How The Male and Female Hearts Differ, and How This Impacts Men’s and Women’s Health Care

What Is the Difference Between Male and Female Health? Which Hormones Matter & How?

Recently I was delighted to have Dr. Felice Gersh as a guest on my podcast. She is an integrative gynecologist who has been working in the field of women’s health care to help women deal with issues such as PCOS; offering holistic women’s healthcare. Having graduated with the Fellowship in Integrated Medicine from the University of Arizona, she was one of the first dual board-certified integrative gynecologists in the country.  It was an enlightening and fascinating conversation about male and female health and hormones, how these differ, and the impacts of their dysregulation.

Why women’s health care deserves more attention than it gets.

Dr. Gersh shared a personal story with me about her own health. When she was in medical school she had irregular periods and then had two years where they disappeared completely. When she approached her OB-GYN head of the department about her female health issues, she was just recommended some birth control pills. When these did not agree with her, she was forced to self-diagnose and found that she had PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome. She now helps other women find holistic solutions for this and other health issues.

A lot of the time, doctors in more senior positions tend to become preoccupied with organizational, administrative, and even political issues. As a result of this, the most recent developments in medicine are sometimes overlooked. According to Dr. Gersh, she finds that some doctors still follow protocols from 20-25 years ago overlooking the new research and findings. She refers to the term ‘doctors’ orders’ and why this is not how medicine should work. Doctors have to work with patients to find holistic and lasting solutions rather than simply following routines that often do not attempt to get to the root of women’s healthcare issues.

For instance, pregnancy is the ultimate stress test for the female body and the healthcare industry isn’t trying hard enough to find out why so many women are failing this stress test. So clearly there is a case for finding more holistic solutions, as we discuss in my podcast. We also discuss how men’s and women’s hearts are different, and how estrogen is so vital to women’s heart health.

Endocrine disruptors and their impact on health.

Among the many health issues we discuss in the podcast, Dr. Gersh and I talk at length about the impacts of endocrine disruptors on the health of women as well as men. Surrounded as we are by all sorts of chemicals, our exposure to substances that interfere with the body’s hormone production has never been higher. We are talking about ingredients such as bisphenol A or BPA, dioxins, PFAS, phthalates and so on that are found in so many of the products we use. According to Dr. Gersh, a poor diet and nutritional deficiencies together cause inflammation and hormone deficiencies in many of us. This is the reason for so much metabolic dysfunction; causing the kind of inflammation that underlies so many of the chronic diseases we see around us.

One of the problems she speaks about is gynecomastia, something colloquially referred to as “man-boobs.” She explains how the production of androgens from the adrenal gland, and the production of estrogen, which the male body also produces naturally, contribute to this issue. Again this has to do with inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. Tune in to my latest episode with Dr. Felice Gersh to know what is really going on in the field of women’s health care, in the body, and why it responds the way it does.