Transcript
Speaker: Hey everyone, Laurel here. Just wanted to let you know that if you would like to watch this as a video podcast, you can now do that over on YouTube. That is all. I'm Laurel Beabersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt?
Speaker: Whatever that means. We're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices. Welcome to the conversation.
Speaker: Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Today's Make It Make Sense episode examines a women's health roundtable on the Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by entrepreneur and investor, Stephen Bartlett.
Speaker: The title of this episode is Hormone and Fertility Experts We've Been Lied to About Women's Health. If this happens, call a doctor.
Speaker: So ah we have a premise. Somebody has lied to you, and these experts will set the record straight. Now, this is part one of a two-part discussion where these guests appear, and the first part alone runs about three and a half hours in length. So ah our focus in this episode you're hearing with us now is we're going to have you listen with us to 10 clips from this Diary of a CEO interview.
Speaker: in order to be able to listen and evaluate how this panel of experts frames and discusses hormonal birth control. We'll obviously be looking at whether their claims are aligned with the scientific evidence and other expert consensus, but we're going to do what we like to do as well, which is we're going to take a close look at the language and rhetoric they use and how it functions to persuade and shape what listeners believe.
Speaker: Okay, so the guests at this roundtable discussion are OBGYN and menopause specialist Dr. Mary Claire Haver, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Vonda Wright, exercise physiologist Dr. Stacey Sims, and fertility specialist Dr. Natalie Crawford.
Speaker: Now, we've examined Dr. Haver's rights and Sims messaging on our podcast in the past. In episode 113, Debunking Menopause Grifters, we examined claims from Dr. Haver and Dr. Wright. In episode 111, Make Stacey Sims Make Sense, we examined claims from Dr. Sims.
Speaker: We have not discussed Dr. Natalie Crawford before. Dr. Crawford is double board certified in OBGYN and reproductive endocrinology and infertility. She's the panel's only fertility specialist or fertility subspecialist. She also co-founded a fertility practice and sells natural fertility and IVF courses, which we feel are relevant commercial interests for you to keep in mind when we evaluate her messaging.
Speaker: So this round table covers menstrual cycles, fertility, menopause, exercise, and nutrition. Our focus today, what we're going to be talking about is how these guests discuss hormonal birth control, the pill,
Speaker: and other hormone-based methods used to prevent pregnancy and treat gynecologic conditions. So their qualifications to give advice about these types of medications matters. Only Dr. Haver and Dr. Crawford have clinical training directly relevant to prescribing contraception and treating gynecologic disorders. So right off the bat, presenting all four as authorities on hormones and fertility misrepresents their qualifications.
Speaker: ah Yet, however, in this episode, we have to be examining everyone's claims because unfortunately, even relevant expertise doesn't guarantee evidence-based advice.
Speaker: Yeah. So this episode of the Diary of a CEO aired actually about a year ago on October 16th, 2025. And I began seeing clips around that time on Instagram.
Speaker: And I kind of suspected we would need to investigate further information. And I really didn't want to. um i expected it would be frustrating. I wasn't wrong.
Speaker: However, what I wasn't prepared for was um a kind of sick feeling that it left me with. right So listeners, you might be wondering if you saw it a year ago as well, why are we covering this now? Because you know a lot of time has gone by. And well, the the answer is that Sarah and I are a very small business, if you haven't noticed. um we We do this podcast for free. We don't have any sponsors. We have jobs. you know We have lives. And as it turns out, checking claims and consulting experts
Speaker: takes a lot of time. It's pretty much what Brandolini's law tells us, which is that refuting misinformation takes a fuck ton more time and effort than producing it does. So, um but meanwhile, this roundtable episode on Diary of a CEO keeps reaching, almost said diarrhea of a CEO.
Speaker: That's good one. gonna save that one. might come in handy. um This roundtable episode, it has um continued to reach new people. So I checked a couple days ago, and it has 3.5 million YouTube views. oh And i had checked it the week prior, and it was only 3.4.
Speaker: 100 million, excuse me, ah let me do some actual math, 100,000 increase in one week. Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah, it's a big reach. That's a lot. um And we've criticized the expert guests on this roundtable panel on our podcast in the past, right? And and we focused on their advice about exercise, nutrition, menopause, but- Seeing them all together on Bartlett's platform really made the stakes feel higher for me, at least somehow. Like I can imagine for listeners who already trust these women, um they're very prominent figures in their relative spaces. They're all sitting around this table with Stephen Bartlett. They're all agreeing with each other. They're all nodding along.
Speaker: And I think what's happening there is there's this impression that like all of the claims that are being made are also then being independently confirmed by the other experts at the table.
Speaker: yeah You know, it's kind of like what when people don't understand what the word peer reviewed means in research, they think it means like, oh, these people's peers agree with them. It's been peer reviewed, right? i mean, yeah, well, and they each, you know,
Speaker: If you saw all of them sitting together and maybe knew one out of the four, they're all providing authority to each other with their own authority that they have from their brand. Right. So they're sort of all everyone being there is kind of like it's like it's cementing.
Speaker: the fact, well, all four of them are saying the same thing. So it must be true. There's four experts. Yeah. Right. Yeah. and And so, you know, and they're all medical doctors, PhDs. So what's being said on this YouTube video actually starts to sound like scientific fact. So throughout this three and a half hour interview, they do occasionally and very briefly acknowledge birth controls, specifically hormonal birth controls benefits,
Speaker: including, of course, that it is very effective at preventing pregnancy. They also mention, tend to gloss over how it can treat conditions, um the symptoms of conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS, as well as heavy bleeding and painful periods. I'm going to make a little side note for a second.
Speaker: PCOS is now called PMOS. And when this Diary of a CEO episode was recorded, it had not yet been renamed. So in the clips that we're going to play for you in this episode, you're going to hear these panel experts refer to it as PCOS because that's what it was called when they recorded. Sarah and I are going to refer to it as PMOS. Just know that we're talking about the same thing. So, okay. Throughout the interview, these experts occasionally, very briefly acknowledge birth control's benefits, but those acknowledgements are almost repeatedly overshadowed by things like personal stories, warnings, stuff that builds this like overwhelmingly negative picture actually of hormonal contraception. um Sarah and I both feel like, you know, the average listener coming to this show
Speaker: for entertainment purposes, for education, maybe because they know one or more of these experts, could easily walk away actually feeling afraid that using hormonal birth control could mean compromising their health.
Speaker: Even when, as we're gonna discuss, it could actually mean protecting their health, improving their quality of life, improving their health. so You know, the part, though, that left me with the sick feeling was how they repeatedly invoked teenage girls, um like repeatedly in various different ways. They would use alarming anecdotes, a lot of unsupported warnings, suggesting that hormonal contraception could compromise their developing bodies, could derail their athletic ambitions, or could threaten their future fertility.
Speaker: Now I'm a parent of a girl. i'm was also once a teenage girl, as was Sarah. So when I hear contraception framed as a threat to girls in a way that is very misleading and also completely devoid of evidence, it actually enrages me.
Speaker: um i imagine parents... who have listened to this episode could easily come away with more mistrust and skepticism about medication that their daughter's doctor might recommend to effectively either prevent that girl from getting pregnant or prevent ah her from having to experience these painful, debilitating conditions from some of the um conditions that we mentioned, like endometriosis, PMOS, right? And I think that misinformation, misinformation generally, but especially when it comes from medical doctors is so harmful.
Speaker: It's so harmful because it prevents people from getting being able to make the best choices for their bodies based on the best available evidence.
Speaker: Yeah. it's It's just, it's deeply frustrating. It felt, it actually felt very handmaid's tale to me in some ways. Like that's the sick feeling kind of explained using pop culture. Like I i came away with this very, like may the Lord open, you know?
Speaker: Yes. Blessed. What is it? Blessed be. best Blessed be the fruit. Blessed be the fruit. It's yeah. I mean, and And we'll discuss this. And and to to be even like slightly fair, let's say, Natalie Crawford is a fertility, her focus is fertility.
Speaker: But even with that, it's it's frustrating to see that the conversation is so anti-birth control for women, for young girls, when we know that things like abstinence-only education unequivocally does not work.
Speaker: it it It is such an effective treatment for for a lot of different conditions. And we get hung up on the the birth control-ness of it, right? When it's when it's really just hormones, right? i mean, arguably, maybe not arguably, I think maybe the ability for women to control how many children they're going to have, when they're going to have their children,
Speaker: is the hugest difference in a society that is pro women and a society that is not, right? A major resource for our episode today in our discovery of like, you know, looking into these claims is the interview that we just did with Dr. Kemi Dool, who's a physician and a researcher. She is double board certified in OBGYN and gynecologic oncology.
Speaker: We heard the round table. We asked her about some of the claims in the round table without actually asking her to review the episode itself. And we'll, we'll link to our episode with Dr. Kemi in the show notes so that you can listen to it if you haven't already. But one of the things she said, which is just so absolutely true is there's no society where women thrive and they don't have control over reproduction.
Speaker: The pill has made it possible for women to avoid unintended pregnancy. which might mean the ability to finish school, not have to drop out, pursue a career, earn money themselves independently, choose when and whether to become a parent.
Speaker: ah There are lots of complications that can come with pregnancy, including death, which is a risk that falls disproportionately on Black women in the United States. The pill was approved for contraception in the United States in 1960, and it gave women something that was really life-altering. It was a reliable method that they were in control of. They didn't have to depend on a man to wear a condom, to put it on correctly, to keep it on.
Speaker: Sex was no longer this thing that risk tying your entire future to someone that you maybe never would have chosen to parent with. by And ah Dr. Kami pointed out that because it's called birth control,
Speaker: That obscures the many other benefits of this medication, which is treating painful periods, heavy bleeding, acne, endometriosis, PMOS.
Speaker: Depending on the type of medication, it can reduce certain cancer risks. Oral contraceptives have decades of research looking at their benefits and their risks. But as as Dr. Kemi put it, today in 2026, birth control sounds coercive.
Speaker: So she's urging her profession to explain more clearly what these medications treat and why they're prescribed. There's a distrust that's already there. And this episode of Diary the CEO Roundtable seemed to just deepen that distrust.
Speaker: I think it absolutely could leave listeners afraid of hormonal birth control as a treatment that could improve their or their daughter's health and quality of life. So a premise that Dr. Crawford repeatedly leaned on to imply this was that women and adolescent girls must ovulate and menstruate to be healthy.
Speaker: So Because of that, she concludes for listeners, hormonal birth control is a threat to their health because it suppresses ovulation and menstruation. We ran this premise by Dr. Kemi that women must ovulate and bleed to remain healthy. And her answer was very clear that no, they they do not. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. And I can see why Dr. Crawford would possibly have a pretty easy time mythologizing this, that ovulation and menstruation is inherent to women's health. Like it is Why they're healthy is because they're menstruating, because they're ovulating. Because it seems intuitive, right? That it'd be important for premenopausal women to do what their bodies naturally do, right? Ovulate and menstruate.
Speaker: and And it's intuitive that, you know, for any reason, this is not happening. um Those processes are stopped or they're suppressed, that that's not good, right? That like, you know, that must mean something is wrong.
Speaker: But in our interview, Dr. Kemi clarified very clearly a fundamental distinction, right? Which is that, yes, okay, an underlying health problem can stop someone from ovulating or having their period.
Speaker: That is true. An underlying health problem can do that because this happens when with situations that are underlying health problems or situations that do harm women's health.
Speaker: We see that if a woman has an eating disorder, she might also stop ovulating and menstruating. She's not eating enough. We see that similarly with REDS, which is Relative Energy Deficiency Syndrome, which is not necessarily an eating disorder. It's just not fueling adequately for exercise. And this can happen and unintentionally with athletes who are women. And yes, that is a situation that is harmful to that woman's health. It could be the reason that they stop ovulating. And then there's also certain thyroid conditions that need medical attention that can be the reason for someone's period stopping, right?
Speaker: But Dr. Kemi also clarified this, stopping ovulation or a period with medication like hormonal birth control does not mean causing these same kind of health problems for women.
Speaker: The reason that someone isn't bleeding or ovulating actually really matters. Okay. And as she said, as Dr. Dole said, it's not the bleeding that's making you healthy. So we've been posting clips on our Instagram page from our interview with Dr. Kemi, and there's been some very interesting comments. This one was amazing.
Speaker: In the comment section. So a woman, I presume, if they're even a person named Joy, comments, any girl or woman who eats a conventional diet should bleed once a month. That's how we get rid of metals such as iron and copper. yeah Okay.
Speaker: So I went to Joy's ah profile and she has zero posts, 82 followers. She's following 1,133 people and thirty three people and her you know saying that people put- Count a description. Right. Her description is not a bot.
Speaker: You know me. I'm the bot that's not a bot. Not a bot. um Yeah. and and And I looked at some of the profiles of some of the people who liked her post and they were giving not a bot. Not a bot. You know what I'm not is a bot.
Speaker: Yeah. And then another another handle who I don't think is a bot, Mama47 wrote, I like this. Yeah. It's good to be able to control when you bleed or not, although synaptic pruning would change things if done long term. I guess there's this idea that if adolescent girls um go on birth control, that they experience some type of synaptic pruning, which alters their brain development.
Speaker: And this would lead to long-term harm. And and there's absolutely zero. Actually, i don't i don't think there's any trials done on humans looking at this. I think there might be some rodent studies. But in other words, there's there's actually no evidence showing that this is true. Oh, my god.
Speaker: Yeah, I went on a little little deep dive looking at synaptic pruning. I was like, what the fuck is this person talking about synaptic pruning? Yeah, and and you know, this post, it it it didn't garner a ton of attention. So this is like a full 50% of the people who are commenting on the post. A full 50% of whom could be AI.
Speaker: Right. yeah So historians and researchers, they call this this age that we're in right now, they call it the age of misinformation for a reason, um because of how how rapidly and widely misinformation of all kinds is spreading via social media and now via bots who are posing as people on social media. Right.
Speaker: So it really doesn't help us at all, at all, when four human doctors with gargantuan followings go on a massive platform to continue to sow doubt and perpetuate misinformation too.
Speaker: They're basically carrying the water for anyone and everyone who benefits from distrust in science and medicine, including forced birth activists, anti-vaccine activists, climate change denialists. And let's not forget about the foreign governments actively working right now online to undermine Americans' trust in its institutions. um This panel of experts doesn't actually have to share any of those motives either to carry the water for everyone who benefits from a misinformed U.S. citizenry.
Speaker: So there were so many cases where Dr. Natalie Crawford overtly suggested and even just flat out said that suppressing ovulation and bleeding with hormonal contraception is itself a health threat. What is up with that?
Speaker: Okay. if If we're to believe- Because it's not, let's just clarify. It's not. It's not. if If we're to believe Dr. Kemi and Dr. Jen Gunter and research, okay, Dr. Crawford is actually getting this very wrong. And so then the question is, is she wrong on accident or is she wrong on purpose? Okay.
Speaker: And which is worse? So this is kind of our, like the the attitude we were taking sort of throughout it was as we're listening to all of this is like, okay, you're getting it wrong.
Speaker: But are you getting it wrong by mistake? or you getting it wrong on purpose?
Speaker: I'm not sure which is worse, but either way, it's very concerning. Like for example, in one of the last clips, you'll hear Dr. Crawford recommending that If you ah are going to take birth control, she really doesn't want you to do, but if you're going to do it, you should do the, some some birth control, some hormonal birth controls have a ah seven week period of placebo pills ah where there's nothing in the pill, but you just, because you're in the habit of taking it every day, you just, you take that.
Speaker: And then you in like supposedly get your period during those seven weeks, ah seven days of excuse me, of hormone withdrawal. Although Um, it's not actually your period, but we'll talk about that. So she recommends that you take the pill, those, the, and have that week off rather than skipping the week off. A lot of women don't do that. They just stay on the pill the whole time. They don't do this like week off protocol. And she says you should take them because it gives your brain a break from being restricted from the hormones. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: But a brain break, a brain break. Yes. But one of the things that we learned in our conversation with with Kemi and then what we talked with Dr. Kemi and then what I sort of went down a rabbit because I got very interested in this as a former Catholic.
Speaker: The so this idea of this seven day break means we've got to go back to the nineteen fifty s where. when researchers were actually developing the pill. the One of these research researchers, his name was Dr. John Rock. He's a gynecologist and a devout Catholic. And he was hoping that the Catholic church would accept this new form of contraception because previously Catholic churches, speak their whole thing is no contraception ever.
Speaker: So the church permits the rhythm method, which is avoiding sex during the fertile part of your menstrual cycle. So Rock argued that the pill could fit because it used the hormones and then this week of no hormones to kind of, it looks the same, like your monthly schedule of not bleeding and bleeding looks the same. You take these hormones for three weeks and then you have this so-called period. And that it also then could reassure you during that week when you're bleeding that you are are in fact not pregnant.
Speaker: So he campaigned for church approval and even published a book making his case Five years later, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church's opposition to contraception anyway. but So it didn't do what he hoped it would do, but this idea of the seven-day break kind of endured.
Speaker: And the history of the seven-day break is not because women's brain need time off. It's because it was a way that they were trying to make it socially acceptable and acceptable to the Catholic church. That's literally why. There is no medical requirement for a monthly withdrawal bleed, right? So history is reminding us always that religious and political beliefs can and do shape reproductive healthcare. I mean, we saw how not that long ago, a couple of years ago, organized efforts by conservative Christian advocacy groups and Republican politicians brought about the reversal of roe v. Wade in 2022. So against this very recent backdrop,
Speaker: When we hear warnings from popular online doctors that could scare literally millions of listeners away from contraception, what they're saying and why they're doing this really does deserve scrutiny.
Speaker: whether these speakers share any of the same ideology. To Laurel's point, they're carrying water for this argument. By the way, a study highlighted by John Hopkins estimated that through 2023, states with total or six-week abortion bans may have experienced approximately 68 more women dying during pregnancy or within a year afterward than would have been expected without those bans.
Speaker: And since returning to office, Trump has revoked Biden-era reproductive health protections, of course he has, and his administration has disrupted funding for family planning services, which has further limited women's access to contraception. So yeah, ah the messages delivered by these doctors in this roundtable discussion carries the water for these movements.
Speaker: Messages that frighten women and narrow their choices through fear without evidence, um they work together with the policy that narrows that access, right?
Speaker: The result's like a synergistic one. Fewer women get the medications and contraceptions they need. And we work with women. We teach women. We make this podcast largely for women. And that's the same audience these guests reach.
Speaker: Their messages in the roundtable sound supportive. You've been lied to. Your suffering has been dismissed. We're on your side. And, you know, it's Women have been dismissed and they have been undertreated, especially Black women, as we discussed with Dr. Kemi. But this this fact, this truth, this reality does not validate giving millions of women unsupported advice, misleading them, and undermining their ability to make informed choices about their bodies, their health, and their futures.
Speaker: That is exactly how misogyny has always worked to undermine women's ability to make informed choices about their bodies, their health and their future. And so with that, I think it's important to remind everyone listening that Sarah and I are not experts in any way, shape or form in contraception or gynecology. Nope.
Speaker: Like not even remotely. Not even remotely. And so when we question the factual nature of claims made in the round table, We're going to lean heavily on our trusted experts, our interview with Dr. Dole and the work of Dr. Jen Gunter.
Speaker: We're also going to lean into what the clinical guidance currently is and we'll reference research literature that overwhelmingly ah contradicts some of the claims made. We're also going to examine their rhetorical strategies and their persuasive tactics, which is not something that you need expertise to question.
Speaker: Evaluating what people tell us online has sort of become an essential life skill at this point, and we all need to practice it. Having a doctor before your name or a PhD or MD after it does not put your claims beyond scrutiny. We've been doing this on the podcast for a while, and today we are doing it again. As we said, we've selected 10 clips. So after each clip, Laurel and I will compare the explicit claims that they make with expert guidance and research.
Speaker: And we'll also look at the persuasive packaging, right? What might someone without a medical background reasonably take away from what these people are saying? What has been established? What are you being invited to assume?
Speaker: So to help make some of these rhetorical sleights of hand more recognizable, we've named them so that they can be more readily identified and we can take a closer look at how they work. For one sleight of hand, we'll use Dr. Jen Gunter's kind concept of goodness and badness blanks, which she writes about in her blogs on the Vagenda.
Speaker: Goodness and badness blanks are language that suggests something is beneficial or harmful, but that actually leaves the listener to fill in the blank and regarding what that benefit or harm actually is. For example, calling a hormone natural can suggest goodness without establishing that the natural hormone actually creates a better health outcome.
Speaker: Calling a medication suppressive suggests badness without establishing that whatever's being suppressed leaves us worse off. Yeah. So the goodness and badness blanks, you want to listen for those, we'll help you listen for those. We also want you to listen for a frequent reliance on a certain sentence structure, what we're calling the big butt structure, the structure of the big butt.
Speaker: Listen, it's a good eye thick thighs save lives. You need a big butt. e um You know how whenever you hear a butt in a sentence, you only remember what gets said after the butt, and you don't really remember what came before it? Like, this house is beautiful, but the foundation is collapsing.
Speaker: um The food is delicious, but the kitchen has rats. The car runs beautifully, but the brakes don't work. So in the case of hormonal birth control, in one clip, Dr. Natalie Crawford acknowledges that IUDs are highly effective contraception, you know, something most people know, right? She follows a meet this immediately with a with a big butt, and she warns ah something about young women not building bone and possibly facing lifelong problems. downstream health consequences.
Speaker: Anyone trying to persuade you of something is is making an argument, and all arguments are built through language and the words used. And the word but, I think, is akin to a spotlight.
Speaker: um It directs listeners' attention to the thing that whoever's speaking wants to emphasize. um In another clip, Crawford briefly acknowledges that the pill effectively prevents pregnancy. No duh.
Speaker: But she pivots ah to some warning about reduced ah ovarian hormone production. And then Dr. Haver kind of chimes in. She's like, and testosterone. You're going to listen also for the many instances when they generalize from anecdotes, right? A patient's story, a relative's experience becomes a warning for all women.
Speaker: Also listen for very loaded language, like calling birth control a crutch or saying that it's handed out like candy, right? Suggesting that it it using it reflects personal failure or prescribing it reflects careless medicine. And listen also for false choices.
Speaker: For example, nutrition and sleep are presented as the proper way to manage a condition like PMOS with lifestyle. And using medication in the form of hormonal birth control is presented as an inferior fallback.
Speaker: This is a totally false choice. Lifestyle changes and medication work together, not as an either or. After you get done listening to the 10 clips with us, if you are masochists like we are.
Speaker: We encourage you actually to go and listen to the full to the full conversation, um but equipped with your your rhetorical bullshit detector, warmed up and ready to go. You might find yourself both intellectually engaged with the exercise as well as emotionally enraged by what you're hearing um all at the same time. You know, we contain multitudes.
Speaker: ah But in all seriousness, we we do hope you you listen and listen critically and ask yourself a couple of questions, okay? While you're listening, ask yourself, why does symptom relief get framed as inadequate when contraception provides it, but exciting when cold exposure supported by pilot data might provide it?
Speaker: Or why is the premise that women shouldn't suffer, but then effective treatments that ease women's suffering get not only completely overshadowed, but demonized?
Speaker: And why is menopausal hormone therapy praised for relieving menopause symptoms while hormonal birth control, which is another kind of hormone therapy, is demonized for relieving other forms of women's suffering?
Speaker: What's up with that? and and finally finally, ask yourself, who's benefiting from this message? right And how, right? these These guests, they sell books, they sell courses, they sell programs, they sell products. They appear together.
Speaker: And this introduces each other's audiences to the other. And Bartlett, Stephen Bartlett, enriches himself by monetizing attention through advertising and sponsorships.
Speaker: And of course, no, having a business doesn't make everything someone says false, but we can and we should examine how a narrative supports what someone sells.
Speaker: Yeah. So when you listen to these clips that we're going to play for you from the roundtable discussion, listen for the vulnerabilities that these doctor brands are pressing on.
Speaker: Based on what they say and how they say it, what are women listeners encouraged to fear? Who are women listeners encouraged to trust or distrust?
Speaker: And in what are they encouraged to invest their time, energy, and money instead? So the title of this Diary of a CEO episode sets up a story, right? Hormone and fertility experts.
Speaker: We've been lied to about women's health. If this happens, call a doctor. I just want to break in and say as well, I was, when i had to go listen to this episode, um I was looking through all of his episode titles and I felt like I was reading headlines from a national inquirer. Like it was all this like incredibly,
Speaker: a like dramatic language, no matter what the topic was. Yeah, very alarming. Yes, yes. A lot of fear mongering. So the story is that they're telling here is that women have been deceived and that these four experts are here to rescue them with the truth.
Speaker: Well, Laurel and I both listened to the episodes and we think it leaves women with more fear, less reliable information and less confidence in treatments that could help them. So without further ado, let's now examine how this happens and let's question who benefits when it does.
Speaker: OK, so we are going to play our first clip. And what you're going to hear is an opening question. It's not the first question. i It's one of the questions. By the way, these clips are not going to be presented necessarily in the order in which they appear. um We do try to tell you ah if there's more that happens before the clip or after the clip to put it in context. um But this is one of the opening questions on the talk. So Stephen Bartlett asks,
Speaker: how terrible is birth control for female hormones? And um then this framing goes completely unchallenged.
Speaker: And let's hear how Dr. Natalie Crawford responds.
Speaker: On this point of birth control, one of the questions that came in from the audience was how terrible is birth control to female hormones? The birth control pill shuts off the brain's desire to send the signal to the ovary to make hormones. So it is ethanol estradiol, a synthetic estrogen, and a type of a synthetic progestin or progesterone. These work. The brain thinks that you have estrogen and progesterone present. As we said, that's the luteal phase. And so your brain says we don't need an egg to grow. Ovulation starts in the brain. Yep. Right. So no FSH comes out.
Speaker: And you're not going to get ovulation. So they're very effective for prevention of ovulation, which is makes it a very effective contraceptive option. But as far as hormonal shifts, yeah, your brain's not sitting out FSH and LH. Your ovaries are not going to be making estradiol or progesterone. Or testosterone.
Speaker: True. And so that is how they are sometimes helpful if you have... You know, ah some women get hemorrhagic cysts with ovulation. every ah Every time you ovulate, when you rupture that cyst, you get a lot of bleeding. The birth control pill can prevent ah ovulation, therefore prevent some women from being in terrible pain. If you have PCOS, they're often handed out like candy. One reason is because it will regulate your cycle so that you don't have these prolonged irregular periods, but also will decrease testosterone levels, which is sometimes a good side effect of the pill for women who have PCOS. Back to a normal level. Yeah, but if you don't have PCOS or the regular person, a lot of times your body's tissues are not responding to synthetic estrogen and progesterone the same way it does to natural.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So let's, uh, let's go through some of the things that were said. Okay. How terrible is birth control to female hormones, Bartlett asks.
Speaker: Crawford's response is, the birth control shuts off the brain's desire to send a signal to the ovary to make hormones.
Speaker: um Okay. So couple things.
Speaker: The question is extremely biased, but it's also very unclear. Okay. We're assuming birth control is terrible, but we are also talking about a category of contraception that includes like condoms.
Speaker: When we say birth control, we could be talking about condoms. We could be talking about the copper IUD. We could be talking about fertility awareness, like the the rhythm method. We could be talking about hormonal contraception. We could be talking literally about anything that people do to prevent pregnancy.
Speaker: and, and, Crawford doesn't take the opportunity as like a science communicator to to clarify that first, right? Like she she first should maybe go, well, let's talk about what we mean when we say birth control, right? And then possibly also dispel this idea that birth control is terrible for for female hormones. um You know, she just kind of assumes that the person, that the listener is asking about hormonal birth control, which I find very interesting because it seems to me like she's clearly inclined at this point, unprompted to steer the conversation in this direction. And then she says it shuts off. Listen to listen to this, like the way these words are put together. Okay. It shuts off the brain's desire to send a signal to the ovary to make hormones.
Speaker: That's one way that you could frame what birth control does. it it It shuts off desire, right? Like that that seems like a bad thing. Like I think this is a badness blank, right? Yeah. that My brain's desire has been shut off. What my brain really desires is to do this.
Speaker: Yeah. And as it rains up yeah and as if as if brains have desires on their own. Right. Separate from Right. Right. Yeah, and so I think that the type of hormonal contraception she's describing is, I believe, the combined pill, okay? And so this is the pill that contains just very, like, non-expert explanation here, two hormones. and There's estrogen. There's a progestin.
Speaker: And these reduce the signals that would normally stimulate the ovaries to release an egg. And so that's how it prevents ovulation. And it's also why that's the that's the mechanism by which it alleviates symptoms of of many disorders that affect the female reproductive system. so So she goes on and she goes, this makes it a very effective contraceptive option. But... There's the but.
Speaker: But as far as hormonal shifts, yeah. Like it's kind of her her her affect is like, yeah, your brain's not sending out fs h and Yeah.
Speaker: Your ovaries are not going to be making estradiol or progesterone. Mary Claire Haver, or test on testosterone. Or testosterone. Right. Okay, so there's the big but, right? she She acknowledges that it's an effective contraceptive option, right? She kind of appears fair and balanced, right? See, you know, I'm not like totally anti-birth control. I just told you that it's good, right? You know, you obviously know that it does this, but I mean, I mentioned a positive, right? But...
Speaker: As far as the hormonal shift, she's basically saying like, you you're shutting off all of these hormones. but i want I want to just really focus on the big butt here because i i want to sing you a song.
Speaker: Sarah, Sarah's going to do the beatbox. Oh, I thought that didn't work. Let's try and see if it works. Okay. Okay, you start the beatbox. Okay.
Speaker: oo They like big butts and they love to lie. Listen, you can't deny the pill gets mentioned with some itty bitty praise, then a big butt in your face. You'll get spooked.
Speaker: It worked. Sort of. ah But they do like, she does like big butts. Yeah, she likes big butts. um Okay, so if you're listening to this, right, this is a big badness blank because you all these hormones have been shut off, right? But all these hormones are shut off and testosterone. Think about who their audience is.
Speaker: Okay. A lot of people listening have bought hard into this message that women's health revolves around protecting, optimizing, balancing hormones, right? And then you hear that your brain's desire to do this has been shut off and that your ovaries aren't going to be making these hormones.
Speaker: Right. And you start to wonder, oh, my gosh, is this fill in the blank? Is this a bad thing? Right. This sounds bad. This sounds bad. And then this this part was really subtle and I found it really interesting. OK.
Speaker: She's like, you know, that's how they are sometimes helpful. OK. She's again like, you know, here, here, I'm going to throw you a bone here. And she has to think about it for a second. She's like, you know, um some women get hemorrhagic cysts with ovulation.
Speaker: you know, and and that's how they're helpful. And shes she likes she struggles for a second. and then And she's like, oh, how do they help? How are they good? Oh, hemorrhagic cysts.
Speaker: Hemorrhagic cysts? So random. Dude, she could have also mentioned that they reduce heavy bleeding. They treat painful periods. They relieve cyclical endometriosis pain. They lower ovarian and endometrial cancer risk.
Speaker: She hesitates for a moment because she needs to think. Like, it's hard for her to come up with something. And then she chooses... Painful bleeding from hemorrhagic ovarian cysts. I'm not fucking buying it.
Speaker: Yeah. Right. She fucking knows that it helps with all this other stuff. It's not hard for her to think of a reason. She's a double board certified reproductive endocrinologist and obstetrician gynecologist. Give me a fucking break, doc. Like, yeah know what is that you know what this shit does.
Speaker: But no, it takes her a second. And then this one, if you have PCOS, PMOS, right, they're often handed out like candy, you know? But I'm i'm really confused, okay?
Speaker: I'm really confused. So they're helpful. You just said they're helpful. Okay. The pill regulates the menstrual cycle so you don't have prolonged irregular periods. It decreases testosterone, which helps with the symptoms.
Speaker: I guess it's also irresponsibly over-prescribed, right? It's handed out like candy. But here's the deal. Just because something is commonly prescribed, it doesn't actually mean that it's over-prescribed. It's like saying, well, you know, for diabetics, they just hand out insulin like candy. Right. Would you say the same thing? Right. Would you say that about that? No. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. um Kemi said in our in our interview, this is a direct quote, there's decades of research about these different formulations. She's referring to hormonal birth control. There's decades of research about these different formulations and how effective they are in painful periods, heavy periods, endometriosis, fibroids.
Speaker: Okay. Okay. they're very effective forms of medication. yeah And in the interview, she, again, we said this in the beginning, like she makes the case for not calling them birth control, right? They have a wide ranging medicinal benefit for lots of different women working with lots of different issues and and birth control sounds coercive. Yeah. And so then and so then Dr. Natalie Crawford, she adds,
Speaker: this This final little chestnut. um your Your body's tissues are not responding to synthetic estrogen and progesterone the same way that they do to natural.
Speaker: This is a big badness and goodness blank, right? the The listener hears synthetic, right? estrogen and progesterone, and they hear natural.
Speaker: And these are like two opposing feeling words, right? Probably the listener, the lay listener, hears synthetic in me and they think fake, right? They think not as good as real.
Speaker: And they hear natural and they think this is this is good, this is better, right? So it's that, you know, natural is always better, appeal to nature fallacy. um But here what I find really ridiculous about this whole thing, um like even implying this, is that literally the only natural hormone that you can put into your body is horse estrogen from a female horse, a mare, which is called Premarin. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Pregnant mare urine is what it stands for. Yes. Thank you for that. Sorry. Were you about to say that? No. ah That's when I, when I found out that primer, cause I was like i pre in premer mary you' pregnant mare urine. I was like, you what now? Like it's literally tells you in the name. that's Yeah. And I don't, I don't think this is the most common way that people bring estrogen into their body, but it is the natural way that you would bring estrogen into your body. Cause you're not bringing human estrogen into your body. No, there's not somebody out there donating estrogen.
Speaker: So if it's not pregnant mare urine, it's fucking synthetic. Okay. So if you are taking hormones and you are not taking pregnant mare urine, you are taking synthetic hormones.
Speaker: And so I just, I'm wondering like, why even set this up this way in people's minds? Well, it's it's just more evidence that, you know, birth control bad. but i can said it I'm so confused because throughout this interview, there's so many instances in where they're like, but hormones are good. why know and And women should be allowed to take hormones. And I'm like, ah, which is it? I'm so confused. right Okay. Here I think are some, if we listen to the clip again, which we're not going to, but if you listen to it again, listeners, like here's what I think are reasonable takeaways that the average lay listener could leave with
Speaker: After hearing just the short clip, okay, I think they could very reasonably believe if I take the pill, it shuts down a part of my brain's normal functioning and takes away hormones, prevents the release of hormones that I need to be healthy.
Speaker: They would think it's useful for preventing pregnancy, but on the other hand, it might harm my body in the process. They might think, you know what, doctors are just handing this out like candy. They're prescribing it too casually. So now when a doctor prescribes this, I'm going to be like extra skeptical.
Speaker: It might be appropriate if I have PMOS, but if I don't, it's probably not, it's probably not healthy for me. And synthetic hormones are worse for my body than natural ones.
Speaker: um These are not, in my opinion, takeaways that will make women's lives better i think they uh make women's lives worse yeah i agree All right. So our next clip is Bartlett and Crawford talking about being on birth control and that you lose awareness of your body. So Crawford is claiming that being on the pill, on the hormonal birth control pill, especially if you started too early, means you're missing out on tracking your cycle and in particular your luteal phase length and thus
Speaker: you're missing potential signs of dysfunction that you would otherwise be able to catch during your regular having your cycle. And Bartlett then reports that his girlfriend, Mel regrets taking the pill for 10 years because she didn't understand its effects.
Speaker: And then she also had a period of prolonged absent menstrual cycle after she stopped being on the pill.
Speaker: But to your earlier point, Steven, we have a generation of women on contraceptive options who are not tracking their cycles. We have women who are not taught how to track their cycles. They don't know when ovulation occurs. They don't know how long their luteal phase is. If I say the first sign of ovulatory dysfunction or having a problem with your cycle is a short luteal phase.
Speaker: Well, you only know that if you're tracking when ovulation occurs, because otherwise you could still have a regular cycle, but you don't know that something's abnormal.
Speaker: So there's that. Let's listen to Bartlett's response and then we'll get into it. Mel regrets. My girlfriend, she's very open. She regrets being on the birth control pill for 10 years because she had no idea what it what it was doing to her body. And then obviously when she came off her cycle, I think she spent, like you, Natalie, two years trying to figure out what was going on and she didn't have a period for an extended a period of time after she came off. What are you saying to your daughters about the birth control pill that wasn't said to you? Are you recommending them to use it how you guys used it or...
Speaker: I mean, we were started on it so young. i i do see a trend towards not starting it as young as it was started in our generation. and I think that that is important. I see, you know, personally, my daughter is not quite at that stage yet. So we haven't had to make these decisions.
Speaker: Okay, so let's reiterate. So Crawford is claiming that being on the pill, especially if you started too early, means that you're missing out on understanding the phases of your cycle and what they might indicate, especially disease.
Speaker: Bartlett then responds that his girlfriend Mel regrets taking the pill for 10 years because she didn't understand its effects and she didn't get to do all this tracking. So each of them, their message kind of bolsters the other, right? She shows up with his so-called science, right?
Speaker: right? Because we got to look into this luteal phase business ah to to back his anecdote. And then he provides the emotion and the story to connect with the science claims, right? Okay. So before we talk a little bit more about this, I was just very skeptical because I literally never heard this before. i was very skeptical of this idea that we need to know our luteal phase length because it's going to indicate to us if we're getting sick.
Speaker: I have... Quite literally never heard that before, which doesn't mean it's not true, but I felt like if it was true, there would be a lot more like public health outreach about it, about the importance of tracking it. Like we would know by now. So I went to consensus, which is the AI that we use to look at research.
Speaker: And I asked consensus two questions. The first question was, is change in luteal phase length, the first sign of major disease for women who ovulate? And then the second quote question was,
Speaker: is luteal phase length change ever a sign of major disease? And the answer to both was no. And I just want to read you this real quick before we move on, which is it's a summary quote from a 2020 paper by Naj Mambadi et al.
Speaker: And here's the quote. Luteal phase length varies substantially within healthy ovulatory women. with within women variability, meaning you yourself compared to yourself, exceeding three days in 59% of women, undermining its utility as a stable disease marker. So that's just straight nonsense, right? Because your own, a totally healthy woman's luteal phase could vary in an excess, exceeding three days. It could be five days longer one time, and one day longer the next. In fifty in two thirds of women, that's what's going on. So this is not a data point that means anything that she is suggesting that it does, right?
Speaker: But they're using this very kind of they're using this language of loss, right? It's this you have lost knowledge. It's this information that you're losing. Like everything's lost if you're not tracking your your luteal phase.
Speaker: Dr. Kami also refutes this idea that we need to be cycling so that we can track health markers. Yes, she says, right. Yes, there are times in which not having a cycle is an indication of a problem. But that doesn't mean that somebody who's taking contraception that has the effect of suppressing ovulation and suppressing the menstrual cycle is endangering their body.
Speaker: Right. As Laura mentioned earlier, we talk about women losing their period from anorexia or reds. It's not the same thing as choosing to suppress it for any number of reasons. We also talked about how this week of being off the placebo pills was basically to try to pacify the Catholic church. And that didn't even really work anyway. yeah,
Speaker: You know, both this round table and Kemi are saying there needs to be greater education around menstruation and contraception. And even that belief that Lauren Colenzo Semple debunked with her research that you should be exercising differently on different parts of your cycle is not true. There is no health benefit to tracking your cycle unless you are actively attempting to become pregnant, right? That's one point in your life where you're going to suddenly start paying a lot more attention, right? yeah As you should. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So why, it weirds me out so much, and you'll see this later as well, this whole round table discussion is so celebratory around getting as many periods as you can.
Speaker: Like, Always be cycling. Always always be menstruating. i Always be. What's that thing from like, from ah like selling sales pitches, like always be closing, right?
Speaker: Always be menstruating. Yeah. Right. We know from research already that the moral menstrual cycles a woman has in her lifetime, the higher risk she has of either uterine or ovarian cancer.
Speaker: So why, are we emphasizing the benefit of just have as many periods as you can? Right. Doesn't really make sense. We talked about that with Dr. Kemi, right? Like you're going to need, you're going to need to be pregnant a lot.
Speaker: You know, if you want to have the same type of number of cycles as women did back pre birth. Yeah, historically, you're gonna just need to be pregnant a lot, because when you're pregnant, you're not cycling, right? right And so historically, women weren't getting their periods as much as these people are claiming that you should be.
Speaker: Right. And so, you know, you you want to make America cycle again and pregnant again. Like that that's what you're going to need to have to to do because otherwise you are actually cycling a heck of a lot more.
Speaker: than women were, and that carries some cancer risk, right? And we talk about this with Dr. Kemi, so you gotta go back and listen to that episode. It's fascinating. um I also wanna just push on what she, you know, there's always like this, like, won't you think of the children? like This invoking of the children, right? and And so the question is, like, how are you talking to your daughters about this? Because there's this implied harm, right? Right.
Speaker: And she says, um well, we we just don't see that girls are being started on it as young nowadays. Like, it's changing. Yeah. And we actually looked that up in consensus. Like, is it true that today girls are starting birth control later? And the opposite is true, that actually adolescent girls initiate hormonal contraception today at younger or similar ages as they did in earlier decades. So I'm not sure where that observation comes from.
Speaker: yeah What's implied, listen for the the goodness and badness blanks, right? What's implied is that, oh my God, they're starting them so young. And how is that negatively impacting their futures?
Speaker: And we see a lot more of that in later clips as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, we are now going to shift to talking about a clip that we have called Haver's inability to manage her PCOS with lifestyle and the crutch that birth control apparently became for her. um So what you're going to hear here is Dr. Mary Claire Haver share a personal anecdote, which she frequently does.
Speaker: I'm just like going to pop a side note in here. Sure. She's watching. She's definitely watching. Dr. Haver, you have really missed what I think is your true calling, which is that you are an exceptionally good storyteller.
Speaker: You are exceptionally empathic and charismatic. And you are really good at using personal anecdotes to bring people over to your side. And I feel like if you just switch to teaching people how to do that. Wait, I don't understand. What do you mean switch to people trying to do that?
Speaker: If she would just become like a a marketing coach. Oh, I see. Teach people how to do what she's so good at. Become like a storytelling coach, like help people turn their life stories into persuasive narratives to support a brand.
Speaker: um She's really, really good at it. Yes. You know what I was going to say, what I thought you were going to say when you said she's so charismatic and you know she gets people on her side. I thought you were going to say she should start a cult.
Speaker: because she kind of already has one. I mean, in in like a very loose use of word cult. us um Technically, you know, she does not have a cult, but but she would good at it he has a cult following. Okay. So anyway, she shares this personal anecdote about having PCOS and she's going through medical school and she implies that the hormonal birth control that she was taking for symptom relief was a crutch. Okay. So let's listen.
Speaker: And Mary, I forgot to ask, were you on the birth control? Yeah, we were off and on for 20 years. So polycystic ovarian syndrome, that was the treatment. I mean, I learned about nutrition kind of on the back end, but the life that I had set up for myself between, you know, medical school, residency, and then going into the field of OBGYN with limited sleep, you know, working 100-hour weeks, there...
Speaker: I didn't have a environment that would have been conducive to be able to manage that disease with lifestyle. And I can look back and say that honestly now, um, with, without using the crutch of the birth control pill to manage my symptoms.
Speaker: Yeah. Hmm. Hmm.
Speaker: Okay. So there's a couple of things. Okay. So she says, so polycystic ovarian syndrome, that was the treatment. She's implying that birth, hormonal birth control was the treatment, but let's be clear.
Speaker: It's still the treatment. It is the treatment. It's the treatment. And it's an effective one for some women. Okay. So it's, this is not a thing of the past. Okay. Second thing she says is I learned about nutrition as a doctor in training, right?
Speaker: I learned about nutrition kind of on the back end. And so I think what she means there is that she learned about nutrition later, right? That after initially managing the condition with birth control, she learns about nutrition ah And that's because, you know, maybe what's implied there is that like doctors don't learn about nutrition, which you hear a lot as a way to kind of cast out on medical doctors advice, which is that, oh, well, they don't know anything about nutrition. Well,
Speaker: They do. They actually do learn about nutrition. um They don't spend nearly as much time on it as like an RD would because just for a second, try to think about like everything a doctor needs to know about the human body and about diseases and about medicines so that they don't fuck up. Okay.
Speaker: Like, so they don't make some terrible mistake or miss something. It is... appreciation to doctors, like a lot of schoolwork, a lot of things they need to know. And yes, they do learn about nutrition. They just don't spend as much time on it as other specialists would, okay, because they can't.
Speaker: um So she says, like, I learned about nutrition later after managing it with birth control. And I think what we're supposed to hear there is that you know maybe if she had known about nutrition earlier, she wouldn't have needed it the birth control. right She wouldn't have needed that hormonal birth control. like right In our mind, we're like, you know what's kind of being communicated here is that nutrition, lifestyle, is the real treatment. Okay, that's how you really address the issue. Hormonal birth control is the crutch.
Speaker: It's the inferior fallback. So she's she's creating this false choice, right? She's contrasting lifestyle management with pharmaceutical management. And you either manage your condition properly with lifestyle, goodness blank,
Speaker: Right? Nutrition and sleep, right? She also mentions that she's not getting enough sleep. Or you rely on medication, hormonal birth control, as the fallback, the crutch, the badness blank. Okay?
Speaker: The thing is, though, is that they are both valuable, that we want to actually maybe use both. Okay? yeah And then she says, but the life that I had set up for myself between you know medical school, residency, and then going into the field of OBGYN with limited sleep, you know ah working 100-hour weeks there. I didn't have an environment that would have been conducive to be able to manage that disease with lifestyle.
Speaker: So my question is, who else of the 3.5 million people who have listened to this might find lifestyle management difficult apart from young physicians in training going through medical school, Sarah? Oh, I don't know. Maybe all of them. All of the ones who are dealing with PMOS and are stressed out, maybe literally just being alive right now is a very stressful experience.
Speaker: I'm just guessing. Yeah, yeah. So this this doctor who is famous, who's incredibly wealthy, is on this show talking about her incredibly privileged trajectory that she was on that brought her to where she is now out of becoming a physician.
Speaker: And we're supposed to hear, all of us listening are supposed to hear, God dang, it must have been hard for her, right? To manage that lifestyle? Whew. And you know some of these people listening are single parents.
Speaker: Some of these people are are juggling multiple jobs. And they have children and limited money and little control over their schedules. And they have some painful conditions. right And they should think, well, you know I'm on this medication, or I'm not, and I'm thinking about it. And it and it helps me, or it could help me. But you know what? I guess i'm that's not the right way to manage it.
Speaker: you know That's just a crutch. That's just a crutch. And instead, if I do it that way, what I'm really doing is I'm i'm just compensating for my personal failures and my inability to have a better lifestyle.
Speaker: Get it together. Yeah. Why can't you just get it together and not use this medication for your diagnosed disease and instead just lifestyle your way out of it? Laurel, what's wrong with you?
Speaker: Why are you what? You're such a weak baby. Like that's kind of what I hear. Yeah. I mean, I really look up to Dr. Mary Claire Haver because like she's going to show me the way to be a better person, to be a good person, right? To do this the right way.
Speaker: Okay. And then she says, and I can look back and say that honestly now without using the crutch of the birth control pill to manage my symptoms, like I can look back and say this honestly, that I just didn't have my nutrition dialed in. I didn't have my sleep dialed in.
Speaker: So she calls using hormonal birth control the crutch um and and morally downgrades it and frames it, you know, what is actually today an effective treatment for symptom relief for some women who have PMOS as something that she merely relied on because she couldn't manage her condition supposedly the better way through lifestyle. So again, like someone with a less demanding schedule than a physician in training might wonder, oh well, what's my fucking excuse? You know, why can't I get my shit together?
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. It's very, it's, it's ah what I hate is that all of these framings, the, each of these different points that they are claiming around hormonal birth control, whether it's the loss of information, whether you're just using it as a crutch, it all suggests a failure on the part of the woman choosing to use it. yeah it's It all suggests like this moral failing.
Speaker: this failure of character that you you're just relying on this thing and it's bad for you. And if you're doing that, then you must also be a bad person in some way, right? You're, you're, you're, you're not, you need to be strong. And it it, to me, I hear a little, I hear this like sort of dog whistle of conservatism where there's this concept of the women should suffer, right?
Speaker: A little bit. There should be a little bit of suffering for women because women are long suffering and aren't they incredible and they birth our children and we should be grateful for them.
Speaker: But again, there is this element, you know, it's, it's so weird because at one, they're kind of talking out of two sides of their mouth. On one hand, they're sort of saying, women have been suffering for too long and it's wrong. But then on the other side, they're like, but don't take this thing that will relieve your suffering.
Speaker: There's a, you have to do it this other way. Yeah. Or if your doctor gives you hormonal birth control, you know, prescribes it for you, they're doing so irresponsibly because they don't know about nutrition.
Speaker: Right. right So if it doesn't make the person feel like a bad person because they don't have their shit together with a better lifestyle, it at least makes them maybe not trust their doctor who is actually possibly prescribing them the best line of treatment. Yeah. Right.
Speaker: OK, so let's recap. right Haver shares a personal anecdote. She does it like just you watch her and you're like, you're you know i want to like you. um She describes her her genuinely demanding circumstances as a physician in training. I don't doubt them. She acknowledges that the pill managed her symptoms.
Speaker: That's good. She does not actually explicitly say that birth control is ineffective. She also does not say that everyone can manage PMOS through lifestyle alone.
Speaker: She doesn't say that women should stop taking it. But nevertheless, here are some reasonable takeaways that I think people might still have after listening to this 44-second clip. They might think lifestyle changes are better, more legitimate treatments for PMOS. They're better.
Speaker: They're not better. um And also it's not an either or. It's not an either or. It's not an either or. Setting it up that way is the false choice. It's false. It's false to set it up that way. You shouldn't even set it up that way. Do you see? Birth control is a fallback when you can't manage your lifestyle, right? It's just the thing you do when you can't do something else. False choice. Not true. Not true.
Speaker: Had she learned about nutrition earlier, this is what the listener might might come away with, had she learned about it earlier, she might not have even needed to take that hormonal birth control. And someone might think, reflecting on their own life as a woman with more time than a physician in medical school, geez, you know, I really should be able to manage my lifestyle and not have to rely on this crutch of hormonal birth control to manage my PMOS symptoms. so What's my fucking problem?
Speaker: Yeah. What's my excuse? Again, I will say, if these are the takeaways that women could come away with, which I think it's reasonable to say that they could, this is not helpful to women. No. No, it's actually pretty fucking insidiously harmful.
Speaker: Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Let's, uh, we're going to go back to Dr. Crawford making some claims in this next clip about using hormonal birth control for endometriosis treatment, which is something that it's also used for. some of these claims are accurate. Some of these claims are really questionable, but let's take a listen and then we'll talk about it.
Speaker: And Dr. Crawford, why don't we have a cure? Mm-hmm. Well, because it hasn't been studied is one of is the primary answer. The secondary answer is that often the the goals are tough with endo because if estrogen feeds it, we all are going to sit at this table and talk about how important estrogen is for your body. And ah a lot of the treatments that exist for endometriosis take o estrogen away to try to not feed these lesions. And that has a slew of other symptoms and long-term health implications as well.
Speaker: Truly, We don't even give women option to try to feel better. They are given birth control pills because, hey, I'm going to stop the ovulatory cycle. I'm going to, you're going to less what we call unopposed estrogen days. do have symptomatic relief. Yeah, but we have, and that's going to help hopefully with some of your symptoms. And it can for some women. It doesn't reverse disease. It doesn't cure it. It doesn't make anything better, but it can slow down the progression. Any of these treatments that do halt the ovulatory process, but it severely impacts
Speaker: mean, beyond so many layers of your your mental, your emotional health, your relationships, but your fertility. Stage three or four disease, regardless of your age, you're going to have a less than a 20% chance of conceiving naturally over the course of your life if you have stage three or four disease.
Speaker: Okay. So yeah, one of the things that's so fascinating to me with Dr. Crawford is regardless of where the conversation or the question starts, she always manages to bring it around to something relating to your possible future fertility, whether or not you're going to have a baby. And again, we recognize she's a fertility expert, but that's not the question here, right? That's not what we're talking about. So let's, let's, let's break this down a little bit.
Speaker: so The initial question, okay, why don't we have a cure for endometriosis? She says, endometriosis lacks a cure primarily because it has not been sufficiently studied. Yes, this is true.
Speaker: And Dr. Kemi points this out as well. So, and then she says, estrogen feeds endometriosis lesions, but so for suppressing estrogen can cause other symptoms and long-term health consequences.
Speaker: Does it? Not according to Dr. Kemi. And per Dr. Kemi, one successful treatment for cyclical endometriosis pain is progestin and estrogen combined.
Speaker: So her setup that we have to remove estrogen completely is either, again, it's like, is this ignorant or is this purposeful? Right. Right. We don't know. And then she says, and this is one of the things that I found the most outrageous, but it goes, it goes back to this idea of like the goodness and the badness, right? She goes, we don't give them a chance to feel better right. With like other, with other supposed options. And I'm like, the fuck other options is she talking about? Right. So here's, cause I was like, I looked up, i was like, what are the common treatments? Okay. So she's, she's either talking about like diet and exercise, which may have some modest effect.
Speaker: ah She's talking about possibly taking like NSAIDs, right? Like an ibuprofen for pain. which give me a fucking break. If you've ever had like a really bad period, yeah multiply bad that by, i don't even know how much to get a sense of what endometriosis feels like. Yeah. or major surgery to remove right deletion. So those are the other options. Okay. So first diet and exercise. Yes. They're always going to help with inflammation, but in in this condition, it's extremely unlikely to be enough. And just like with PMOS, it should be used in conjunction with other therapies.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. Why are we selecting out of all of these options, hormonal therapy as the bad guy and, and putting the onus on the patient who's actively in pain and looking for relief to try everything else, right? Her version is they need to try everything else. I'm assuming she's not saying surgery, uh, before they get to try hormonal birth control, right? i don't know Where has this like first don't know, do no harm gone?
Speaker: yeah I looked at the statistics about how effective hormone therapy is for women with endometriosis and the stats show hormone therapy reduces pain symptoms for two thirds of Two thirds, the majority of women yeah with endometriosis. She doesn't say that. She says it's going to help hopefully with some of your symptoms and it can for some women. No, no, no, not some most.
Speaker: Yeah. Most. And she ah she also says we don't give them a chance to feel better. I'm sorry. Giving them a treatment that reduces their pain symptoms is also giving them a chance yeah to feel better. Right.
Speaker: First do no harm, right? To me, it's harmful to tell, like if that person came in and you said, well, really you need to give diet and exercise a good go first and you send them away and you say for a month, you got to do this. That to me is not first do no harm because first do no harm is I know that you're in pain. I know there is a treatment available to you that has been approved and is is used by lots and lots of women. And I am choosing to not give it to you because I have this idea in my head that you haven't tried hard enough yet.
Speaker: Right. Right. Again, it's this like women's got to suffer a little. i And then,
Speaker: I love when Mary Claire ever jumps in. So MCH jumps in to clarify that we do in fact get symptom of relief, right? She's actually providing some real facts here. Yeah. She's, she's kind of like lately, like pushing back a little, like oh but we do get symptom relief. Right. And then.
Speaker: you know, Carford says, yes, help some of your symptoms, some women, it doesn't, she goes, it doesn't reverse disease. It doesn't cure it. It doesn't make anything better. It does make things better. That's not true. And then also you're changing the subject, right? yeah We have no treatment that cures the disease. So why are you saying like surgery doesn't cure it? It just removes what's, you know, the, the painful sort, the source of pain. Right. yeah A better diet and exercise doesn't cure it either. Right. So, but for some reason she's saying this hormonal one, well, it doesn't cure it. Right. doesn't reverse the disease. Nothing does. Right.
Speaker: But it does improve quality of life. And that is the point that actually Mary Claire Haver is jumping in and making. Right. I take, for example, I take Imodium every single morning.
Speaker: Imodium is for diarrhea. I have, I'm on a medication right now that gives me diarrhea. So I take Imodium every day. It doesn't cure my metastatic breast cancer, but it does cure me of diarrhea.
Speaker: And that makes my quality of life, my ability to like keep weight on my body, my ability to have a regular normal day, a whole lot better. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Speaker: The idea that symptom relief isn't enough of a reason yeah is such horseshit, right? So she goes on to say birth control and other treatments that halt ovulation can relieve symptoms, right? But don't reverse or cure it. We agree.
Speaker: We need more research. Right. It's just the fact. That's the truth, right? that thatt That's a true thing she's saying. Yes. It is undeniably true. Yeah. We need more research. Yep. She says endometriosis severely affects mental and emotional health relationships and fertility. Absolutely.
Speaker: Definitely. And then she says stage three or four endometriosis means a less than 20% lifetime chance of a conceiving naturally regardless of age This has nothing to do with what we're discussing.
Speaker: When I'm listening to that part, i it's like, i I don't know if she's talking. Now when she says this, you have a 20% less lifetime chance of conceiving naturally with a naturally regardless of age. It happens, and you can only kind of get what I'm saying if you listen to it again, it happens so seamlessly that I think she's talking about birth control, hormonal birth control results in you having a less than 20% lifetime chance of conceiving naturally regardless regardless of age, like what you're what what you're about to say, I'm sorry, is that she kind of flips the conversation like super quickly in a way where the listener would, I mean, I'm still, when I heard it just again for like the eighth time, was like, is she talking about a decreased...
Speaker: ability to conceive naturally because of taking hormonal birth control or taking or having endometriosis. Like I'm literally still a little bit confused about how, why are we anyway, I'm sorry. no No, no, You, you bring up a very important point, which is she suddenly starts talking about the issues around stage three or four endometriosis. And actually some point while we're talking, I'm going to go and just check that that statistic is accurate yeah and that she is actually, because we're talking about using birth control for your symptoms, your pain relief from your endometriosis. And now she's talking about how, if you're someone who has stage three or four endometriosis, that you have a twenty less than 20% lifetime chance of conceiving naturally, right? Which is horrible. And if that's something that's very important to you and you have stage three or four endometriosis and you are discovering that it's you have maybe been attempting to conceive naturally and it has not been possible. And I feel for those people, it's terrible.
Speaker: But why are we now again, once again, bringing back the conversation to this idea of conceiving? And why is she so obsessed with everyone conceiving naturally? If you want to become a parent, there are so many other ways available now to become a parent if that's what you want.
Speaker: And the idea of, well, I'm not going to give you birth control to take away real pain that you're having now because for two thirds of the women with this condition, because of this possibility associated with stage three or four of this disease that we're not clear if it has anything at all to do with being on birth control. It is a wild thing for this doctor to say, why is meaningful symptom relief being rhetorically minimized when she's discussing an established treatment. This is not how doctors consider treatment. You're supposed to treat the person in front of you, not a future potential child. And certainly if the treatment
Speaker: would impact your ability to conceive in the future. Absolutely. You need to be educating people with the facts, right? But nobody's arguing that we should not be presenting all of the facts on birth control, if we are prescribing birth control, what is this woman practicing medicine? Like it's a little terrifying to me because she seems to have, she's, it's like this glitch in her brain where she can't help, but bring everything back to the Holy grail of natural fertility and natural conception and childbirth. Well, she's, she's not speaking as a doctor. You see, she's speaking as a brand. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah yeah She's speaking as a brand. This is her brand. And she says on the in she says in the interview, like, look, I'm biased. And she she does it a couple of times. She says, my whole thing is fertility. Like, this is what I talk about. This is what I care about. Okay, good on her for...
Speaker: admitting her bias, like we're all biased, we all have bias, and she's forthright about it. But I'm sorry, it it doesn't actually excuse the way that she's misrepresenting science and also continually coming back to something we're not even talking about and making symptom relief feel like it's not real relief.
Speaker: And you don't deserve it is also kind of what it I hear a little bit, right? Because you have to try these other options first. Women should be trying these other non-hormonal options before they try this. And it's not, you know, because the the hormonal options aren't actually making anything better. Right. When for two thirds of women, they are like there's a, there's one, it's one thing to have bias. We all have bias, right?
Speaker: It's another thing to actually misrepresent data, yeah which is what she's doing. Yeah. Yeah. So this next clip is called Sims Cold Exposure Pilot. um Notice how we haven't really heard much from Sims or Wright. We will hear from each of them once. And so now it's Sims' turn. So I want to give you a little background about what gets discussed before this clip because it does it does matter.
Speaker: So before the clip we're going to play from Stacey Sims, Bartlett reads something from a listener. And it goes, quote, he says, 26-year-old, the advice given to her by the and NHS was to go back on the pill to solve for the pains that she was getting.
Speaker: And he waits for a response. And Crawford obliges and she answers first by acknowledging that there are some dismissive doctors.
Speaker: And in this way, she associates prescribing the pill with the dismissive care that you might receive from a dismissive doctor. And she also acknowledges that endometriosis treatment options are limited and that the pill substantially improves symptoms for some women and it is an important part of their care, okay?
Speaker: So she is meaningfully acknowledging its benefits, but... She then also contrasts this line of treatment with finding the root cause, right? The root cause of ah of this endometriosis, right? So then Mary Claire Haver chimes in, okay? And she adds a kind of alarming sounding aside. It's very, won't you think of the children?
Speaker: I'm getting a little Handmaid's Tale vibe off of it too. She's like, um you know, right on the heels of what Dr. Crawford says. She says something like, oh my gosh, these young patients are having to make decisions early on about their fertility. And it's so hard because they're so young, right? And and again, there's this ambiguity, right?
Speaker: yeah I'm not sure if she means that we should be concerned because they're having to make these decisions early because of the endometriosis or because of the hormonal birth control. Because again, it's unclear to me what they're referencing because they're not being clear. There's like in vague insinuations happening. And so anyway, this is where we are now where we're kind of just left wondering like what What did they mean, right? And so then keep this framing in mind. All of this happens. Keep this framing in mind because then we hear from Sims.
Speaker: Sims has her moment. And she goes right ahead and proposes some pilot data around cold exposure therapy as a possible line of treatment for endometriosis.
Speaker: All right, let's roll tape.
Speaker: We have some pilot data looking at taking some of the nuances of recovery and looking at how to dampen inflammation. So we have some pilot data that's showing when women do cold exposure, that it dampens inflammation improves their symptomology.
Speaker: So I'm always thinking on the outside, like what other things can we do to dampen inflammation in a positive way to improve symptomology? How does that work? So if we're thinking about the responses to cold exposure, I'm not talking about ice, we're talking about cold water exposure.
Speaker: It creates a cascade of immune responses that kind of protects the body. So we're reducing inflammation, we're improving parasympathetic, which reduces stress. So if we're timing it and they know when their period is and they can go, okay, well, for the next or the 10 to 14 days before my period starts, I'm going have 10 minutes of cold water exposure.
Speaker: And over the course of three to four months, that immune response becomes learned automatically. So it reduces symptomology. So it becomes one of the treatment options that we have for some of our athletes that have endo and interferes with their training. So, i mean, the cold water exposure available there. So that's how we started the pilot study. um cold like but Someone wanted to do this at home. 10 degrees Celsius.
Speaker: So what is that? About 40? It feels cold. Yeah, it feels really cold, but not an ice bath. Not an ice bath because ice is ice is not good for winter. Can you get that in the shower? you You need to. This is like cold submergence. Can you do that at a home tub just with yeah turning on the spigot? You could get back if you get really cold. Yeah, you might want to add a little bit of ice and let it melt. But um not ice baths that we see in all the popular media because that is way too cold for a woman's body. It does the opposite. It's a severe stress and causes a stress response rather than a parasympathetic calming response that we want.
Speaker: I just cannot, cannot. Yeah. so i So yeah you go, I have so many. oh my God. We have some pilot data. Let's start with that.
Speaker: We have some pilot data looking at the nuances of recovery And how to dampen inflammation fucking pilot data. Pilot data. That's what we have.
Speaker: We have pilot data, Sarah. Yeah. Is this, can i talk about why pilot data is not good? Could you? Yeah. Okay. So if you, if you're like, why are you harping on about pilot data? Why, why, who gives a shit? Surely it's all the same.
Speaker: Okay. This is why, this is why we care, right? Pilot data or, or preclinical data is something that shows ah some sort of intervention or medication or something is true in a small group.
Speaker: However, sometimes when that small group is then expanded, which has to happen first before it can be considered like actual research, right? Pilot data is is preliminary.
Speaker: The results change. And this potential positive impact, it does not borne out. Best case scenario, the and the the intervention is kind of neutral and doesn't do what the claim is.
Speaker: But there's lots of worst case scenario examples. And one of the worst and most disastrous ones that some of the listeners may remember is this drug called phalidomide that was given to pregnant mothers in the nineteen sixty s It's an anti-nausea drug. It seemed to have no bad side effects in pilot data. It was then given to pregnant women in 46 countries based on this data.
Speaker: And as a result, about 10,000 babies were born with severe birth defects. Half of these babies died under the age of one. There were also innumerous miscarriages and stillbirths, right?
Speaker: Pilot data does not always then lead to conclusive data. Just doesn't. and And we shouldn't be discussing pilot data on and on a podcast. No, no, we shouldn't. We shouldn't be discussing pilot data as a as an alternative treatment.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, to contrast these well-established first line treatments. um Not at all. ah You know, and we're not saying that. ah cold water therapy is like taking thalidomide like we're not trying to say that we're just making the case that like pilot data ain't where ain't where the answers are that's not where you you get at the most effective things that we should be doing right in serious researchers and serious scientists would never example, would never bring pilot table data to a table discussion like this. They just wouldn't. They'd be like, it's not it's we don't know yet.
Speaker: Yeah. No. Because let me just put this in perspective, okay? So it'd sort of be like if there were, I don't know, a three and a half hour podcast episode devoted to casting doubt on evidence-based water sanitation practices that are widely utilized by municipalities all over the country and world and devoting significant airtime on this podcast to explain to people that, you know what, actually, you can dy your own water filtration system in your kitchen using just the right combination of material that you can find at home, right? So sand, charcoal,
Speaker: while also spending inordinate amounts of time stressing that it can't be too much sand, right? Definitely not too much sand because too much sand is bad. This would be absurd, right? Like if we heard if we heard them talking about how you really probably shouldn't trust the way that the city that you live in the United States claims its water and instead you should filter your water and then like just get really excited about the ingredients and like you know The fact that something can be done at home with natural material, it doesn't make it effective. It doesn't establish that it works. And pilot data does almost nothing to strengthen whether or not it works.
Speaker: Okay, so she says, um we have some pilot data. That's showing that when women do cold exposure, it dampens inflammation, and improves their symptomology. OK, so first of all, this is really vague. Like what what symptoms are we talking about?
Speaker: OK, are we talking about exercise soreness, menstrual pain, endometriosis pain? um She doesn't really ever identify that, right? She mentions that this data is on the nuances of recovery.
Speaker: OK, so recovery from like exercise and sport. ah The thing is, is that the question's about endometriosis, right? Right. um Not about recovery from exercise. It's not about that. And then her next quote is, it creates a cascade of immune responses that kind of protects the body. So we're reducing inflammation. We're improving parasympathetic, which reduces stress. So if we're timing it and they know when their period is, got to know.
Speaker: Always be tracking. Always be tracking. And they go, okay, well, here's the protocol, right? For the next 10 to 14 days before my period starts, I'm going to have 10 minutes of cold water exposure. Like this is just classic Sims. Like if you listen to Episode 111, we talk about her mechanism theater and her protocols. This is what she does, right? She she takes a proposed mechanism, cold reduces inflammation. She makes an enormous leap from one population to a completely different one and then provides a very precise protocol, usually around knowing when you
Speaker: ovulate or get your period. Okay. And she uses pilot data as her supporting evidence. Like that's exactly what she does yeah so often for so many different things. This is her MO. You just got like a great example of it.
Speaker: Okay. And then she says, so it becomes one of the treatment options that we have for some of our athletes that have endo, okay? So now she's kind of like sealing the deal, you know? She's like, listen, I know about this, because I have athletes with endo, and and they have success with it. um But, you know, again, we've got this anecdote, okay?
Speaker: And it's not evident, anecdotes are not evidence. no We can't judge whether whatever benefited her athletes um would benefit anyone else with endometriosis. It's unfalsifiable, right? We can't test this. We can't test this anecdote.
Speaker: We can't use it as evidence, okay? But someone who's a lay person listening would would go, oh, well, this seems legit. so So Sims takes pilot data from one very niche population of people and then tells 3.5 million listeners about it, many of whom might be suffering from endometriosis.
Speaker: implying that they should they should give it a shot, you know? Yeah. and I mean, the thing the thing that drives me the most crazy about this And then, you know, Mary Claire Haver getting into the details of like, well, how much do they need to be submerged? Right. So I'm thinking i'm like, okay, I'm somebody they're telling me I should be trying other options because this hormonal birth control that has, it works for my symptoms. Apparently it is bad news. If I try it, I'm a, I'm a bad person. I haven't tried enough other things. So I'm supposed to, first of I'm supposed to know my period, which if you're on, if you have endometriosis is not that it's not a regular thing that you're tracking easily, but in any case I should know it. And then ah in in the two week period before I'm going to ovulate, I'm going to run myself a cold bath, throw some ice in there and get it and for 10 minutes every day. No, no, no, no, no. You can't put ice in.
Speaker: No, no. Put ice in to melt it to get at the right temperature. so It's too cold. No, no, no. But that you have to use if the water's not cold enough. I thermometer. Just be careful because if it's too cold, it does the reverse. Does the reverse. So I make sure it's 10 degrees Celsius with like my meat thermometer. i don't even know what I'm using.
Speaker: put in enough ice to make sure it's 10 degrees, not too much, take some ice out if it's too too much and get in there for 10 minutes every day in the middle of, at some point in my already probably very busy day, I'm supposed to be making this probably half hour event happen instead of let's use a medication that's already been approved and works for your symptoms.
Speaker: What in the actual fuck? What in the actual fuck? So, okay, well, who are the authorities on endometriosis, right? um We've got the World Endometriosis Society. We've got the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. We've got the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. We've got the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. We've got the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. We've got the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada. We've got the Endometriosis Foundation of America. And we've got Endometriosis UK. Okay. what are the the treatment options that these authorities recommend?
Speaker: Well, the first line treatment is hormonal birth control with progestin, um as well as pain management medications. Mm-hmm. The second line treatment, medications that reduce ovarian hormone production.
Speaker: Third line treatment, surgery, maybe also supportive care for pain, um psychological support. Notice how none of them, like not even one of them mentions c cold therapy for endometriosis. why Why the fuck then does it get so much air on this interview? like Like if you're a listener who's a fan of one of these doctors and you have a You know, you're smart, but you don't know a ton about science or medicine, right?
Speaker: Which is most people, okay? You could reasonably come away from this, like watching this and go like, wow, cold exposure tackles the inflammation behind endometriosis, and it trains the immune system over time to reduce symptoms of endometriosis.
Speaker: Wow. You might think, wow, this Stacey Sims person has figured out just the right temperature, just the right timing, just the right frequency, just the right duration for this cold exposure. And there is clearly a right and a wrong way to do this.
Speaker: You might think, hey, you know what, if it works for Sims athletes who have endometriosis, it could work for me. You could think, wow, I could try this at home. I don't even need to go to the doctor. ah Maybe I don't need those hormone treatments.
Speaker: And, you know, watching all of these experts they all seem to be taking like a genuine interest in this idea like some of them don't seem to know that it existed some of them look like they're learning on the fly they seem pretty enthusiastic about it they're asking questions about it it seems like they're excited about it this seems fucking like not only credible but actually kind of cool right okay so like so like so at its best at its best this could become for some listeners just an enormous fucking waste of time
Speaker: At its worst, it's directing women away from treatment that works in favor of ah fucking sitting in cold water. Miserable. but Also, it's fucking miserable. Yeah. fuck you like I want me you want me personally, i hate cold water. So I'm personally so offended.
Speaker: But also just horrified that like this is what passes like this. They think that this is good for women like this. This circus act. This is a fucking circus act. Sorry, i'm yeah I'm kind of venturing away from my like, trying to keep it chill. No, it's okay. I'm trying to keep it chill. He doesn't. I think, you know, peaks and valleys is emotional peaks and valleys is where we are with this. Yeah.
Speaker: All right. We've been talking for almost two hours. So I think that's enough for the listeners for today. The watchers the watchers and listeners for today. By the way, we didn't tell them that we're on YouTube.
Speaker: We're on YouTube, you guys. We'll tell you in part two. We'll make sure, you know, we're on YouTube next episode. Sure. All right. So before we go, let's reflect for a second on these patterns, right? So, so far we've heard that birth controls benefits that I acknowledge briefly, but, and there's always a big, but that turns the focus to what it might be doing wrong, right? Birth control might be suppressing hormones, It could keep you from discovering scary health issues.
Speaker: It may only cover up the root cause. ah Then we've got Stacey Sims offering cold exposure based on pilot data as a possible treatment for endometriosis.
Speaker: What are we being coerced into believing about established treatment? And what are we supposed to think about as far as what's promising treatment? And essentially it's absolutely backwards to the evidence that's out there.
Speaker: So ah in our next episode, which will be two weeks from now, we will continue to unpack these misleading claims from the round table. We'll be continuing to check them against available evidence, examining rhetorical sleights of hand that make them persuasive. ah We're going to cover...
Speaker: Mary Claire Havers claims about teenage girls, athletic performance and hormonal birth control and Vonda w writes warnings about bone health, hormonal IUDs and periods. So hopefully so far, this episode has been useful. you felt like you're learning a lot, please rate and review.
Speaker: And if you want to get stronger yourself, which is an evidence-based way of securing some healthy longevity for your life. Our free barbell mini course is linked in the show notes and we will see you in two weeks.
Speaker: bye
