73. Dr. Robin Berzin: Why "Normal" Labs Are Failing Women (and What to Ask For Instead)

What if your bloating, fatigue, or fertility struggles aren't separate issues, but signs of a deeper imbalance no one's connected yet? In this episode of Extend, I'm joined by Dr. Robin Berzin, founder of Parsley Health, and we dig into how functional medicine uncovers the why behind your symptoms and why conventional care keeps missing it. We talk about the most overlooked root causes of chronic illness, the truth about blood sugar and hormones, and why fertility issues are often metabolic in disguise. You'll also learn how functional medicine works in real life, how to find the right provider, and why Dr. Berzin created her "brains, bones, and booty" framework for aging well—especially for women. Dr. Robin Berzin is a Columbia-trained MD, pioneer in reimagining primary care and author of State Change. She's helped thousands of patients get off the prescription treadmill and finally feel like themselves again. We Also Discuss: The wake-up call that changed everything Why most functional medicine was failing How functional care actually works The blood sugar-hormone connection no one talks about Brains, bones, and booty: the new longevity framework for women The real reason your mental health symptoms won't go away What no one tells women between pregnancy and menopause The hidden crisis in kids' health—and what to do about it Thank You to Our Sponsors: TruNiagen: Whether you are looking to stay sharp, feel more energized or simple age better, go to https://www.truniagen.com/IFit: If you are looking to elevate your home gym fitness experience with the best in fitness tech, choose IFIT. Go to https://www.ifit.com/Vitaboom: For supplements you can trust and wellness solutions tailored to your health, visit https://vitaboom.com/ Learn more about Dr. Shah: Website: https://www.drshah.com/ Clinic: https://www.next-health.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darshanshahmd/ Learn more about Dr. Robin Berzin: Instagram: @robinberzinmd https://www.instagram.com/robinberzinmd/?hl=en Instagram:@parsleyhealth https://www.instagram.com/parsleyhealth/?hl=en Website: https://robinberzinmd.com https://robinberzinmd.com/newsletter/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research, tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21, and trained and board-certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board-certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We're living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system, no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease, and most importantly, extend your health span.

• 0:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Many women are told that their hormones are normal while they silently suffer from anxiety, infertility, exhaustion, and weight gain. If this sounds like you, you're going to want to listen to this episode. In this episode of Extend, I'm going to sit down with my friend, Dr. Robin Burson. She's a founder and CEO of Parsley Health, and she's going to explain how functional medicine totally rewrites the story by treating hormonal disturbances at their root cause and not just silencing the symptoms with medications. I've known Robin for a long time. She and I both started our clinics together almost around the same time many years ago. And we've been on this journey of really trying to help people through functional medicine and root cause medicine, improve their health, their wellness, and their chronic diseases.

• 1:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So from infertility to autoimmune disease, all the way to brain fog, bloating, and burnout, this episode is going to teach you the key labs that most doctors miss out on, how blood sugar impacts everything from your hormones to your mood, and why fertility struggles are often metabolic problems in disguise. And we're going to learn about Robin's Brains, Bones, and Booty Protocol, and how you can age well, especially for women. Dr. Robin Burson is a Columbia-trained doctor. She's an MD, a pioneer in reimagining primary care, and author of the book State Change, which is a fantastic book. She's helped thousands of patients get off the prescription treadmill and finally feel like themselves again with her company Parsley Health. Let's get right into it with Dr. Robin Burson.

• 2:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Hi, Robin.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 2:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So happy that you're here. It's so funny when you start the podcast and we've already been talking for like an hour and then we have to act like we just met each other again.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It's so true. We're basically, our conversations were basically in one long podcast for the past 10 years that I've known you. So we're just going to continue the conversation here, recorded.

• 2:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love it. And some of the best conversations I've ever had in my life, by the way. That's why I'm so excited that you're here. And, you know, we were kindred spirits because we kind of started in this space around the same time of helping people be healthy versus like the disease care, sick care system. And we've both grown up in the last 10 years with all the challenges of, you know, the pandemic and trying to grow a business and no one even understands what we're trying to do here. And it's been amazing, right?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  It's been such a journey. I remember meeting Darshan back at like a conference, like a wellness conference years and years and years ago in Arizona and being so excited because there was another like escaped doctor from conventional medicine. You know, both of us trained in very conventional settings and having practiced that way. And both of us had made this leap into trying to help people thrive, not just survive. And we were early and we were weirdos. And here we are, we're still doing it. So something's working.

• 3:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Something worked out, exactly. And that was a Mind Body Green conference in the middle of, wasn't it Tucson or something?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  It was somewhere out there. Yeah. It's huge love to Mind Body Green and Colleen and Jason and that whole crew. We missed that conference. If you're listening, bring it back.

• 3:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I keep trying to get them to bring it back and-

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I called it Wellness Nerds Unite.

• 3:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes, it was. It really was. And it was amazing. I think that was a spark of a lot of great things. That conference was, I met Dr. Amy Shaw there, I met Dr. Hyman there. And now we're all friends in this space. It's amazing. But I really appreciate you being here because out of all the conversations that we've had over the past few years in growing this business, the kind of guiding principle and guiding light is how do we just make healthcare better, right? Over that entire time. And so I'd love for you to just tell my audience kind of your story, like where you trained and how you came up with the idea of Parsley Health and what you were trying to accomplish.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  So I was one of those kids that was like in college, I'm never going to be a doctor. My dad's a doctor. So of course you're like, I'm not going to do what my parents do. Right. But during medical school, sorry, during college, my grandmother unfortunately passed away from colon cancer. And I ended up taking this course on everything about cancer, the biology of cancer, the sociology of cancer, the epidemiology of cancer. And I learned in that and doing research for a big paper that I wrote then, what that 50% of cancers are preventable. And I learned that, you know, my grandmother had eaten the SAD, Standard American Diet, smoked cigarettes for many years, both very proven risk factors for colon cancer, and then not had a colonoscopy in time, which is a life-saving screening test.

• 5:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  True.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And the combination of that knowledge, right? So much was preventable on every level. Got me interested in medicine, got me interested in functional medicine, in the idea of treating the root cause and the idea of preventing disease. And it was really that that launched me to go. So I trained at Columbia for medical school, trained at Mount Sinai Hospital for internal medicine. So I've been in New York for a long time. And my guiding light, though, was really her story and everything I learned. And that made me a total weirdo at Columbia, where like, everybody was like you, right? They're training to be some sort of fancy pants surgeon. And I was this person that says, I want this foundational training in conventional medicine, which is so powerful and important. And I want to understand how we can help millions of people avoid my grandmother's

• 6:07Speaker 01

  fate, and also millions of people transform their lives, because so much of our chronic disease epidemic today is reversible or modifiable if we approach it differently.

• 6:16Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. I mean, but that's a realization that you had. How many years have you been a doctor now?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Well, I graduated from med school in 2011. It's 2025, so 14 years.

• 6:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, so 14 years, no one was talking about that, right?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I mean, there was obviously like, some people talking about preventative medicine, but it was such an infancy. And it was more of, how do we apply like, traditional Western medicine to preventative medicine? And no one really understood this whole concept of what are the root causes, right?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Nobody did, but it was just screaming at us in the face.

• 6:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It was.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  You know, I have this really vivid memory of being in internal medicine training. You know, this is, this is now graduated from Columbia, Mount Sinai in New York, but they're all very similar. And making my lunch, like I'd make these healthy sandwiches with avocados and sprouts and salmon, and I'd bring my lunch in a little, you know, Tupperware. This is like before we knew as much as we do today about microplastics. So, cool. And my one girlfriend in my residency class, she was the same. And we'd make our food and we'd go and have these lectures. You know, you remember in medical training, they'd have these lectures at lunchtime.

• 7:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  And they'd feed all the young, you know, growing doctors food. And they'd give you pizza and like take out Chinese food. And I remember being made fun of by my, you know, fellow interns, fellow doctors for bringing this healthy food with me in my little Tupperware. And I remember saying to them, you realize that most of the people in this hospital right now are here because of the food that you're eating for lunch. And it made me understand at that moment that there is a very big difference between health and medicine.

• 7:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  And our healthcare system is very interested in medicine. It is not so interested in health. But I and you are very interested in health. And I saw an opportunity to marry the two through Parsley Health and through functional medicine.

• 8:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. And you know, that realization, what you just said there is exactly the realization I had 10 years ago when I got sick myself. You know, listeners of the podcast know their story, but I had autoimmune disease, high blood pressure, diabetes. And trying to find the answers in Western medicine were not there, other than to treat it with a pill and, uh, and or surgeries or, you know, all the different things that we do in Western medicine that is covered by insurance. And the, the system is not designed to create health. And that's where what you did and what I did is rather than trying to fix the old system, we decided let's create something new where people can actually find health and reverse chronic disease, but also feel incredible. Right?

• 8:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And that's, I think, you know, Parsley Health, which is based in functional medicine, is that other system. And I remember when you started this, probably a lot of people said to you like, wait, does my insurance cover this or why not? And how did you like answer those questions?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Well, in the early days, really, the mission was simple and the mission remains the same. It's make functional medicine scalable, make it accessible, make it affordable, and make it something that everybody can have. Because what I observed 10-plus years ago, and you know, in some ways, this is often still true today, that functional medicine was the right thinking, but the wrong execution. It was available in very expensive practices, very small, tiny practices. They weren't tracking data and outcomes, they weren't publishing, they weren't leveraging technology, they weren't really standardizing the care in a way that would allow it to go primetime. And I said, all of these private practices that are really expensive are great. They're doing good work. But I want this to be something that can go primetime. I want this to be something that can reach a lot of people.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And so that really was the mission. And so we built Parsley initially to be a much more affordable and accessible price point, to be able to use FSA and HSA. And then, over time, we started going to network with insurance. We're now a network for 15 million people and expanding.

• 10:10Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's amazing.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Currently, New York and California, in terms of taking insurance, but more states about to be signed this week on the way. And really, that path has been hard and arduous and long, but it's so gratifying. Because when people see, hey, I can use my benefits to cover part of this care, and suddenly this becomes something that I thought only really rich people did, and now I can have a part of it. Yes, it's an investment in your health. It's an investment in your time as much as your money. And I think that's one thing. We're so used to healthcare being so transactional. Go in when you're sick, go in when you need it, get a pill, walk out the door, hope the doctor waves a magic wand.

• 10:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And the one thing that hasn't changed in Parsley versus other forms of functional medicine is that functional medicine is a journey. You are the hero of that journey. You are leading the way. The doctors are there to help. The nurses, the health coaches are there to help, the tests are there to help. But you are on a hero's journey, powering your way to better health. And that's what's gratifying about it, but that takes time and then investment, right?

• 11:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. So let's just take it a step back, because I think a lot of times when we speak about functional medicine, a lot of people don't even know what that is yet. And I think you and I, because we talk about it every single day, we feel like everyone knows what it is. But I would love for you to give, you know, from your vantage point, how do you define functional medicine at this point in time?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Functional medicine is an approach to health where we find and treat the root cause. It's really that simple. Instead of saying you have high cholesterol, I will treat that with a medication like a statin. We say, why do you have high cholesterol? Is it genetic? Is it the foods you're eating? Is it your sedentary lifestyle? Is it your body composition? Is it a GI microbiome issue? Why do you have high cholesterol? And then, when we understand the why, through testing, through your clinical story, through going back in time and understanding your childhood, your family, then we might prescribe a statin, because that might be the best tool for this particular job.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Or we might prescribe you a high fiber, high protein, high healthy fat, low refined sugar, low refined carb diet, and help you completely resolve your high cholesterol without any medications. We might prescribe a supplement that can help with that dietary intervention, because the supplement's going to have fewer side effects than the statin. But it's not this perspective of replace a drug with something natural for the sake of there being something natural. And that's why I love functional medicine so much. It takes all of the available science, all of the best allopathic Western medical treatments, and it's an and, not an or. I always say it's not like natural or the highway. Don't Reiki your UTI way, people, like take an antibiotic, okay? We're good.

• 12:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  But if you're having recurrent UTIs, as I've had patients, many patients, I think one of my patients who had UTIs over and over and over again, hitting her with antibiotics over and over and over again was ignoring the root cause, that she had yeast overgrowth. She had inflammation in her body that was preventing her immune system from actually kind of killing the UTI. And we needed to take a whole body approach to her chronic UTIs, were able to resolve them. She didn't need the antibiotics anymore. That's the difference in functional medicine, and what it results in is sustainable health. As opposed to what we see today, at least in the United States, which is people ending up on more and more pills that they don't take, that they can't remember to take, they can't even find.

• 13:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And that

• 13:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Can't afford.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And can't afford, although, thank you Mark Cuban for leading the charge there. But that leaves them sort of to this lifetime of where they're still sick, but they're taking a bunch of pills. And that, the message I want everyone to take away is that that does not have to be the end game. Medications and drugs are great and they're important and we need them. And we need this whole person approach. Otherwise, we're not going to be sustainably healthy.

• 13:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, it's so powerful because a lot of people think that once they're on a medication, that's the solution to the problem. Now that they have the med, their diabetes is under control or their autoimmune disease is under control. But in reality, you're just masking the symptoms. If you don't do the and, which typical Western medicine very rarely gets you, you're always going to be on the medication masking symptoms, but you're also going to have all of the other negative aspects of the medication and the disease process potentially flourishing as well.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think the world is waking up to that. You know, we have healthcare costs that are drowning our country. And we talk a lot about how healthcare is broken, right? That's almost become sort of this pat phrase. Like, what does that even mean? Healthcare is broken, it's costing a lot of money. And I think at one point, it's like, well, it costing a lot of money is maybe a societal problem, but it's not a me problem. But what's happened in the past few years as healthcare costs have skyrocketed has become a me problem because people's health insurance has become completely unaffordable. And then it still doesn't even cover any of the things they need. And so, and these costs are being passed from employers down to the average person. They're coming through taxes. And so, it's really become a me problem.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And I think people have to understand that we have to do medicine a different way. It's not, it's not a nice to have, it's not because we're wellness nerds. It's because this is the only way forward for a sustainable healthcare system.

• 15:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, without a rethinking of the entire healthcare system, we're headed towards a complete catastrophe where this will be 100% of our GDP eventually, right? It's just not, it's not going to work.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Right, well, I'd argue we're in the catastrophe, right? We're spending $4 trillion a year on chronic diseases, many of which, not all, but many of which are reversible, preventable, or can get better through functional care. And it's bankrupting us today.

• 15:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, exactly. So if you were to further describe functional medicine, what are the root causes that blossom out into hundreds of thousands of diseases that we have names for? What are some of the root causes?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Well, the functional medicine model, like I said, we start with looking at the root cause and we do this total body health assessment where we do functional labs, which is looking at things like metabolic health, heart health, nutrient levels, toxins, like heavy metals, hormones, inflammatory markers. We look more broadly. The average primary care doctor looks at anywhere from 15 to 25 tests. We look at hundreds of biomarkers in functional medicine because we're connecting the dots across the body. We understand that what's happening in your gut could be causing your brain fog. In fact, one of the top causes of brain fog today is SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And we can test for that. How cool, right? And we can treat it. How cool. But we can't test for it or treat it if we don't know to look for it.

• 16:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  In addition to the testing, we evaluate what is happening in your personal ecosystem that could be driving disease. And so you asked, you know, what are the things that are driving all of these downstream diseases? We look at what are you eating? Because food is medicine. It isn't like medicine, it is medicine. And the standard American diet will generate the standard American diseases. And so we look at heavily and in depth what you're eating. We look at food allergies and food sensitivities. We look at macros, like what is your sugar versus protein versus fat, right? We look at micros, like what is your phytonutrient base, these nutrients in plants, right? We evolved for those nutrients to send smart messages to our cells and keep us healthy and to our microbes and keep us healthy. How much fiber are you getting? The average American is getting like 15 or

• 17:30Speaker 01

  less grams of fiber a day. You should be getting 25 minimum, ideally 30 to 50 plus. And so we look at what you're eating. We look at, are you moving your body? Exercise is our most powerful drug. So if you're sitting 11 hours a day and looking at a screen, your body is going to start to decompose. You're going to be in poor metabolic health. You're going to be one of the 98 million Americans who have metabolic syndrome, right? We look at your environment. What toxins are you exposed to? What's, what's, what is around you? What's in your food, what's in your drugs, what's in your personal care products? And we look at your mental and emotional health. Mind and body are not separate. And so, looking at what is your stress level? How are you managing that stress? Are you like managing it with wine and Ambien?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Or are you managing it with yoga and running? Right, like those are two different ways of managing stress. As your doctor, we need to know what your chosen way is. And it's not about judging you, it's just about helping you find ways of coping with the natural stressors we all experience in ways that are not destructive to your body. And so, in functional medicine, we look at all of these things that our conventional system tends to ignore. And then we give you a highly personalized protocol that addresses all of those things. And as personalized as it all is, the common things that we see over and over and over again is poor metabolic health and poor heart health and poor brain health, largely because of the way people are eating, the way people are moving, and the way they are managing stress. And if we can intervene on those things,

• 19:01Speaker 01

  the cool part is you hit lots of body systems at once.

• 19:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I love that description specifically because everything you just talked about has never been talked to us in medical school as part of your general primary care exam either, right? Gut health, brain health, emotional health, hormonal health, all of those are pretty much ignored in traditional Western medicine. And when I talk to people like about neck health, for example, and you probably have the same discussion with people about parsley health, we get asked a question like, how is this different than going to my primary care doctor? And you just answer that so eloquently, it's completely different.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  It's wildly different, it's so different.

• 19:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's so different.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  It's so different.

• 19:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, before we started recording and in the endless podcast that Darshan and I have been in conversation for years, you know, we were actually talking about how parsley and necks can work together. And, you know, to me, functional medicine is the foundation. It should be the foundation of your medical care. It should be the way that you look at your body, the way that you treat disease. Again, it's not about not using drugs or not using procedures or, you know, being natural for the sake of natural, it's about incorporating all of these things together. And then you can bonus that and take it to the next level with the types of therapeutics and longevity treatments that NEXT offers, right? And together, that is an amazing way to treat your health.

• 20:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And so I think that what's cool about this moment is that these things, to your point, years ago, I felt like I could have just been this robot or like a video of me explaining what functional medicine is.

• 20:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  And you're right, many of folks listening might be new to functional medicine or might be like, yeah, I kind of know what it is, but I could not describe it to save my life. And that's fair. But I will say there's been a sea change in the past couple of years. And as somebody who routinely is interacting with healthcare executives, insurance company executives, hospital system folks, in the past two years, the level of recognition and acceptance, and I go into meetings expecting to say everything I just said to you, like, what on earth is functional medicine? I've never heard of it. And over and over again, I hear, do you know what functional medicine is? Yeah, I know what it is. And I'm like, all right.

• 21:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Well, that's great.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Cool. Now let's move on and continue this conversation. So it is changing.

• 21:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. I appreciate that what you said about NEXT Health and the longevity treatments because you're absolutely right. And one of the things that I look at whenever I put someone through a longevity protocol is, is your general health in order? Because if your general health from a root cause level is not in order, doing any of the longevity treatments that we have are going to be, number one, ineffective, and you're going to be wasting your time and money. But number two is, you're, you're just, you know, you're just only treating 2% of the problem. The other 98% is really not being addressed. And so we need to get people healthy from a functional root cause level before they start doing things like, you know, plasma exchange or anything else that we offer. Because you need to be in a general state of health before you do some of these additive things.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the two really work together.

• 22:05Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  But I agree with you, there's this foundational piece that is missing where if your doctor isn't looking at what you're eating, they're not looking at how you move, they're not looking at your microbiome health, they're not understanding if you have decent omega-3 fat intake and how that impacts your brain long-term. For example, You're just missing, it's like having blinders on. Yeah. And there's so much we can do and I just see so much transformation over and over again in patients. You know, I have so many, partially for the record for everyone, we, we see men, we see women, we see young, we see old. We are across the country virtually and then we're in person in New York and LA. But you can work, work with us just totally virtually.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And I love that because I hear over and over again, like I live in the boonies. I can't see a functional medicine doctor and I'm like, yes, you can. But you know, I see these stories of transformation and we see a lot of female patients. Women are 80 to 90% of autoimmune disease. They're 80 to 90% of the hormonal imbalances and hormonal conditions, fertility, menopause, PCOS, endometriosis. Women are 70% of GI conditions. And so women are impacted by today's chronic conditions a little bit differently than men, both in their earlier years as well as their later years. And like just this week, I had three different people, women, come to me and be like, you know, my periods are off.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  My doctor doesn't really have anything to say about it. My GYN doesn't know what tests to do. I don't know, am I in perimenopause? Is this just getting older? I'm having trouble getting pregnant. I was told I can't get pregnant because my periods are off and I'm going to have to do IVF, right? And there's a lot of these messages and in all three cases that I heard of this week, when we dug in, these women had a simple blood sugar imbalance, a metabolic imbalance that was imbalancing their female hormones. I like to remind everyone of the pathways. If you didn't do biology or you didn't do hormonal biology, when your blood sugar goes up, insulin goes up. And insulin's the hormone that puts away the blood sugar into the cells. So it doesn't float around your bloodstream and make you sick. When insulin goes up, testosterone goes up.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  And when testosterone goes up, estrogen goes up because testosterone gets converted into estrogen. And that's where we end up with a lot of these hormonal imbalances in women. And all three of these cases, it was really a matter of understanding the ways in which blood sugar was impacting hormones. There was nothing wrong with their hormones. We just needed to address the blood sugar to get everything back on track. And it's these examples of where people are kind of living sick and the conventional medical approach is to say, well, you're just going to have to deal with that. That I think people are waking up to is changing.

• 24:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, no, that's such an important realization because fertility is a perfect example of how this fertility doctor space has exploded in the last decade because people are having a lot of problems having kids. And rarely do I see, you know, they go straight to IVF and medications to improve fertility, et cetera, et cetera. Rarely do I see even a hemoglobin A1C checked or a continuous glucose monitor offered for anyone that is having fertility issues, right?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  It's so rare. And we, I mean, we, I always joke, I'm like, Parsley Health has gotten so many women pregnant, but we really have, we have so many patients, thousands and thousands of patients who've come to us with fertility challenges. And it's a blood sugar issue that no one's detected. It's a thyroid issue that no one's looked at or treated properly. It's inflammation from food allergies that is leading to chronic miscarriage. It's being on the wrong kind of prenatal. There is so much that you can address when it comes to fertility. And just working with functional medicine, working with Parsley for six to 12 months as you're in this journey, trying to get pregnant. One of my patients, she'd

• 26:03Speaker 01

  had in her twenties thyroid cancer. She didn't have a thyroid. She was on thyroid medication. She had PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. So she had irregular periods. Again, she was told she'd never get pregnant without IVF. We helped her kickstart her periods again, regulate her blood sugar, totally get her on track. She has had three children,

• 26:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  amazing.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Three, without intervention, without assistance since working with us at Parsley. Other women we work with, we're there for them in that IVF journey, right? That's not always going to work. And IVF is a beautiful, amazing, important tool. But one of my good friends in New York, who I trained with, and he's a, you know, a big reproductive endocrinologist in New York, he's like, listen, I see this stuff all the time. She comes in and she's got all this underlying health issues. The GYN hasn't even identified it. She doesn't have a PCP because she's been maybe seeing the GYN every couple of years and that's it. She's not doing functional medicine. And my job as an IVF doctor just got a lot harder. Because she's got metabolic dysfunction, thyroid dysfunction, inflammation, gut issues. I'm not going to have a successful IVF cycle as I will

• 27:07Speaker 01

  in somebody who doesn't have these issues. And so he sends them on back to us at Parsley. But, you know, we're there to support that IVF journey as well. But I think a lot of people get the message that it's zero to IVF, like zero to 60.

• 27:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. They skip everything in between.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  They skip everything in between. I'm like, but, but we can, we can help you, you know?

• 27:25Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I mean, for IVF doctors that are listening out there, for patients that are doing IVF, one of the best things that you can do to improve your success rate is pair up with a functional medicine doctor. It will skyrocket your success rates.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And give her a level of support. You know, IVF is, and again, I'm like a huge supporter. It's an amazing tool. We need it. We need more access. But it's tough. You know, it's a lot to go through physically, emotionally, financially, and it can't be our only answer, especially when there's only something like 600 IVF doctors in the entire country. And so we need other ways.

• 28:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely.

• 28:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 28:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 29:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So you know, when you talk to your patients, how do you describe kind of like this shell game people are playing with their doctors now? It's like, you know, you have your primary care, you have your OB-GYN, you should, everyone should be looking at having some sort of functional medicine practitioner in their life as well. How do, how do you have people kind of sort out the number of doctors they need to have in their life?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  I know so many doctors. What do I do with them all? You know, I mean, I think that's where functional medicine can be really powerful because we can act as that quarterback and we can guide you, right? We're going to refer you to specialists, right? If you need a colonoscopy, we're going to make sure you see a great GI doctor. You need to go to your GYN to get your pap smear and your exams. And, you know, primary care, for most people, they end up using a functional medicine doctor as their primary care because the work is so much more in-depth. For our virtual patients, we find, you know, we have patients literally in every state in America today. We find that sometimes they like having a local in-person PCP because they like that touch point. And we're super supportive of that. We love working with PCPs, by the way. We'll share our notes, our records, make sure people have what they need.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  So it doesn't have to be in competition.

• 30:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  But I do think that the goal of our healthcare system should be for you to have fewer doctors, not more doctors.

• 30:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, the way that the system is set up, it's set up for you to be endlessly referred to yet someone else. With long wait times and confusion and what do I do when my rheumatologist and my cardiologist and my PCP don't agree, right? And I think that's, again, no one intends for it to be that way. It's not malicious in any way, but it's how it's working.

• 31:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, that's exactly the, the kind of rigmarole red tape that everyone gets stuck in when they have a medical issue is the endless referrals in circles sometimes. You know, unfortunately, our technology and our system is not, has not advanced to like where everyone else has in medicine, where people are talking to each other. It is so hard to even get records between doctors to communicate and to have, have a mind meld on patients sometimes. So I think what you're referring to, which is what I talk with all my patients about is your health needs to be a team approach, but there needs to be a quarterback on that team. And so that quarterback, such as your functional medicine doctor, understands all these different pieces and how they play together.

• 31:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And before you keep going down this referral pipeline, the quarterback needs to be aware so they can maybe save you a lot of time and wasted energy, right?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And you know, even in my own personal experience, I had, I developed cystic acne in medical school. I hadn't had acne growing up and I was seeing dermatologists. I was having creams and peels and hormonal drugs like spironolactone. I was getting cortisone injections in my zits in my face that left scars. I was going to all these different people. I was spending money out of pocket, right, on getting facials and getting different perspectives. I finally learned and trained myself in functional medicine, figured out that I had developed food sensitivities to wheat and dairy, which I hadn't had growing up, but in periods of a lot of stress, you can actually develop food sensitivities that

• 32:39Speaker 01

  you didn't have in another point in your life. I stopped eating those two foods for four, six weeks. My skin completely cleared up. It's been clear ever since, except when I cheat and I know that this pizza has to be zit-worthy for me to justify it, but like, listen, it's gonna happen. It's cool. And that root cause medicine approach saved me thousands and thousands of dollars.

• 33:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Absolutely.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  All sorts of different doctor's appointments. And the quarterback thing you mentioned is really important, but so is having this perspective of resolving issues from the root.

• 33:18Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right, absolutely. And I think what's incredibly powerful about functional medicine, too, is not only do you solve issues, but the actions you put into place make you feel incredible. Like, you sleep better, your, your skin looks beautiful, you have less brain fog, you can keep weight off. All these side effects of functional medicine are what really lead to an incredible life where you enjoy every day.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. It's, it's amazing. I mean, I always talk about, well, I'm gonna make fun of the longevity movement right now, right? Because I, I love y'all. And, you know, there's all these guys mostly talking about, and sometimes women, too, my, some of my good friends who are like, I wanna live to 120, I wanna live to 150. I think most people, especially women, but everybody, yeah, it would be nice to live to 120, 150. I don't really know what I'm gonna be doing by then, and that's a really long retirement fund, but cool. But I want to look and feel good now.

• 34:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  I want to look and feel good next year. I want to know that I have a path to looking and feeling good 10 years from now.

• 34:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  And what do I do to achieve that? And for me, you know, you mentioned metabolism and weight. I was never a super heavy person, but I, in my twenties, was one of those people who, like many women, experienced just feeling like you're always in the fight of your life to

• 34:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  stay slim.

• 34:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Feeling like, almost like, do I have to starve myself to stay thin? Or like, why is this so hard?

• 34:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  And when I learned functional medicine and I started eating real whole foods, and I went gluten free and got a lot of the refined carbs and sugar. People always ask me, like, is gluten bad for everybody? Well, it's problematic for a lot of people, I'll put it that way. Not everybody, but a lot of people. Also, what is gluten in? It's your cookies, your cakes, your crackers, your packaged foods. It's all of these processed foods that are high sugar altered processed foods that are inflammatory, that spike your blood sugar, that cause you to put weight on. And when I started eating real whole foods, I never had to think about weight again. It just became a non-conversation. And the freedom in my brain to have space to not feel that way was amazing.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Now, I recognize that doesn't work for everyone, and for some people, it's not enough. But it's such an important starting place because it's about our vitality, our metabolism, and our sense that we feel good from the inside out, as opposed to the sense that I think a lot of people live with all the time, that they almost have to like, attack themselves from the outside in.

• 35:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely. You know, in my surgical career, I did a lot of trauma surgery, general surgery, and then I went under reconstructive surgery. And then, like many plastic and reconstructive surgeons, I did some cosmetic surgery. And I did a lot of liposuction, specifically on females. And you'd be so surprised at how, like you said, attack yourself from the outside. Liposuction is on the rise every single year, you know? It keeps going up, keeps going up, more and more people wanting to get liposuction. And it's really, all the people getting liposuction, almost all of the ones that I saw, had zero idea of what they should be eating, they had zero ideas of their hormones.

• 36:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And so when I started getting into longevity and, you know, functional health optimization medicine, I made my blood panel, my pre-surgical blood panel include metabolic markers, hormonal markers, and wow, the things I discovered, like completely hemoglobin A1s and diabetic ranges, inflammatory markers through the roof, and people that are seeking liposuction, and they had no idea. And I almost like worked myself out of a job because once we started addressing those things, they didn't need lipo anymore.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  They're like, I don't need this.

• 36:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  You know, only 8% of people, according to a Nature study from 2020, get preventive screening tests in the United States. And a lot of people, to the exact point you just made, don't know what they have.

• 37:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Zero idea.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I find this whole conversation around, of course, these diseases aren't our fault. However, there's just so much that people don't know, and this information isn't out there, and the preventive testing isn't being done.

• 37:29Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And so people end up spending insane amounts of time and money, even at risk to their own lives, on some of these treatments, without coming from at least the starting place of knowing. And so that's why I think it's on you, it's on me, it's on the medical community at large, to have these conversations. Because I can tell you, you know, I live in New York City, I'm often in LA, back and forth, we're at the clinics, I'm also all across the country, working with different health plans, different patients. I don't care if you're young, or old, or rich, or poor, or north, or south, or east, or west, or super have a lot of letters behind your name, or like not at all. The level of health literacy, what people know about their own bodies, is insanely low.

• 38:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  And that's on us. That's on our, on our education system. It's on our medical system. We only benefit from teaching everyone about how their bodies work. And then empowering them to get testing and basic preventive care. So that, hey, maybe liposuction ends up being a good tool for you. Maybe you had hypothyroidism and just by treating that, you would have lost 60 pounds.

• 38:39Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And I think, you know, I always have this kind of dream scenario for what we should be doing in this country, in the world, really. But, you know, I think every single person needs to get a full set of biomarkers from the age of 25 onwards, every year. You include that in everyone's just general healthcare plan. And a biomarker set that's not your traditional Western medicine, basic biomarker of a chemistry profile on a CBC is on, you know, everyone checks in primary care offices, which is like, to me, it's very minimally useful, right?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Minimally useful.

• 39:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right? If you do that every year, like, the cost of healthcare will come down exponentially because finally people know, you know, what's going on.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  I know. And it's really incredible. You know, we, at Parsley, we work with a large school system in Arizona that offers Parsley's care to their employees. And the school system has its own health plan. Sometimes school system and municipalities sort of essentially have their own version of a health plan, which is great. And they decided to cover our functional labs, our full functional lab panel, which is around 100 essential functional labs for every single one of their employees who wanted to sign up for the program. So that the lab costs would never be prohibited to getting this information. And I am just so blown away about how forward-thinking.

• 39:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's amazing.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And these are schoolteachers, these are janitors. This isn't Google people where, you know, they have so many health benefits, they can't keep track of them all. This is a school system that says that we are drowning in chronic disease costs. Functional medicine is a way to help with this. And covering the cost of the labs is a no-brainer. And that has led, we are, as an organization at Parsley, actually working now with some of the major labs to offer some of this testing nationwide for more affordable prices. As a starting place. Now, data and labs are just a starting place. It's not enough, but it is critical to your point. If we invested a fragment of the $4-plus trillion

• 40:38Speaker 01

  we spend a year on proactive preventive testing and screening and training our primary care population of providers, doctors, nurses, NPs, PAs, in functional medicine, we would save trillions of dollars. We would upend our healthcare system.

• 40:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And if anyone listening has, like, knows anything about how to do that, Parsley Health is the only clinical training program for doctors, nurses, and health coaches that exists. So outside of, you know, lectures and classes that you can take with one of the organizations that, you know, five, you know, nonprofits that train doctors in these things, those, however, aren't clinical training.

• 41:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  We have a clinical training fellowship.

• 41:21Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Amazing.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And we train folks who are coming from primary care and OB-GYN and Peds and all of these different fields. We train them in functional medicine. Right now, I have two health systems that are asking us if we can train their providers in functional medicine.

• 41:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's fantastic.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That is fantastic. And how long is that training program?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  It's a three-month training program. We can do it entirely virtually.

• 41:42Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Incredible.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Now, it never ends because once you're working with us at Parsley, once you're one of our providers, we have grand rounds every Friday, we have lectures, we have office hours with our senior clinicians, we're updating our materials all the time. Four times a year, we have learning and development days where we actually are updating all of our providers on the latest in hormone replacement therapy. We are training. It's like an incredible level of constant learning because this field is on the cutting edge of medicine and you have to stay on top of things. But we can train folks up in our process in a couple months.

• 42:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's amazing. I mean, imagine if every doctor in the country just had this three-month virtual course. It would completely change the approach to healthcare in the world, in the United States and everywhere.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:24Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And, you know, I don't think any doctor goes into becoming a doctor thinking, "Oh, I can't wait to, you know, treat thousands of people with advanced chronic disease." You know, I think, you know, in reality, most doctors want to see people get well, right? And, and I really feel like the system is just so weighted towards doctors learning how to treat advanced chronic disease and not keeping people well. And so just something like this, as simple as this, if you're a primary care doctor out there listening, this is an amazing training program that could really shift your entire methodology in just three months.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  It can be game changing. Today, for everyone, we don't offer it to the general public. We offer it to folks that were hiring and training to work with us at Parsley, but we are considering changing that because, as I mentioned, a couple of health systems have asked if we can help train their providers, which is really exciting.

• 43:17Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I think that'd be a massive, massive solid you do for the entire country. If, if people could actually get this training.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  I'm like, that's not actually what Parsley Health does. We're not like a doctor training program. But we like, you know what I mean? Maybe it is now, right?

• 43:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You have a course at one commune as well, right?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I do.

• 43:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Is it a functional health course?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have on one commune, I have a course called Mentally Well.

• 43:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Which is all about the connections between our physical health and our mental health. So many people are suffering from anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, insomnia, and these conditions are driven not by your mental state, but actually by your physical state. And my book is called State Change, and it's all about how do we actually change our mental state through our physical state? And that it, then we talk a lot, actually, in the State Change book, you can buy it and like rip out the page in the back and bring it to your primary care doctor.

• 44:12Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Love that.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I list all the tests that you should get because there is so much that people don't test for. I cannot tell you how many women are put on Zoloft or Prozac who have an untested for an untreated thyroid condition. Drives me up the wall.

• 44:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Amazing.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  And they're told they're depressed and gaining weight and that it's all in their heads and it's not in their heads. Blood sugar imbalances can cause depression, inflammation from undiagnosed autoimmune disease. There are nutrient deficiencies, iron deficiency, B12 deficiencies, genetic variants like MTHFR, which can impact the ways in which you make dopamine and epinephrine and norepinephrine, right? Serotonin. And so by addressing these things, we have huge outcomes. I had a patient who was suffering from brain fog for years. And as I mentioned earlier, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is the overgrowth of certain types of bad bacteria in your gut, can actually cause brain fog. So if you're out there and you're like, yeah, right after I eat, I'm super bloated

• 45:11Speaker 01

  and I have this reflux and I'm burping and I get this horrible brain fog after I eat, that could be SIBO. Just by treating her SIBO, her brain fog went away.

• 45:20Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  And she had been on stimulant medications,

• 45:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ugh.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  which are addictive in some cases, habit forming for many others. I know the industry claims that the stimulant medications are not habit forming or addictive. I can tell you in clinical practice, I observe otherwise all the time. And the reality is, we were able to totally resolve her brain fog through treating her gut.

• 45:44Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Incredible. Yeah. And see, this is not even considered. When you go to a psychiatrist, they're just there to diagnose which pill is going to work the best for you, you know? And it's unfortunately, when it's happening inside of your body and you're seeing a specialist that's only meant to understand one part of your, one part of your body and not the other parts, it's really hard for them to ever bring this together.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's amazing what you shared earlier that you were doing this extensive lab work on your liposuction patients. Because just like psychiatrists who, who did go to medical school, I remember they were there, next to me in training, you know, could be ordering these tests. It's not how they're trained. And so they don't.

• 46:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And surgeons, you know, we've so subspecialized medicine.

• 46:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  That we're missing the forest for the trees.

• 46:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. You're right. So like what happens, you know, in my psychiatry residency, you would see people all the time, and you did this as well, in your training program where people would come in and they're basically there to get diagnosed based on the criteria and what medication would fit that diagnosis. And so you never see anyone check hormone levels, right? And a psychiatrist usually never checks those at all. Because there's an assumption that the primary care doctor that had referred you to the psychiatrist had done that, right?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Ruled out all the other causes, we call it in medicine, right? And this is the trap of Western medicine is there's so many disjointed physicians working to solve the symptoms of a problem versus actually a quarterback there to understand and look at the body as a whole. And so that's where functional medicine really fits that picture well. Yeah, I love that. So let's go to the topic of women and some of the struggles that women face in their healthcare journey specifically, because you know, I think that functional medicine is uniquely suited to help women through transition phases in their life. And you and I had a conversation about this before.

• 47:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  So I'd love for you to just kind of talk to us about the transitions that women go through and how functional medicine can help them through these transitions.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  You know, women have a very different health journey than men. And it's not good or bad, it just is. And 86% or so of women in the US will have a baby by the end of her childbearing years. So most go through pregnancy. 100% of women will go through menopause. And these two major life changes and major life experiences have huge impact on the long-term trajectory of women's health. And we sort of ignore that, right? But it's a really big deal. And in pregnancy, you're growing a baby, pulls the omega-3 fats out of your body and gives them to baby. It has implications for your bone density. Women start losing bone density around this time.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  It has implications for your metabolism and long-term metabolic health. And then on the other side, women sort of have a period of time and then they go into menopause where again, the hormonal changes of menopause, the drop off of progesterone and estrogen, and for many women also testosterone, have huge implications for increasing rates of dementia long-term, which is why women have higher rates of Alzheimer's than men. For bone health, women have Much higher rates of osteoporosis than men for diabetes and heart disease, which skyrocket for women after menopause. So my perspective is we can't put our heads in the sand. We have to recognize these two major life phases and the impact we have on women. And we have to get ahead of it because right now something really interesting and cool is happening

• 49:18Speaker 01

  in American health and healthcare, which is that we figured out that we had read the data wrong and hormone replacement therapy is not only largely safe for most women, it is highly protective of cancer, heart disease, dementia, all the things, osteoporosis, all the things we said it was bad for. Turns out to be, again, this doesn't apply to 100% of people, but most women largely really beneficial. And so we're seeing increased access for hormone replacement therapy and increased conversation around it. And that's awesome. And we prescribe HRT all the time at Parsley. We prescribe synthetic, we prescribe bioidenticals, we personalize it to you. It's awesome. And HRT is not the only answer.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  And a lot of women are sort of being told that just wait for menopause and go on HRT. And that's not going to cut it because HRT is not going to build your bones. HRT is not going to build your muscles. HRT is not going to rehabilitate your brain after all of these hormonal changes. And so for me, I'm a mom of three kids. I had all three of my kids after 35. I'm shocked and amazed all the time, people, that I had three children. I thought I'd have like one kid at 42. And when I woke up at 40 and had three, I was like, whose life is this? Like, I don't like, I'm abducted by aliens. Like, this is crazy. But it's awesome. And what I recognized as I was going through my fertility journey was that I did have a lot of tools from functional medicine to approach fertility in a proactive way,

• 50:46Speaker 01

  which I did. And I thankfully, you know, as a result, didn't end up needing IVF or other treatments. I was able to conceive naturally, which to me was a huge gift. And then I also realized that I didn't really have a protocol or a plan on the other side of having babies. So much of our energy as women in our twenties and thirties goes into, you know, again, if you're looking to have kids, well, not everybody is, but most are. And if you're looking to have kids, well, how am I going to get pregnant? And how's that pregnancy going to go? And then afterwards, like, what do you do? Just, and one of my good friends became a patient a couple of years ago, and she said to me, you know, she just had her last kid, she was done with the fertility journey. For her, that had been an IVF journey, had been really arduous. And she said, well, what

• 51:28Speaker 01

  do I do now? Just like, sit around and wait for menopause? And it just like, hit me on the head that we needed a protocol, we needed an approach for women to get healthy, look good and feel good today, and look good and feel good in the decades to come.

• 51:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah. What's the name of that protocol?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it's called brains, bones, and booty.

• 51:46Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love that.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Brains, bones, and booty. So whether you're still in your fertility journey, whether you're in that, you know, no woman's land between kids and menopause, whether you're on the other side of menopause, whether you haven't even gotten to your fertility journey yet, you know, women start losing 1% of their bone mass every year when they turn 25. So it is never too early to begin. So it's about building up your bones, but taking the right nutrients and minerals, by making sure that you're doing hormone testing and understanding. Sometimes women go through estrogen depletion really early in their life cycle, much earlier than menopause. And when estrogen depletes, our bones start to fall apart, right? It's about doing weight-bearing exercise and impact exercise. I hate to

• 52:30Speaker 01

  say it, but nothing you put in your mouth will build bone.

• 52:33Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  It will, those things will create the conditions such that bone can be built. Really important. You need your substrate, right? You need your raw ingredients for the recipe. But the only thing that's going to make bake that cake is getting in the gym and doing weight training and, you know, rebound or trampoline, impact, running, things that create that impact and allow your bones to get the signal to build bone, right? Our osteoblasts that we learned about in med school, because I know my nerd friend over here will appreciate that. And so it's all about bones, and then it's also The brain part, you know, a lot of the healthy fats that we need, our brain is largely made of fat and our brain is running on some of these critical nutrients like B vitamins. We're not getting some of these things in our diet.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  And so making sure that we're repleting those things, especially during and after pregnancy, leaning up into menopause, doing exercise, exercise is the, one of the best ways we build our brain, treat your brain like it's your bicep, right? You gotta build it up too. Commuting and social life is critical to maintaining our brain health, working and staying engaged, right? And then booty is really about our muscles and our metabolic health. And with, again, 98 million Americans having prediabetes and almost 40 million having diabetes, we are all living in a state of poor metabolic health. Women during pregnancy, I see this all the time and it rarely gets flagged, you kind of, even if you do your best to stay active, you lose a massive amount of muscle mass in pregnancy.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  You know, I was never, let's be honest, look at me people, I was not an athlete. But, I was a nerd, I was not an athlete. But, I played enough sports, I moved around enough, right? There's just sort of like your life as a younger person, you have a certain amount of lean muscle mass. And in pregnancy, I completely lost my core. After three kids, I had horrible diastasis, I did not have any core strength, I lost a lot of that lean muscle mass in my, you know, quads and glutes and hamstrings and the big muscle groups, my back. And what happens is women are pregnant one, two, three or more times, like I was, and they never go back and rebuild that muscle. And so they are in a total deficit in their 40s and 50s, leaning into menopause and beyond,

• 54:47Speaker 01

  and so that sets them up for dementia, it sets them up for diabetes, it sets them up for weight gain. So, eating adequate amount of protein, either 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of body weight a day, doing weight training, I've just gotten into this this year people, I hate the gym. I'm like a yoga chickie, like I'm, I, you know, like, I'm being slow and calm. But building lean muscle mass, it's now or never, right? And that's, I don't mean to say never, you can build lean muscle mass in your 60s and 70s. It's well studied that you can do it. It's just harder. And if you're looking for longevity, if you're looking to feel and look good, if you're looking to have a less symptomatic menopause,

• 55:28Speaker 01

  building that lean muscle and metabolic health, that booty now is so powerful. So I do Pilates once a week. I always thought Pilates was super boring. I started it about a year ago. It's completely changed my body. I realized that it's not as stupid as I thought. Sorry, Pilates people. And my Pilates teacher, Annie, and I, every week now, this year is 2025, we say that it's the year of the booty for me. So I know it's like the year of the snake or the swan or something and like someone else, for me, it's the year of the booty.

• 55:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love that. That's such a great protocol. And you're right, like after having children, I think a lot of women, they go headfirst into this like raising kids journey, you know? And they tend to ignore their own physical and emotional needs. And it's so important, like your book, to pick it up and read it and really focus on that time between having children and being done having children and menopause, because that's where you're going to build all the resilience that you need for what happens after menopause, right?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And if you're listening to this and you're 55 or 65 or even 75 and you're like, well, I didn't have that roadmap, it is not too late. Start now. Brains, bones and booty applies at any time of life. But to your point, especially, I think women are not given a roadmap to what to do with their health. And this is again, back to our earlier conversation, a little bit of the travesty of oftentimes I see women, they don't, they don't have a functional medicine doctor, they don't even have a PCP.

• 56:54Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  They're seeing their GYN every couple of years because in many ways, we've reduced women's health to reproductive health.

• 57:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And your reproductive capability is critical and important, but it's not all of you.

• 57:04Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And my OB-GYN friends will tell you straight up, I'm not a primary care doctor. I'm not here to worry about your metabolic health and your autoimmune disease and your mental health. And I'll try to like get to those things if I can, but I'm just going to refer you out for most of that stuff. And it's not fair to them, they are specialists in what they do, which is critical and important, to ask them to do all these other things that they're neither trained nor reimbursed to do. And so we end up in this world where women don't really have anyone looking at them as a whole person. And then they don't even go to a doctor for 10 years after they have kids. And all of this is happening. And when you turn 50, right, your cancer risk goes up, your heart disease risk goes up. There is so much happening in your body around this time. And then menopause essentially adds fuel to that fire.

• 57:50Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, that whole statement you just made about not seeing a doctor in 10 years. I just think about, one of the first questions I ask any new patient is, when was the last time you saw a doctor? And I would say almost 85% plus, men and women, say, I haven't seen a doctor in years. You know, I mean, the most, the most a woman has seen a doctor is OB-GYNs for either a checkup, you know, which is just very focused on reproductive organs, as you said, or people have been to an urgent care as their primary care doctor. And it's just, and I think that happens because people have lost faith or trust in the medical system. And they're also fearful of what they're going to get diagnosed with too, you know? And so, right? And I think that there needs to be a massive perspective change.

• 58:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And, oh, the third thing is too, they go to their doctor with a perspective change. Maybe they hear a podcast like this and that doctor completely negates everything that we're talking about.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I know. And that is so heartbreaking because I think a lot of people do seek help. And you see this with women. Women often are dismissed or ignored at the doctor's office.

• 58:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Or gaslit.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  And they really have to advocate for themselves. And that's hard to do. You know, I get it, man. I'm a mom of three, I'm a doctor, I'm running a company. Like, it's hard to make time for myself. It's hard to make time for my health. And it can be scary, right? Because you're like, huh, I'm going to get information maybe I don't want. But to do that and to get over all of that, to go to a doctor and then have them tell you, pat on the head, you're fine, or you don't need all these tests, why do you need them? That is heartbreaking.

• 59:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It is.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  And a huge number of women are, have symptoms and not a diagnosis, or have the wrong diagnosis, or feel like when they've gone to the doctor, they haven't been listened to.

• 59:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Or had anyone be interested in a diagnosis. And that really has to change. And I think that takes everyone listening to this. You do have to be an advocate for your own health.

• 59:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  And if you feel dismissed or unheard, or like the person's not listening to you, go find someone else.

• 59:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh. Yeah, no, it's absolutely necessary. And, you know, it reminds me, just last week, I did an interview with a reporter on, you know, we're doing Inex Health. And one of the things we talked about was hormone replacement therapy. And she said to me, she's 55-ish, I think, said, oh, I mean, I would never do hormone replacement therapy. I said, well, why would you not consider it? Wasn't it dangerous? Doesn't it give you breast cancer? And this is a health reporter that's been talking to many people in the health field, I assume, during the course of her career.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And she still has this perspective. So there's still massive educational hurdles that we have to get over in the system as a whole.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a huge lag.

• 1:00:36Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  In our healthcare system and the medical system's understanding of these things. However, it is catching up. And I do think that there is a new generation of doctors, PCPs, OB-GYNs, you know, you name it, who understand

• 1:00:51Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  the harm that was caused by misreading this data and leading so many women not to use hormone replacement therapy. It's, you know, it's a travesty, but it's being corrected. I just saw a new study came out that said, you know, the current guidelines say, okay, you need to, you can, HRT is actually largely safe and protective. You know, not for certain women with a history of breast cancer and so forth, but the majority, it can be. And, but start it within 10 years of menopause. And if you hit that magic 10-year mark, game over, you're out. It can't be started safely. And now that's being questioned as well. And I just saw this paper come out that says that actually, as late as, you know, 79 years old, you can be starting hormone replacement therapy. Now with that,

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  You need to be doing the right preventive testing. You need to be looking at heart health. You need to be looking at cancer risk, right? You can't do that in a vacuum. And this is one thing I am seeing right now that I think is both good and bad, which is there's a lot of services online right now that will give you hormones and prescribe you HRT. And on the one hand, I'm like, this is awesome. It's access. It's getting it to all these people that, you know, whose doctors are sitting there saying, I don't know anything about this. Because I will tell you, I prescribe HRT quite a bit in my practice and at Parsley. And our providers do as well. And we have protocols on it. We have trainings. The information is changing a lot. What is good HRT? What is the right way to prescribe HRT? It's not a locked and loaded science, everyone.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  It is, it is evolving in real time. Everyone is staying on top of it, but that takes a lot of energy and work. So that means there's a lot of providers out there who will say, you know, here's a Vavel and some oral progesterone and call it a day because they don't know what else to do.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  But what I'm seeing with these online services that are providing hormones and not doing testing and not looking at the whole health of the patient is a lot of women are getting the wrong types of prescriptions. And there's a balance here, I think, between yes, we want access. And hey, wait a minute. We need to do this in a high quality way and not just be selling hormones on the internet.

• 1:02:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I completely agree with you. And it's going to become a big problem, I think. And it might unfortunately take us another step back. If you're giving hormones solely for that one, just using hormones as your only modality as, you know, one of these online services, right? Because as we know, your hormones interact with everything else going on in your body, right? And there's, there is a high risk of doing hormones that for people, for certain people. And so really not doing a full risk evaluation, not understanding the metabolic health of the person, other things going on with, with the person's biology and just slinging hormones to people over the internet with not so much as a questionnaire. I think it's going to cause a lot of problems in the long term.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that, you know, that balance has got. Off in other areas of health, right? We've watched it over the past decade. And, you know, there was the wave of the mental health companies prescribing stimulants on the internet. And that was, I will tell you, I thought that was a bad idea from the beginning and it turned out to be so. But like, you know, again, we're balancing access, but also maintaining quality of care.

• 1:04:08Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  And I say this to women all the time. Your hormones are one aspect of your health, but you are not your hormones.

• 1:04:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  You are so much more than your hormones. And so if you're seeing a doctor or using the service that reduces you to just your hormones, there is going to be a lot to that picture that's missing. And that's where things can get problematic.

• 1:04:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I think a similar story is playing out with the GLP ones, where there are many services offering them online without any insight into the overall status of the patient.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:37Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Their hormones, their, you know, what's, there's so many things that go into this. Their gut health, for example, that are not being taken into account. And that's why, you know, at the worst, people will regain their weight when they stop or they have no off ramp off of these. But, you know, even before that, I think that people just end up relying on these GLP ones to achieve a certain weight and then maintain it forever. And then they end up losing muscle mass, they end up losing some of their brain health over time. And I think we're going to see the long-term consequences of just pure appetite control without any thought about addressing micronutrient deficiencies, central fatty acid deficiencies, et cetera.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  I, I a hundred percent agree. I, I met someone recently and they were like getting a GLP one from one service online and hormone replacement therapy from another service online. And then they were also, what was the third thing that they were getting? Oh, migraine medication from another service online.

• 1:05:32Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  And I'm like, this is wild. Like you don't have any of, none of these services. These are all prescription services, but none of them are actually looking at your health, doing testing or connecting the dots between your appetite, your hormones, your migraines, your heart health and everything else about you.

• 1:05:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And the same person didn't have a PCP, let alone a functional medicine doctor. And I think that, you know, there are real consequences to this in terms of important things getting missed and also overall health kind of falling apart because a lot of these medications are good for a while, but not forever.

• 1:06:09Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, absolutely. It's so true.

• 1:06:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 1:07:00Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 1:07:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 1:07:58Dr. Darshan Shah?

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• 1:08:06Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You know, the other thing I get concerned about specifically for in women's health is I don't feel enough people are talking about the rising rate of heart disease in women as well. It seems to be a very male focused disease. And I wonder, you know, what your perspective is on that.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, heart disease really is equally in women as in men. It's been growing in women. And it's highly linked to metabolic health. So the story of losing our lean muscle mass, eating an ultra processed diet, which is 75% of American calories today, you know, not counteracting or addressing your brains, bones and booty, then in your 50s and 60s and beyond, sometimes earlier years, or early as your 40s, is leading to heart disease. Heart disease shows up in women differently. That classic, you know, crushing pain, elephant on your chest, or nausea, or pain radiating down the left arm. Those types of symptoms are more classically male versions of heart attacks. Heart attacks can show up in all sorts of ways. Although,

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  again, I'd argue here, and I think the point of this conversation is like, by the time you've had a heart attack, we are so far down the road of heart disease that started 20, 30, 40 years ago.

• 1:09:15Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  And this is where, you know, we'll pay $300,000 for a cabbage, a surgery to tie a vein from your leg around your heart, but we won't pay $400 for proactive preventive testing.

• 1:09:26Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  That would show that you were on your way to heart disease 20 years earlier. We've really, our healthcare system is upside down. But in that for women, you know, menopause, pregnancy, these major life phases that impact all of our overall health, is impacting our cardiovascular health, too. And you're right, fewer, women are less likely to have their cholesterol and their heart health tested. Women are less likely to have a calcium score. Women are less likely to really just get proactive preventive care around cardiovascular disease. And yet, this is equally, if not more so, a problem in women as in men.

• 1:10:03Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, exactly. And so I want to highlight that because I think the women listening to this conversation should not only address their hormones, they should not only address all the female centric things that we're talking about, but also they need to address their brain health, their heart health, just as much as men do.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, hormones are not the end of the story, everyone.

• 1:10:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly, right. And I think that's a big point that you make in your book, too. It's like, it's hormones and what's next, right?

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 1:10:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Do you see children at Parsley?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Oh, great question. So I, we do, uh, we do see kids on request for our members. So if you are a parent who is working with us at Parsley, um, we have amazing family medicine providers, trained in functional medicine, who will also see kids basically on request. We don't currently have a pediatric service on its own. I'd love to, I would love to, you know, I, at one point, brought my daughter to one of our functional docs at Parsley because she was having GI issues as like a three-year-old that her regular, her fabulous Mount Sinai pediatrician is great in New York, couldn't figure it out, wanted her to see a GI. I'm like, I'm not taking my three-year-old to a GI. She just had a microbiome imbalance and it's really hard for anyone who's out there, who's a doctor and a parent, like are us two here.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I don't like being my kid's doctor. It's, it's hard sometimes. I do a lot, but then there's like a limit. Most recently, I actually brought my son to a functional pediatrician because I needed another perspective on what test to order. We just diagnosed him with an egg allergy that's been causing congestion and rashes. And we're actually now embarking on going to see a functional dentist to look at airway medicine and mouth breathing, which is something that he suffers from. And I think that we are vastly missing a functional medicine perspective in pediatrics, but there are not very many functional peds.

• 1:11:57Dr. Darshan Shah?

  That's why I asked you that question because I feel like also the children of, the children in the United States, probably all over the world in Western society, are experiencing more and more of the same problems at an early and earlier age that we see now in our, in our clinical practices with adults, right? And so things like GI imbalances, which, I mean, I remember growing up, no one had an allergy. No one had a peanut allergy or egg allergy.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the modern medicine, medical community created the peanut allergies, right? That, that, that is, there's a great Wall Street Journal article about this, about how literally the response by the, you know, American College of Pediatrics essentially was to tell everyone to stop eating peanuts. And that created allergies for millions of kids.

• 1:12:45Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It was based on like a few case reports of peanut allergies that were published. And then everyone stopped eating peanuts and then it became a massive problem.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Massive problem, yeah.

• 1:12:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right. And it took them 20 years to unwind that recommendation.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  There's this really funny image of like with each of my kids when they're like, you know, a few months old. I like sit them on the kitchen counter with a jar of peanut butter. And first I like wipe it on their arm and then I'm like watching. I've got my stethoscope, like listening and then I'm like, okay. And then I'm like, all right. And then like half an hour later, I put like a little bit in their mouth and then I'm like, listening, watching, listening, watching. And then I'm like, okay, it's peanut time.

• 1:13:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You have the happy bed right there.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  I have a whole process, people. I'm like a crazy person, but. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's massive amounts of allergies. There are gut dysbiosis issues. You know, we did gut health testing on my son. He's got dysbiosis. He, and we eat like we're eating a very parsley health approved diet, right? But these things can happen and the egg sensitivity and allergy was a huge aha moment for us. Because eggs are a superfood and we eat a lot of eggs in the house. And learning that he's got this egg sensitivity has been really a powerful step forward in his health. But I've been doing functional medicine testing for my kids, you know, either on my own or,

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  you know, sometimes when things get a little bit more complex, I want the functional medicine pediatrician to weigh in because adults and kids are not the same. And interpreting the tests for children is a little bit different than interpreting the tests for adults. And I'm, I'm not a pediatrician. I'm adult medicine. So it's been really helpful for me even to have this outside perspective.

• 1:14:27Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I agree. I'm, you know, as much as I want to treat my own kids and get them tested. I do know that it's a whole different world with children as far as what their test results show and.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  And by the way, I didn't bring my son to parsley mainly because I was like, you know what? I don't need my poor, like my team to be stuck seeing like my kid. I was like, you know what? I'll, I'll like spare them.

• 1:14:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. What do you think about the rising rate of obesity in children as well?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a symptom of everything we've talked about. It's a symptom of a diet of ultra-processed foods, of eating 60 pounds of added sugar a year, of sedentary lifestyles, a lot of gym programs and athletic programs around the country get cut, right, or considered disposable. And these kids are suffering, what I see and we see in the kids that we see at Parsley, is that the kids are suffering from the same stuff as the adults. It's food sensitivities, it's dysbiosis, it's, you know, really improper diet, it's lack of physical activity, and these things are massively impacting children.

• 1:15:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Lack of sleep as well.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  And poor sleep. I've become fascinated around this whole airway medicine movement. I'm not a dentist or an airway specialist, but the book Breathe is really incredible.

• 1:15:40Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love that book, yep.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  And we are, you know, seeing a lot of kids who are mouth breathing and then have exhaustion, have behavioral issues as a result of it. So I think that like we're starting to see how the ways in which we've lived our lives for the past 50 years are really starting to catch up. And you said earlier, I think that everyone should start getting these proactive, you know, functional tests at 25. I think it's 15.

• 1:16:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Because 15-year-olds and high school kids are living now with metabolic syndrome and hormone imbalances and inflammation that if we could catch it that early, imagine the trajectory of their lives.

• 1:16:19Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about the airway medicine piece that you were just mentioning, because I think a lot of people have questions about that. So, book by James Nestor called Breathe, highlights the fact that because our diets have changed so much, our airways have become smaller over time and over, as we, just going through evolution, but also going through just from childhood onwards into adulthood, not having food that is real has caused our jaws to become weaker and make our airways smaller. Is that kind of what you're referring to?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. All of this processed food. I mean, if you think about like these bars and these cereals and everything, we're kind of always eating mush.

• 1:16:59Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  And the book is really elucidating the fact that without like, you know, basically like sticks and brambles and meat and things to really chew on, our palates, the roof of our mouths, get higher and narrower and compromise our airway and compromise people's ability to breathe well. And then when you are mouth breathing at night when you sleep as opposed to nasal breathing, you oxygenate your brain poorly, you don't get as deep asleep. It's basically sleep apnea for kids or for people with narrow airways. That is a different kind of sleep apnea than the sleep apnea we typically observe with somebody who's overweight or somebody who's drinking alcohol, right? But the end result is the same.

• 1:17:41Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of people and children who are suffering from this. And there are some good therapies out there, like myofunctional therapy is a way of teaching kids to do mouth exercises that makes their mouths stronger so that they can learn to breathe through their nose. But that's increasingly being accompanied by this whole practice of airway dentistry, where folks are actually doing palate expansion and looking at the mouth from that perspective in addition to doing these myofunctional exercises. And I will say, like, I hope that the field of ENT catches on because that, talk about, if we are behind the times in hormone replacement therapy in women's health, wow, all my friends

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  who went into ENT for med school, I love you, but, you know, sinus surgeries are largely unnecessary.

• 1:18:30Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  And you got to figure out the root cause of all of this inflammation. Rarely, rarely is it structural.

• 1:18:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Sure.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Sometimes it is, but rarely is it structural. And so I see these people get these sinusectomies and they're totally worthless. And then they need another procedure and people are doing revisions.

• 1:18:48Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  And it's because they're not addressing the root cause of the congestion.

• 1:18:52Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. Yeah, it's ENT definitely.

• 1:18:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Needs to rethink from a root cause level of all the procedures that are doing.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Well, they don't have the training, right? I mean, I don't know of, you know, in our world, any of functional ENTs. But if you're out there, you know, please like let us know at Parsley Health. We're happy to refer to you. We're looking for you. We love you. If we can train you in functional medicine, help you out, it will change your practice. Right? Um, there's certainly a place for some of these procedures, but not at the level that we're doing them.

• 1:19:23Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right, right. Wow, this has been such a great conversation. We covered a gavitt from women's health to children to hormone health. I love it.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  Liposuction.

• 1:19:35Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Exactly. But I think, you know, if I could just put a broad stroke, kind of summary to everything, it really takes a rethinking of how we are approaching our health. And I think this root cause functional approach is definitely the, it's a clinchpin in like re-changing your health journey. And I hope more people understand where to find a functional medicine practitioner through Parsley, which you offer. Do you offer a remote in 50 states or 50 states? That's fantastic. Um, there's a website called ifm.org that you can try to find someone in your local community. How else can people find functional medicine practitioners?

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  You know, I think you named the two best ways. I mean, Parsley is the largest and most established functional medicine clinic in the country, offering care virtually as well as in person, like I said, in New York and LA. But you don't have to come in person at all, people. You can just do it all online. There's other functional groups around the country and locally in your community. And the Institute for Functional Medicine, IFM, has a directory as well. And I think that what I'm seeing is that there's more and more and more providers training in this, learning this. You know, I basically fell in my chair this year when this big health system came to us and said, we want to open a functional medicine clinic with you and partner with you. Because they said, this is a hospital, everyone. This is not a functional medicine leaning organization, let's just say.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  But they have seen such demand from their community for this kind of care. And they're really excited about offering it. Again, I think we've seen a real sea change in the past couple of years, but it is easier and easier to find these services online. There's lots of services offering testing, some of it functional, some of it more basic. But you can get testing. Parsley Health now offers programs that include the testing. And, you know, that's a good starting place. But again, plug for you also need the functional care.

• 1:21:28Dr. Darshan Shah?

  You do.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  You need somebody who's gonna, you know, connect the dots. You should not have to chat GPT your own health.

• 1:21:34Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  And you should be able to have someone really put the pieces together for you and put you on a treatment protocol, because that will change the trajectory of your health for life.

• 1:21:43Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I agree. I agree. And if someone has had functional testing does elsewhere, say from, you know, mail order tests or they got something on the internet, can they bring them to personally?

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:21:53Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And have them interpreted?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  We have people bring us their tests all the time.

• 1:21:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Same.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Um, all the time. So if you've already done some amount of testing, we may say to you, hey, you did that six months or a year ago. It's, you know, we'd like to get something more recent. But we'll always take what you have and look at it and use that as a starting place. And then, especially if it's recent testing, and then if you want to just go with us from there, that's fine.

• 1:22:14Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I love it that the testing is becoming more available and more people are getting it. But I agree with you that you really need someone that's gonna look at you from a whole body perspective to interpret the testing. I see a lot of people that are trying to DIY it, like with chat GPT, and they're focused on one biomarker and improving that one biomarker.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this happened the other day with like my best friend. She's like, my testosterone is a little bit high. And she's like looking stuff up and it wasn't about the testo- total testosterone was slightly elevated. Her free testosterone was totally normal. All of her other sex hormones were totally normal. I'm like, you're not in perimenopause, but your blood sugar is slightly off and you have high ApoB. And so what I'm seeing is what I call a touch of the PCOS.

• 1:22:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yes.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  And this is what we're gonna do to address it. I'm not gonna touch your hormones.

• 1:23:01Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Right.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  I'm gonna address your blood sugar and your heart health through diet, through exercise, through one supplement, not 50 people. And through helping you understand how your body works.

• 1:23:13Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  And that was everything. So you're right, people are getting a little lost or they're ending up on like 16 supplements to address every biomarker, which is silly.

• 1:23:22Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  I think if you're on 15 supplements, it's probably too many. Now, sometimes you might be treating SIBO, or you might be treating a specific thing for a period of time. And if it's two, three months or something, there might be a reason for that. But, and by the way, supplements are powerful tools. They can be really helpful and I take a bunch of supplements every day. But I do see people on who've like, like Google Chat GPT'd themselves into a supplement. Like maze and they're, they're like trapped and they're like, help me.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  We're like, okay, let's wind it back. Let's get you out of here.

• 1:23:56Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Yeah, I see that all the time because you know, a lot of these services, they'll give you a biomarker. They're gonna say, these are the supplements that approve that biomarker. Then by the time you get through all the biomarkers that are even slightly off.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Dr. Darshan Shah?

  And not correlated with anything else, you have a list of 25 supplements you need to be on.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 1:24:11Dr. Darshan Shah?

  It's crazy, but I think, you know, there's, like you said, there's certain supplements that everyone should be considering as part of just a base program. But no one needs to be on 15 different supplements.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, get your magnesium glycinate, get your omega threes, get your vitamin D3 K2, get your methylated B vitamins, right? There's some core things that I won't say all, but most people benefit from. But from there, you know, reel it in and instead of treating every biomarker with a different supplement, find the root cause. Shift the body's ecosystem and then end up in better health, looking good, feeling good. And only needing a couple of supplements instead of 15.

• 1:24:49Dr. Darshan Shah?

  I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Robin, for joining us today. I really appreciate you doing this. Would you like telling everybody where they can find you, where they can find Parsley and the name of your book again?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my website is robinberzinmd.com and you can sign up for my free newsletter there. You can also follow me on the gram and so forth on robinbersenmd and then parsleyhealth.com. We also have an amazing newsletter at Parsley. Follow us on social. You can do a free 15 minute consult call with Parsley if you're looking to learn more and just understand if the program might be right for you. My book is called State Change. It's available all the places you can buy books, apparently. And it's all about that connection between our physical health and our mental health. And this has been awesome. It's so great to see you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:25:31Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Oh, I can't wait to have you on again and thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it.

• 1:25:38Dr. Darshan Shah?

  Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you liked this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance.