, really. I mean, chronologic age. So I was 46 and I went into menopause and I was treating women in menopause already with all kinds of garbage that we were trained to treat with that were kind of working, kind of not working. Anyway, so I started feeling not so good. I started taking care of myself according to what I was trained and it wasn't working. And then one of my patients came in and showed me this prescription and said, why don't you order this at the compounding pharmacy, which I didn't even know what it was.

3:57So she said, just write it for me in California. So I wrote it. I didn't, you know, it was just basically estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, hormones that our body make. So I was like, oh, okay. The woman came back and she was very happy. And I said, what's going on and she's like oh this is what i need it's wonderful so when i went into metaphors and i was taking the conventional stuff and it wasn't working i thought hmm let me go back to this pharmacy so i wrote to the guy at the pharmacy and i ordered the stuff and i said can you send me some literature remember this is the 1990s so there's no internet there's no google there's nothing so except for the libraries and the libraries that i was going to were the medical school libraries so obviously they had this much information about anything to do with women's health so i and for anyone that's not seeing the video right now dr erica just put a big egg up zero she's saying there was no information on hormones or hormone therapy right so i said to the guy send me some stuff so he sends me some literature and it's pretty good and it's in the real journals and it was before we knew that it was all fake the stuff that they published in the medical journals that were paid for by pharma but we didn't think that anyway so it made sense and I said well why don't you send me whatever you had sent to this woman that I ordered for and I spent like$450, which was a lot of money in 1996, 97.

5:37And I get this box with a zillion things. It has syringes with creams, it has powders, it has pills, it has all kinds of things. And I was like, oh, you know, you kind of need a degree in biochemistry to figure out what to do. So I'm like so desperate to feel good because it was like an alien had come into my head. You know, I mean, I'm not moody. I'm usually pretty even temperate. All of a sudden, I'm like, and I can't live inside my own body, right? I get a notebook out and I start doing it. And I start following the direction. And within a week, shock of all shockers, I feel like myself. So I'm like, wow.

6:20So I call this guy and I say, listen, I have a lot of patients who I have on the conventional wisdom stuff. I would love to send them to you but you know$490 a month is a lot of money he's like I don't need you or your patients and he did me the biggest favor because what he did by saying to me get lost is he opened the door for me to learn about it so what I did is I found a compounding pharmacy in north of New York City where I was living and I spent the following three years while seeing patients, going home at night and studying and working with this guy in a compounding pharmacy and develop formulations and compounds that turned out to really work.

7:10So then I wrote a book about it and then it coincided with that study that destroyed the life of 7 million women by saying that hormones cause cancer. So yet again, like the universe steps in to take care of things, right? I get a call from a patient's husband who was running a medical marketing company who had just sold it for some astronomic number. And he says, how's this going to affect your business? So I'm like, it's going to be great because people need it. Women need this. And I know from, I read it, I did all the research. This is exactly what we need. It's not, not only is it going to not cause cancer, it's going to prevent heart disease.

7:52It's going to prevent Alzheimer's. It's going to keep your bones strong. It's going to keep, you know, everything in place, you know, totally what you want. And he said, OK, can I come in as a partner? So I'm like, sure. I'm like, do I know what he's talking about? So we opened the first compounding pharmacy that did the formulations that I did. And then I was teaching doctors all over New York and, you know, the university hospitals. And that's how it started. And then I moved on. And, you know, I wasn't about making money. I was about helping women, really. The practice was practically all women at the time.

8:31Now, ironically, it's 50-50. Men woke up to it. And it was also perimenopausal women. So, you know, nobody talked about it. Now, I have 16-year-olds in the practice because everybody gets it, brings their kids in, brings their whole, you know, family in. Like you said, the women in their 30s and 40s. and they know what's out there and what can happen. So why don't we prevent it? Because it's all about preventing. We can stay healthy. We can stay looking good. We can stay feeling good. There's no reason not to. So this is the evolution of it. This is where we are. So then I realized it wasn't just about hormones.

9:12It was about diet, exercise, lifestyle, everything you know now. I also decided at the time, you know it came to me as this evolution occurred that it was about putting the pieces together and that it was within our power right to make it happen and that at the end of the day it was you or me whoever is the person involved that would make the decision to conduct their life in such a way that would make it work. And it's like what you were saying on your TED Talk that I told you I was watching before, that you can't allow the outside world to take away your light. You have to hold on to it. And if it's taking it away from you, you better walk away from that.

10:03So that's what I'm doing in healthcare.

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13:21so one of the things that you brought up that i am curious to hear about because the only friends that i have that aren't doing some type of hormone something at this point at our age are ones that are very so scared of cancer you brought up that study so can you tell us and educate us for myself for all the listeners what validity is there what studies were done like what What does it all mean? Why are people afraid of that? Well, they're afraid of it because that study was a complete fraud. It was a study sponsored by Wyatt Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and Upjohn. And it was supposedly, and again, for those who don't see it, quotation marks, right?

14:03It was supposedly going to show that Premarin, which was the hormone replacement therapy they were using in those days was the fountain of youth, which is not a bad idea, right? The only problem is that they used women who were at least 10 years after menopause, who had pre-existing conditions, like they were smokers, they had cancers, they had all kinds of issues. And so they were too old to look at. And they use the wrong kind of hormone replacement therapy because, and this is a hard concept and I teach it to doctors, so I don't want to sound like an idiot by saying something. They believed, and they still believe in the conventional medical world, that all estrogens behave the same.

14:55All progesterones behave the same. The truth is that no such thing happens. And it's common sense that if the formula of a substance isn't the same as the formula of the next substance, they're not going to behave the same. It's just common sense. You don't really need to be a biochemist. You don't need to know anything except common sense to say, what are you talking about? It took 20 years for that piece of information to get across the Atlantic Ocean, because in Europe they got it, and say, wait a minute the study was bad what they gave them didn't work women need hormones so I had written this book and this is again the universe I had written this book called the hormone solution and it came out in April of 2002 and like you were talking about writing a book I really didn't write a book because I thought I wanted to be famous or I wanted people to think that I know what I'm talking about.

15:54It was kind of, it came out and it came out of me and it was about helping and saying the core of that book is really, you know, if you have a baby, I just wrote a chapter for a medical book about postpartum care and how what's going on there, which is another disaster. Anyway, and every age we're affected by our hormone balance. So that's what that book was about. And it was also that putting the right hormones into the mix will help you stay healthy, will open the door for you to stop drinking when you're older, to be able to maintain your weight, to be able to sleep, to protect eventually from heart disease, brain, bones, etc.

16:43And the book came out in April of 2002 and the study came out in July of 2002. So all of a sudden it was number two on Amazon. Just go figure. And this is how I got to where I got. But I did a lot of work in the meantime because I'm taking care of patients and I went from taking care of menopausal women to taking care of like transgenerationally and bringing the guys in too and saying, listen, we all need to make sure our hormones are in balance. We all have it in our hands to improve our lives. We don't need to look for the magic pill, which we're all sadly looking for. We don't need to try to outsmart the next person.

17:30We can just stay there and do what's best for ourselves. And we'll be OK. So where does someone start? Because, Dr. Erica, one of the things that I find confusing personally, right, because I don't know a thimble of what you know in regards to hormones. You live there. You know more. Well, I do know how important it is and it can change how you feel. But I still know for myself, I'm on hormones right now and I know I'm still not on the right concoction of it yet because I see some of my friends are thriving and I feel better, but I know I'm not there yet. Right. So you can see that it's something that my point is this.

18:05There are online solutions and I'm not going to say the brand names, but like there's solutions that you can go to online and they have a system set up and you're immediately on hormone patches and hormone pills, whatever. Then there's these very expensive, because some of my friends go to these people, I don't, but they're these very, very expensive. Some of my friends are spending$10 ,000 a month doing testing, hormones, injections, whatever. They feel amazing. Then I see in between there's labs and there's doctors. So what's the right thing for a regular person to do when they know, wow, I'm aware, I need to figure out what's going on with my hormones.

18:38Where do they start and where should they go? What does that look like? Good question. That's a great question. Unfortunately, there is no clear, you know, like epidemiologic answer that says, OK, everybody should do this because everybody's different. Everybody, like you said, they can go up there or you can go down here, wherever. This is the only thing I would say. Go to anywhere you find your friends recommend. And then, I mean, you get on Instagram all day long. We get fed the stuff. Don't go for the supplements because the supplements, most of them, unless they're tied into the hormonal supplementation, they're just a marketing scam.

19:20So don't bother with the supplements, I would say. Then I would say, try. And if you feel better, stay there. Like you said, you're not quite there. And you know what? Because you live in there. listen to yourself you know it don't let anybody else tell you what's going on and then keep trying until you find the right person now you know this has become a huge market so there's a lot of money that people are spending in it and there are a lot of quacks in it the same way there are a lot of quacks in the conventional world you know so it's up to you like you said in your TED talk in your life, it's up to you to say this far, no further.

20:04This, so I would say, give it three months. In three months, you'll know if it's the right person or not. And if the person listens to you, if the person gets to know you, if they want to know you, if they're not just prescribing because they have nothing else to do than prescribe to collect their money, they'll go the other way. You know that. You know what you want. If they're there to sell you, you're not interested. because it's your life. So you want somebody who's going to protect you and who's going to tell you whatever they know. Now, yesterday I had a patient in the practice who came in and was telling me that one of the doctors that I'm in faculty at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine and another faculty member who's a quite well-renowned doctor was saying something that was a little different, quite different as a matter of fact than what I say.

20:57And she said, you know, obviously she came to me and she was like, what's the story? And I said, listen, the beauty of it is that you get different opinions and that's beautiful. And we don't understand that in our culture. We're a little off on that one, that you want different opinions because they will help you try to figure out what's best for you. And you'll know that not everything works for everybody. So it's okay. I don't have a problem with that, but you can decide if it's right or wrong. You can decide, well, I feel better. I have patients who will come and say, I've been doing the same thing for five years and I'm not quite there and I'm not losing weight and my skin is horrible and my hair's falling out.

21:41And I'm like, why have you been doing it for five years? She's like, well, I don't know. The one thing I can tell you is don't go to anybody who mixes it all together. There are a lot of them that get like compounds that are estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, prudelolone, it's all bumbo jumbo, basically all put together. And then you take the cream and you just mush it on. The problem is that it makes no sense because you'll never know who did what to whom. So I will never put them all together. And my experience has been pretty significant for 30 years. And I still see patients three days a week and I see like 20 patients kind of things.

22:24So I see a lot. anyway what i've learned is that you keep them separate because if you keep them separate it might be more of a nuisance that you have to do it like twice a day or divide it up but we you and i will figure out what's best for you much easier than if you put it all in one what does it look like when it's done the right way meaning is it a patch is it a cream like you're talking about like you said not to take the supplement what makes the right formula is first of all not putting them all together, doing them separately. There are different times in life where different things work better than other things.

23:01Like a patch will work better when you're younger than when you're older. A cream of progesterone will work better when you're younger rather than older. So oral estrogen should never be given because it's processed through the liver and we have enough crap going through our liver. We don't want to add to that. Testosterone should never be given in pellets, you know, because they put them under the skin and leave it there for three months. Your body in its natural state before you stop making it releases hormone impulses. So you don't want to have hormones there all the time. You want hormones to come and go, come and go.

23:46And this is how you want to do it. So those are just like basic things that should tell you if you're getting the right thing or not. Having said that, I have seen people who have been, like I said, doing it for five years the wrong way and it's working. The other thing is that at some point, it's not just about estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. It becomes about thyroid and adrenal. And that's really crucial because it took me about five years of doing it. And remember, since I'm old, that it started a long time ago that nobody even thought about it at the time. I was like, I'm doing it right, but the people are not quite, like you said, not a hundred percent.

24:29I feel great. You look great. You feel great, but you know, you're not a hundred percent. So that's when I realized that the blood tests that we do, because we're conventional doctors. And I insisted on the fact that this is where conventional medicine has to go or it's going to die. As simple as that. And I'm a conventional doctor. So I don't want to be considered alternative. I don't want to think of myself as an alternative doctor. So it's conventional medicine who needs to go there. So when you do bloods, you know what conventional drug bloods look like, right? But they don't really tell you anything before you're sick.

25:10They tell you when you're sick. So I had to kind of learn on my own how to figure out ahead of time, how to get to prevention. Like you said, all these people who pay$10 ,000 a month to have a thousand tests that they don't need. It's like, if you think of the genetic testing, which is like a big thing, we spend$2 billion to get the genetic code for humans like 20 years ago. And it's completely useless because we know that genetics mean absolutely nothing, that there may be two or three genetic diseases actually, which sadly exist. And that's it. And you can't do much about it. And that genetics are useless as far as knowing them, except for creating high anxiety in you because you're going to worry about it.

26:00And it's epigenetics is what our environment is doing to our genes that is making them to either express themselves as negative things or express themselves as positive things. So doing that test, sometimes like I'm not very big on testing, which makes a lot of people who make money off of the testing, not very happy. So to me, what matters the most is you, how you feel, how you're feeling now, how you felt six months ago. And then what I do, which is because I'm a conventional doctor, is that when you feel perfectly and you come and you say, I got it. This is perfect. I feel the way I want to feel.

26:45That's when we do the bloods because everybody's different. And that's when I will know that your bloods are the right bloods for you to keep you where we want to be. You know, like the people who say, like the woman I was talking about was faculty with me. who's saying that you should have the same estrogen levels that you had when you were in your 30s or 20s. I'm sure you've heard that one, right? In order to feel great. Well, and some people, yes, and some people, no. And to have a period, that's another conversation, right? You should have a period forever. Well, I have patients, and when I first started, you know, women would not even admit that they didn't have periods anymore.

27:28They would be like, oh, I'm 59, and I've had a period my whole life. And I'd be like, Oh, my God, I must there's something wrong with me, because I can't believe that. But I believe anything my patients say. So what's the truth? Well, the truth is, they were lying, because they were embarrassed, because the embarrassment factor was so high. And women's, like you say, lack of self esteem and self confidence, trumps everything. Totally. so now like i would have my first editor of the hormone solution the original hormone solution was a 20 something year old lady who told me i couldn't write and i guess she was wrong but anyway she sent me her mother who was a lovely woman took care of her and it was early so i don't blame them for not being sure of what i was talking about and the woman wouldn't tell her a gynecologist.

28:23She was feeling great. And she'd go for her annual checkups and he'd be like, oh my God, you're like 59 and your vagina is like a 35 year old and you feel good. And I don't understand. It's wonderful. You're doing great. And she's not on hormones because it's post hormones are bad for you. Right. And she never told the truth. She never told them that she was on hormones with me. So people were very scared. And even to this day, there are some who will quit the gynecologist and go to the people like me who take care of them and then never say what changed and what happened, which I think is not doing any service to the younger ones.