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Season 3, Episode 20: The Menopause Hack You Need To Hear Right Now with Dr. Sharon Stills

By Jodi Cohen

If you are a woman – this one’s for you… You don’t have to have your mother’s menopause!

Many women tend to “just keep going” in an attempt to take care of everything and everyone around them – until menopause stops them in their tracks. And the truth is, if you are having symptoms, at any age, it’s time to listen to your body and seek help. 

In this episode Jodi welcomes naturopathic medicine physician Dr. Sharon Stills to talk about hormones, menopause, and options you have when dealing with them. Dr. Stills has two decades of clinical experience and is a passionate advocate for women’s health – she is here today to talk about what’s going on and what can be done about it!

Tune in to learn more about:

  • [03:37] – What’s going on? (perimenopause/menopause symptoms)
  • [15:50] – How to figure out your imbalance
  • [22:45] – Every journey is unique
  • [27:52] – There is hope – you CAN find balance

About Dr. Sharon Stills

 

Dr. Sharon Stills is a Naturopathic Medical Physician with over two decades of clinical practice. She is the host of the Mastering the Meno(pause) Transition Annual summit and is dedicated to changing the conversation around meno(pause) and healing in general. Her RED Hot Sexy Meno(pause) Philosophy and Programs have changed the lives of 10’s of thousands of patients and students and she is passionate about being an advocate for women’s health.

Sign up for Dr. Still’s Mastering The Meno(Pause) Transition Summit here!

If you’re enjoying the Essential Alchemy podcast, please leave Jodi a review on iTunes.

Jodi: Hello. I am Jodi Cohen, your host, [00:01:00] and I’m so incredibly honored and excited to have an amazing conversation about hormones with my dear friend Dr. Sharon Stills. She is a naturopathic medicine physician with over two decades of clinical practice, and she’s the host of mastering Menopause. Transition annual summit and is dedicated to changing the conversation around menopause and healing in general.

Her red, hot, sexy menopause philosophy and programs have changed the lives of tens of thousands of patients and students, and she’s passionate about being an advocate for women’s health. And I’m just so excited. I was telling her off camera that said, I’m 54 and so many of my friends are being told you can go on birth control or you can get a hysterectomy.

And those are the two options. I’m excited to talk about what’s going on and what you can do about it. 

Sharon: I’m excited to be here. Thank you for having me. And yeah, it is. It always makes me go, oh my God, over two decades I’ve been doing this. And so I’ve been around a lot and I’ve seen a lot and I always say, we don’t have to have our [00:02:00] mother’s menopause because I think that, that was what I saw happen to my mother.

And of course this was many years ago. I wasn’t even, aware of naturopathic medicine or anything at the point, but she had heavy bleeding and they gave her a hysterectomy. Yeah. And knowing what I know now, I’m like, ugh, I could just, could have given mama some progesterone, we could have saved the uterus in the ovaries.

And so it, it is really saddening to me that, many decades later, women are still being told the same story. And partly to me, I think, I don’t think anyone goes into medicine To not take care of people like we go, we become a physician because we wanna help. And so part of it is just the system and how the traditional doctors are trained.

And then part of it is the onus on them because there are plenty of medical doctors who step outside the box and go, wait a second, this. There has to be a better way. So I’m always a big fan and advocate of. If [00:03:00] your doctor is not working with you, not teaming up with you, not doing the things, because we’re very educated right now.

We have podcasts, we have summits, and so the patients that walk in my door these days are much more educated than the patients that walked in 20 years ago when I first went into practice. Yes. We didn’t really even have the internet. There was no Facebook. I, I had all, if I had to look something up, I had to look it up in a book.

And so it’s very different right now and there are so many options that I am excited to unpack with you today. No I’m 

Jodi: thrilled. For anyone who’s listening who maybe is Early in menopause, if you can just give a brief, a definition of perimenopause, menopause, some of the symptoms they might be experiencing.

Just, so that maybe they recognize themselves in the 

Sharon: symptoms. Yes. And I, it’s it’s a hormonal journey. And so I just had a patient like two hours [00:04:00] ago who said, oh, everything is fine. She wasn’t coming to me for hormone, she was coming to me for something else. But I always ask about the cycle ’cause it’s a sign of our health.

And she was like, oh no, my cycles are fine, but I never take, that at word level define fine. And then I find out. She has cramping, heavy bleeding. Her breasts get tender for three, four days before her cycle, but we’ve been taught that’s normal. We think it’s normal to be in bed for the first two days of our periods and have to take Tylenol, Advil, or put a hot pack on.

So our hormonal journey starts from the onset of menses when we are, 10, 11, 12, whatever age it is. It seems to be getting earlier these days because there’s so many exogenous external hormonal influences that are bringing puberty on earlier, unfortunately. When we get a cycle and when we start becoming a cycling woman, [00:05:00] our cycles should not have symptoms.

And when we, they come with symptoms, it’s, I call symptoms the sacred messengers. It’s the body’s way of saying hello out there, something’s imbalance, so I’m gonna make you feel not good. So you pay attention and yeah, women especially, we are taught just keep going.

We gotta take care of everyone else. And Sometimes it takes until menopause where our hormones jump off a cliff and now we’re just a disaster that we seek help. And so Perry, I always look at what was your cycle? So whoever’s listening to this, ’cause you may not be in menopause, but your cycles now are a good indicator of how your menopausal situation is gonna go.

So it’s something you wanna be doing, whether you’re listening and you’re in menopause, but tell the younger women I wanna change the conversation. And our cycles should be a nice detox every [00:06:00] month shedding the uterine lining. Should be a time where we go more inward, the red tent that they used to go to.

And so really aligning yourself. Women have superpowers when we ovulate and then we get, when we get into the luteal phase to be more inward and so we can really align with our cycles and use the hormones to help us. As we show up in the world, so if you’ve had a history of infertility, that’s another sign that your hormones are off.

If you’ve had a history of P C O S, of fibroids, of endometriosis, these are all signs that when you start to get into the perimenopausal, menopausal years, They’re probably not gonna go as smooth. And so to answer your question, what is perimenopause? Perimenopause is the years leading up to menopause. And so menopause is just one day.

Menopause is a year after you’ve had your cycle. So pretty much you’re [00:07:00] perimenopausal, you experience menopause for day, and then you’re post-menopausal. That’s like the specifics of it. And the thing is with perimenopause and what I want those of you listening to really to home, Is that this can be going on in your early forties.

This can even be going on at 39 or 38. And a lot of times you’re told this is not your hormones, you’re too young to even be thinking about it. But so you wanna, if you are having symptoms and. There’s a gamut of them. So the more popular ones are hot flashes, insomnia, urinary tract infections, hair loss, mood swings, weight gain.

You can have a burning tongue, you can have eye changes, you can have joint pain. Lose your libido there. There’s so many symptoms that are associated with hormones. Our hormones are intricately related with our immune system. So you can start getting sick a lot. [00:08:00] So we have to really think globally.

And so if this is happening to you and I always say you, if you have an inkling, if you have an intuition that your hormones are off. They probably are. So don’t let anyone outside of you tell you, no, you’re wrong, you’re crazy. And the sit, the solutions are not cut it out or Yeah. Or medicate it.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I love 

Jodi: that. And I really love that you, we do normalize period symptoms. Oh, I’m craving chocolate ’cause I’m getting my period, or oh, I’m I must be getting my cycle. Like we all just assume that’s just the way it 

Sharon: is. Yeah. It’s just been, it’s been normalized and it’s not normal.

It may be common, but it’s not normal. And so we have to start thinking about it like that, and I see it all the time where we don’t think it’s an issue that we have migraines or headaches. It’s just, the first. Three days of my period, but that is a sign [00:09:00] that the hormones are out of balance and so perimenopause.

The other thing I just wanna say is it’s like a rollercoaster. Yes, some days you may feel great and some days you may not. And the rollercoaster is your hormones and estrogen can be really high and it can be really low. And it depends when you catch it. So testing can be very confusing during the perimenopausal time because, If I do a test on you and you’re at the top of the rollercoaster, I might be like, no, your estrogen’s fine.

You have plenty. But then if I do a test on you and you’re at the bottom of the rollercoaster, I was like, oh my God, you have no estrogen. So you have to really understand what is going on. So if you do testing, You understand how to interpret the test results. So a lot of times with perimenopause, I mean I’ve been doing this a long time, I don’t even do rely on a ton of testing for the actual hormones.

’cause I know that there’s all sorts of [00:10:00] craziness going on and I can I. What’s going on by looking at symptoms and how someone is feeling. So typically 

Jodi: so the Dutch test is just capturing that flash in time. That could be either at the top 

Sharon: or the bottom. If you’re perimenopausal, and I don’t do dried urine testing.

I do actual urine collection of 24 hours. So I get much more accurate results. You have to collect your urine in a jug for 24 hours, but the results it’s been shown are much more reliable than dried urine which is better. Then just relying on a blood test or not testing at all. So there’s many different ways to test.

And what was I gonna say? I was gonna, I forgot, I just lost my train of thought because I was gonna say something about when you’re perimenopausal so you have these fluctuations, right? And [00:11:00] you, and it can definitely be hormonally related. And you also have to look at. What contributes to hormonal health, like hormones don’t exist on their own.

So you have to be thinking about your lymphatic system moving. Yeah. You have to be thinking about your gut microbiome. You have to be thinking about your liver and your gallbladder flow. You have to think about your lifestyle, your emotions. So there’s a lot of pieces that go into it. So if you are suffering.

With fibroids or endometriosis or things of that nature, typically. Now I remember what I was gonna say. Typically, when we’re younger, we struggle more with estrogen dominance. And so a lot of times, a lot of these inflammatory conditions or migraines are driven because there’s too much estrogen and too much estrogen can be.

Too much estrogen, or it could be too much estrogen in relationship to [00:12:00] your progesterone, right? So if your estrogen’s supposed to be here and your progesterone is supposed to be here, yeah, but your progesterone is here. Now you have estrogen dominance, even though this level didn’t move. And you can have estrogen dominance because you are recirculating your estrogen because you have certain enzymes in your gut, like beta glucuronidase that are.

Giving your estrogen, instead of being escorted out in your poop, it’s getting recycled back into your system. You can have too much estrogen because your liver is not clearing it. You can have too much estrogen because of all the xenoestrogens. And so the chemicals that are estrogen like. So there’s lots of different reasons.

And you have to look into am I producing too much? Am I producing the wrong types of estrogen? Am I getting it from exogenous sources? Am I not clearing it? So you gotta really go in and look at. Like why? Or do I have too much estrogen? ’cause I just don’t have enough progesterone and why don’t I have enough [00:13:00] progesterone?

So is my thyroid not functioning? Am I too stressed out? When the body has to decide between survival or sex, it chooses survival. Yeah. So if you’re very stressed, you’re producing a lot of cortisol, you’re not gonna produce as much progesterone. So there’s lots of different reasons, and that’s like a.

Chronic thing that I see in the younger population, this estrogen dominance issue now as we get older. Go through perimenopause and menopause. Like I said before, it’s like the hormones just, let’s go cliff diving. And so they just they’re gone. And then it’s not so much an estrogen dominance issue, then it’s really about replacing the hormones and replacing them.

Wisely and using, so whenever I talk about hormones, I’m always talking about bioidentical hormones. I’m not talking about synthetic hormones, even though I don’t always [00:14:00] say bioidentical. That is what I mean. You don’t wanna, can you differentiate for those who Dunno the difference? Yeah. So synthetic hormones would be like what you were saying.

Going to the doctor and getting birth control pills. These are pharmaceuticals. They’re synthetic. Some of them come from pregnant horse urine. And like the pregnant horse urine has estrogens in it that. We don’t even make in our bodies. And I always find it interesting that even regular horses who aren’t pregnant don’t even make those estrogens.

So it’s it’s not even good for regular horses. It’s certainly not good for humans. But synthetic. Do not look like the hormones that we produce. So when you take bioidentical, they’re just that they’re bioidentical to the hormones that we naturally produce. And so they know how to lock into the receptor site because they fit and the synthetic ones don’t fit and they cause all sorts [00:15:00] of problems.

Side effects. So like synthetic progestin, which is a synthetic progesterone, if you actually read the side effects. It’s like the side effects are all the things you’re trying to treat. Weight gain, insomnia, depression, miscarriage. So they are very different than using bioidentical. And when I use bioidentical replacement, we’re doing it in sub physiological doses.

We’re not, I’m not trying to make you 16 again. I don’t know anyone who’d wanna be that age again, but keep me in my fifties. I’m very happy looking forward to sixties and beyond. Wow. So they’re, we’re doing them to give your body just enough to give you the therapeutic benefits. I love 

Jodi: that. I love that.

Less is more. So I’m curious because there are a lot of variables that could contribute to what’s going on. How do you unpack that? What tests do you have your clients do? How do you [00:16:00] figure out where all the puzzle pieces go? I. 

Sharon: So I am a big fan of tests, don’t guess. Yeah, I love that little slogan.

I’m not the only one who uses it. And so I do a lot of testing so we can walk through. Yeah. So I do very comprehensive blood work. Okay. And. For hormones, some of the things that you definitely wanna see in blood work that you’re not gonna see in urine are the D H T, which is dihydrotestosterone, which is a metabolite of testosterone.

So one of the things I see, Women will be put sometimes on ridiculously insane amounts, especially like if they have pellets injected into them. Oh, I know. They’ll be like, totally I’m very anti pate. I’ll just put that out there right now. No, my, 

Jodi: I was telling you off offline, I have a yoga instructor who looks great in her sixties.

She’s everyone needs the pellet. I’m like, I don’t think every, I don’t think there’s anything that everyone needs 

Sharon: like that. So [00:17:00] my experience, ’cause I used to work at a clinic where I saw these patients who were put on pellets and I had to take them all off, get them all explanted and get them all detoxed.

They, the pellets like pound you with hormones and then it falls off. So you feel like amazingly good for a little bit. Then you don’t feel good until you get your next pellet, and no one’s monitoring ’em. So they’re giving you these high doses of testosterone, but no one’s. So then your hair is falling out and no one bothered to run a blood test and look at A D H T to see if you’re converting the testosterone to the metabolite that makes your hair fall out.

So it’s really important to look at D H T in the blood. Like every patient I have on testosterone, I’m constantly monitoring. It’s really important to look at in the blood. Sh. Bg, which stands for Sex Hormone Binding Globulin because, and that’s It’s like a modulation. If it goes too high, it’ll [00:18:00] bind.

So I think of it as like the school bus and the binding globulin, the sex time, it’s a school bus, and the hormones get on the bus, and if the levels get too high, Hormones can’t get off at the stop. And so you might have enough hormones, but they’re bound up by this protein in the liver and you can’t get them to the receptor side.

So you need to look at that to make sure that’s kept. A lot of it is Goldilocks hormone replacement is like not too little, not too high, it’s gotta be just right. Yeah. So I look at that in the blood. You can look at. Testosterone and free testosterone pretty accurately in the blood. I don’t rely on, we will talk about in a second, you know what I rely on for estrogen and progesterone?

You can look at a D H e A dash S for sulfate. In blood. Fairly reliable. I look at that in the blood, in the urine. And then I really like the blood for thyroid hormones. That, and when you wanna [00:19:00] have, A full thyroid panel and it still blows my mind. It still happens in my office repeatedly, numerous times a week where a new patient comes in and they’ve just been totally gaslit, totally misled about what’s going on with their thyroid.

So you wanna have those basic six markers. You wanna have your t s H, your free T three, your free T four. Your reverse T three, your anti T P O, and your thyroglobulin antibodies. And you have a pretty educated audience, so I’m sure most people know that already. But then you also wanna have someone who understands how to read those levels.

So I also see a lot of times patients come in and they might’ve had the right tests run. And I’m like what’d they do about it? And no one did anything about it. They just they tested so they didn’t have to guess, but then they never did the treatment. So you wanna be getting the proper treatment for your results.

And for example, free T [00:20:00] three, the range is typically like two to 4.4. Yeah. So if you have a 2.6 or a 2.8. A lot of times I see women are just told, no, your free T three is fine. You don’t need support. But my experience of a long time now is that. The free T three for a lot of women to feel good has to be at the high end of normal or even above the high end of normal.

And so I, you really need to I work with my patients and I’m like, you know your body, you have some symptoms. We get feedback. Like it’s wonderful when the tests. Lab results match, you know what you’re feeling, but I’m most first and foremost concerned with how you’re feeling. So if your T three needs to be a little higher, but that’s where you feel good, then that’s where we put you.

So you really want someone who’s gonna be able to think outside the box. You don’t want your reverse T three to be. The ranges are usually like eight to 25. I [00:21:00] don’t like to see that higher than like 12 or 13. And if it’s getting higher than that, you have to be thinking why is the body putting the brakes on the thyroid?

And it could be multiple reasons from stress or heavy metals or. Co-infections from Lyme or mycotoxins. So you have to do a little digging and see what’s going on. But you wouldn’t wanna give someone, I see this all the time too, you wouldn’t wanna give someone even natural thyroid hormone that has T four in it to someone who has a higher reverse.

T three because you’re just gonna make the reverse T three higher. So then you wanna just go and give some regular T three. So it real, and then if you have antibodies against your thyroid, then it become like, then it’s, I see this also all the time where someone has Hashimoto’s or they have high thyroid antibodies and they’re just given some thyroid hormone and no one does anything about.

The fact that their thyroid is being attacked by their body. And so yes, you might need [00:22:00] some thyroid hormone support, but we, it becomes a very different treatment. Now we have to see why is the immune system attacking the thyroid? What’s, what’s underneath that? What’s causing that? And then the treatment becomes more complicated to alleviate the autoimmunity.

Jodi: So I have Hashimoto’s and I, no one has looked at why I love this. No, this is amazing because you’re looking at all the root causes and you’re really a detective. Why is this happening? What can I do? What’s the next level? Yeah, 

Sharon: that’s amazing. I always say I’m a two year old.

’cause I’m like, why? Why? Why? Tell me why. But that’s really impressive 

Jodi: because then you can get to the root cause. And shift things. So can you share, the example of people who work with you, like they, how long the journey might take, what, that, I know there’s no cookie cutter one size fits 

Sharon: all, but I have patients that have been patients [00:23:00] of mine since the beginning.

I had a patient text me other day. She’s it’s our 20 year anniversary. But it, What we do and how often we interact because if I’m your doctor and you get acutely ill, you’re gonna need to see me. Or if you get a new diagnosis. But like with hormones, once, yeah, with hormones, get those hormones balanced.

I typically see those patients once or twice a year. So we’re doing our blood work, right? So to go back to the testing and there. I had two patients, one patient yesterday and one patient today. Tell me the same thing. I went to Quest and they drew my blood and they said, I have never seen so many tubes of blood need to be taken.

They had 30 tubes of blood taken. ’cause I run very extensive blood work because again, I can pick up things that maybe no one saw. I can diagnose something you may not know you’ve had. I can see [00:24:00] nutritional deficiencies and I’m getting like your fingerprint. Yeah, so a good example I always use is your cholesterol.

If your cholesterol is typically 200 or two 10, Fine. We run it every year, but then we run it and now it’s one 50 and you haven’t done anything different. To me, that’s a sign. There’s excessive free radical activity going on in your body that your cholesterol dropped, and now your liver is struggling and there may be a cancer brewing.

So by doing it every year, it allows me to track and know and learn what’s going on with you. So like I have, my patients have their, their older kids, their teenage kids start doing blood work with me and we start because. The earlier you track, the more information you have and the more you can see.

So I do extensive blood work on every patient. I do 24 hour urine hormone testing. I. Because when we’re doing hormones, we wanna see the metabolites of the hormones, especially [00:25:00] in estrogen. There are different kinds of estrogen, and this is where it gets very diluted. Like people say estrogen causes cancer Kind does.

And if estrogen really caused cancer, then when girls went through puberty and had all this estrogen surging, we’d see a big uptick in breast cancer. But we don’t, we see it postmenopausally when the estrogens are dropping off. That’s also when we see an uptick in osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s disease and cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

’cause these are all have implications. With the hormones. So I do 24 hour urine testing because we have to see, do you have more of the good estrogens or the proliferative estrogens? What kind of metabolites? There are metabolites of estrogen that I use to treat breast cancer. There are metabolites of estrogen that can cause D N A damage.

So we really wanna get the whole picture and see what’s going on and see [00:26:00] over a 24 hour year period. What you’re metabolizing and what you’re releasing, so that’s really important. If someone is measuring your hormones that you’re on in saliva or in blood, you’re not getting accurate results, you’re not getting accurate monitoring, and often you are being told your levels are too high and you have to reduce what you’re taking when that’s not the case.

So that’s a really important piece of monitoring hormones. I also monitor cortisol levels in saliva, like with 24 hour samples so we can really see what your cortisol is doing when, and it’s really you just right before you, I had a patient and I was so sure that her cortisol was flatlined, and then I did her test.

I was like, oh, I was wrong. It wasn’t, it was like the total opposite of what I thought it was gonna be. And so it’s a good example of why we test [00:27:00] and we don’t test, and especially with cortisol, because cortisol can, the symptoms can be low or high cortisol, and we always hear, and we always, oh, high cortisol and, but I’ll tell you like.

At least 50% of my patients, I check their problem is not high cortisol. They’ve already burned through their cortisol and now it’s crashed, and now they’re just flatlined and they actually need some bioidentical cortisol to bring them back on board and to make them feel better. Oh, nice. They’re running on fumes.

Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a great book called the Safe Uses of Cortisol by William Jeffries. I don’t know if it’s still available, but it’s a fantastic book and he really gets into all the uses of bioidentical cortisol and what a game changer it is. And I, 

Jodi: on that note, I wanna give people hope.

’cause you said we were talking offline, I was kinda sharing some of my symptoms and you’re like, we can fix that. Are you able to fix things? [00:28:00] Like all of the, that’s another thing that we normalize. Oh, you turn whatever age, and, this just happens. And that’s just what 

Sharon: age is. Yeah. And I, yeah I don’t think I’d still be practicing if I wasn’t, fixing or balancing things.

Yeah. This is all, and I’m like, we’re gonna get you to a 10 or at least a high nine. I don’t settle for I’ve, ’cause I see that too. Like I see patients come in and maybe they’re on hormones and they’re like I was like, get a zero and now I’m at a three and I’ve just been here for five years and this is where they’ve left me.

And I’m like, ah, no, that is not acceptable. I wanna see women thrive and feel good. Like we, as we are aging, we are like, Powerful beings and we have a lot to give and offer to the world. And we need our physical vessel to be balanced so that we can be creative, that we can have energy, that we can have [00:29:00] joy in our lives.

And I was talking about this morning. I really want I want us to be the generation that are. Kids and our grandkids look at, and they don’t think it’s weird that, an 85 year old is out hiking a mountain. Because we look at that now and when we see that, we think, oh my God, look at her.

That’s amazing. But that is normal. It’s just not common. Yes. No, I 

Jodi: totally agree. And for anyone who’s listening who wants to work with you, how can they find you? 

Sharon: Dr stills.com is my website. I’m pretty findable. Great. Yeah. Yeah, you could just go to my website’s probably the easiest way.

Jodi: And is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you feel is 

Sharon: important for people to know? My gosh. Yeah, A lot. Okay. I didn’t even get, I got through like some of the basic tests. I’ll [00:30:00] just, I won’t go deep into ’em, but like I also do stool testing so we can look at the microbiome. I do heavy metal testing so we can see where your heavy metal load is.

I do iodine testing to see if you’re deficient in iodine, which has a big impact on your thyroid and your breast. I do mycotoxin testing because mold can be a big player. I look for Lyme and co-infection. So there’s a lot of testing. Wow. Toxicity testing. There’s a lot of things that, sometimes it’s like I just wanna hopefully rule out things, if it’s there and we didn’t even check it could be driving your dysfunction.

And so it’s better to test and know what’s going on. And yeah, I just want, anyone who’s, I talk a lot to women. I host the Menopause Summit, which you are a part of this year, and I do that. It is a ton of work, but I do it because I’m really committed to changing the [00:31:00] conversation and it’s a freeway.

To reach a lot of women who need and are thirsty for this information, and I am, I’m really passionate about changing what aging looks like. Menopause is not a disease. I. It pisses me off that there’s an ICD 10 code for it. Yes. But it’s not a disease. It is a normal transition and a lot of it is like our mindset and how we look at the aging process and menopause.

I’ve been postmenopausal now for seven years. I was done and finished at the age of 48. I was a little. On the earlier side, but remember the average age is 50. Yeah. So that means some are gonna go a little earlier, some a little later. And so it’s all normal. It’s all okay. But I climbed and stood on the top of Kilimanjaro and it literally, the universe was like really supporting me to the day.

It was the one year anniversary when I [00:32:00] had my last period and I stood on top of Kilimanjaro to show myself and to also show others like, this is just. At the beginning, we don’t have to be afraid of menopause and we have to take stock and we have to look at, it’s easy to say don’t be afraid of aging.

And if you have to really look and see what are the programs I have, what are the beliefs? What are not mine? What are from society and I can easily get rid of? And what do I have to work on? But when we can we’re all gonna go through menopause. It’s inevitable. If you’re a woman, it’s coming for you.

So get ready and enjoy it. And we’re all, as humans, we’re all eventually going to expire. And so what can we do to improve the quality? It’s not just the quantity, but it’s also the quality of our life. And if we live healthy, If we eat right, move our body, have community, have love, have joy, have passion, have balanced [00:33:00] hormones, yes.

Then we can step into this sacred second act and really rock it and start a new business. Or learn to paint, or learn to dance or travel or. Do whatever you want. Sit and be still and be meditative. It’s not to tell you have to go climb a mountain, but I always say what’s your Kilimanjaro?

What have you been putting on the back burner that it’s time to now put on the front burner? Because we have been taught that we come last as women. And I’m like, no. Put yourself first. That is not selfish, that is necessary. You can’t pour from a empty watering can. So fill yourself up and to have hope that there are doctors out there like myself who will listen to you, who will work with you, who will not give up on you.

Some of my patients, it’s very easy. It’s 1, 2, 3. Hormones are balanced and they go on their way. Some [00:34:00] it takes a little longer if they have other infections and other things going on, or there’s a lot of emotional things going on. Be patient, but don’t give up hope. Trust your inner knowing.

If you know something’s out of balance, find someone who will work with you and listen to you. I learn from my patients. I’ve been practicing 22 years and I learn something every day from my patients. That’s 

Jodi: amazing. Thank you for your brilliance and everything you do. And please repeat your website so people can go find you.

Sharon: It’s DrStills.com. Just dr stills.com. 

Jodi: This was amazing. Thank you for everything. 

[00:35:00]

About The Author

Jodi Cohen

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.