99 episodes

BioBalance Health is a medical practice that specializes in Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement, Weight Loss, and Medical Esthetics. Each week Dr. Kathy Maupin discusses important medical topics, and offers advice on hormone replacement and anti-aging strategies.

See the full video at www.biobalancehealth.com

Dr. Kathy Maupin, M.D. is a leading expert in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy, and in treating the symptoms of aging. She is also the author of “The Secret Female Hormone“, the seminal work about hormone replacement therapy for women.

biobalancehealth's podcast Kathy Maupin, M.D.

    • Health & Fitness
    • 4.5 • 17 Ratings

BioBalance Health is a medical practice that specializes in Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement, Weight Loss, and Medical Esthetics. Each week Dr. Kathy Maupin discusses important medical topics, and offers advice on hormone replacement and anti-aging strategies.

See the full video at www.biobalancehealth.com

Dr. Kathy Maupin, M.D. is a leading expert in bio-identical hormone replacement therapy, and in treating the symptoms of aging. She is also the author of “The Secret Female Hormone“, the seminal work about hormone replacement therapy for women.

    Do You Feel Dismissed by Your Doctor?

    Do You Feel Dismissed by Your Doctor?

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    Every day in my office I hear horror stories about how my female patients are dismissed by the doctors they trusted to help them resolve their problems such as:
     
    ·      Hot Flashes and night sweats
    ·      Loss of libido
    ·      Rapid weight gain
    ·      Brain Fog
    ·      Insomnia
    ·      Arthritis associated with lack of hormones
    ·      Anxiety/Depression starting in their late 30s
    ·      New irritability
    ·      New Migraine headaches
    ·      Lack of motivation
    ·      Fatigue
     
    There doctors dismissed them, telling them they were just getting old, or they were “babies” because they can’t stand a few hot flashes, the doctor changed the subject, or my most unfavorite response to a plea for help, “It is just in your head”. Many other demeaning responses have been recorded, but I am appalled at these responses.  For a patient it takes so much strength to ask these questions, and patients are literally at the doctor’s mercy.  In case you didn’t get it, the doctor who says these things is covering up for his/her own ignorance.  These are methods used by a person in charge who is challenged to answer a question he or she doesn’t have an answer for.  In general, these doctors are men and women, however women have been trained by men and they taught women to do what they had been doing for years.  These “medical” responses are used to belittle the patient to hide their own lack of knowledge. If you are dismissed in this way you should not put up with it.  You can just never schedule with that doctor or practice again or you can find a new doctor who will hear your distress and treat you or tell you they don’t know how to help and refer you to someone who does. You shouldn’t put up with dismissive doctors. 
    Another dismissive phrase used by many doctors since the inaccurate WHI study is you’re your doctor tells you that he doesn’t BELIEVE in hormone replacement. You should respond that hormone replacement is not a religion, it is a medically necessary treatment for menopause! Board certified OBGYNs and Family Doctors should be trained in this treatment. 
    We women have not only been dismissed by doctors, but also by the Colleges (eg. American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology) that tell doctors how to practice.  In my OBGYN training I was taught that most of women’s complaints were because they were depressed so they told us to put women on anti-depressants that just make them numb, but that did not treat our symptoms.   Misogyny is alive and well in the practice of medicine, even in the group of doctors who are supposed to dedicate their lives to the health of women, Obstetricians/Gynecologists.
    Discrimination CAN be taught, and I believe medical training still teaches these male oriented beliefs to new doctors who are almost 50% women. Medical schools allow women to become doctors because we are qualified, and they can’t discriminate anymore.  When I was trained and for a few decades after I became a doctor, you would think I was a second-class citizen. I was left out of resident training run by the residents (almost all men).  Those older male doctors treated me like and. Interloper and some even told me I was not supposed to be a doctor because of my sex. …I was never treated as if I was an equal from the minute, I started medical training and women now practicing over the age of 50-something were all trail blazers and were told all women were hysterical and complainers.   I never accepted this view but now know that women complain because we are not believed and not treated with a treatment that really relieves our symptoms.
     After my hysterectomy 2002 I was in private practice with like-minded women in Balanced Care for Women, and they tried to help me but admitted they didn’t have the knowledge. I had ter

    • 14 min
    If you have a big belly, you may be at risk for Alzheimer’s.

    If you have a big belly, you may be at risk for Alzheimer’s.

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    That is a strong statement, however I am confident in saying that belly fat can put you at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, because it is a fact supported by medical research. These studies reveal that obesity, especially abdominal obesity (Beer belly, Gut, “Dunlap’s disease”…..), increases the onset and rate of Alzheimer’s dementia! Another reason to change your lifestyle to benefit your longevity.
    Abdominal obesity can come from fat accumulation right underneath your skin (the fat you can pinch between 2 fingers) OR the fat that grows inside your abdomen like an apron draped over the intestines. It is called “visceral fat”, and this type of fat is what places you in the crosshairs for several diseases of aging including Alzheimer’s Disease, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and rapid aging.  A large belly is more common in men, but it is still a risk for women if they develop an apple shaped body.
    Below is a picture of visceral fat, and a diagram of what it looks like in an artist’s sketch of a normal weight person. When the yellow fat doubles and triples in thickness the abdomen pushes out to look like a “beer belly”.  
    Visceral fat extends from your stomach over the transverse colon and your small intestines like an apron.  This fat pad thickens with alcohol abuse (beer belly), high carbohydrate diet, overeating, junk food, under exercise and creates a large pad of fat that secretes inflammatory cells.  The resulting inflammation is the vehicle that damages your brain leading to Alzheimer’s disease and damages your arteries leading to heart disease and stroke.
    In my office we use INBODY machines that measure your Visceral fat, BMI, and percent body fat.  Normal visceral fat is below #10 on our machine, BMI less than or equal to 25, and fat % for men
    The Research: A recent study correlated the size of patient’s belly (visceral belly fat), and obesity with the amount of amyloid plaque (the cause of Alzheimer’s disease) in their brain. This was measured by MRI in the study subjects’ brains.  The age of the patients studied was between 40-60.
    The study found that the amount of visceral fat (fat inside your abdomen) is directly correlated with the amount of amyloid plaque and inflammation in the brain!  That causes Alzheimer’s Disease.
    If that doesn’t motivate you to lose your belly fat, then you are making a choice to eventually suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a heart attack, a stroke or arthritis.  If you are thinking that you will just wait for “something to happen”, then not making a decision to change your lifestyle is making a decision to take on illness in the future.
    We have new medications to help you lose that belly fat and they really work. You should ask your doctor to help you and if they don’t understand the importance of arriving at ideal weight then look for a different doctor who will help you.
    Even with medication you will have to put in the work and self-control to turn down unhealthy foods when others are being unhealthy.  You will also have to add daily exercise to your schedule if you really want to avoid Alzheimer’s Disease, heart attack, stroke and early death.
    The possible meds and habits that can help you lose your “belly”:
    ·     Limit calories and or carbohydrates
    ·     Increase daily exercise
    ·     Diet pills (amphetamines that older patients usually can’t take)
    ·     Xenical (Orlistat)-Side effect is fatty diarrhea
    ·     Qsymia (topiramate/Phentermine) can increase BP
    ·     Contrave for craving (naltrexone/bupropion) can decrease sex-drive
    ·     Semelanotide (Imcivree-new), darkens the skin, expensive
    ·     Metformin ER an oral, effective medication to treat insulin resistance, and promote weight-loss
    ·     Victoza and Saxenda injections are diabetic treatments, tha

    • 22 min
    Why blood test of testosterone and free testosterone alone don’t reveal how you will respond to hormones.

    Why blood test of testosterone and free testosterone alone don’t reveal how you will respond to hormones.

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    At Bio Balance Health I order blood tests to evaluate my future patients before I even have my first appointment with them.  I use them to find a baseline for an individual patient, and to see if hormones will help them with their symptoms.  Blood tests work well for establishing a diagnosis but are not the only factor in determining an ideal dose of hormone that works for that patient.  Symptoms and medical history supply most of the information for determining dosage as well as help me find other medical problems to treat at the same visit. Many diseases in the early stages are not treated by primary care doctors because they are overwhelmed with their number of patients and the short-time they are allowed to see them.  Our goal is to prevent disease that have been missed or treat conditions at an early stage before they become severe.
     
    Blood tests establish and confirm both hormone deficiencies and provide a baseline level before treatment and the optimal level for each individual patient.   That blood level may or may not be within the range that is expected for a treatment success (written on the lab report). You are an individual and it is my job to find the ideal blood level of hormones for you.
     
    Why would the blood level not tell the whole story?
     
    Your body is genetically programed to both PRODUCE hormones from your endocrine glands and ACCEPT those same hormones in each cell.  Every person is an individual and each person makes hormones based on their genetic map and environment. Everyone is programed genetically to accept hormones into their cells in an individual manner. This is the key to understanding the differences between patients’ responses to an equivalent dose of hormones, either excreted from their own glands or absorbed through their chosen delivery system (oral, vaginal, transdermal or subdermal pellets) after their glands have aged and don’t produce enough hormone, like estradiol and testosterone.
     
    I was in Cambridge in 2014 for the release of my first book, The Secret Female Hormone, when I visited a medical bookstore.  I discovered a large red book that weighed no less than 10 lbs was titled Testosterone.  I looked through this book and found that there was information that I had not discovered in my research of the American medical journals and books, so I bought it and read some of it on the long flight home to St. Louis, MO. I found that this book had answers to questions I had uncovered in my then,13 years of hormone medical practice. My biggest question at that time was why 2 people of the same sex having the equivalent blood level of free testosterone often feel completely different. For example, I was trained that if a man had a blood level of free testosterone that was above 129 pg/ml and under 350 pg/ml (using Quest Diagnostics lab), then he should feel normal, like he did when he was in his thirties (barring any other illnesses interfering). However, I observed that some men felt great at 110 pg/ml while others at 130 continued to have the symptoms of low T. This puzzled me, but at that time I had no answer. Then I read the first chapter of Testosterone.
     
    The answer is found in the individual differences in the receptors on each cell for that hormone, the receiving end of the hormone physiology.  It informed me that receptor sites are genetically created differently in each individual and that one-size-does-not-fit-all!
     
    You can bathe a person’s cells with what is considered an adequate blood concentration of testosterone for most people, let’s say men since that was the subject of the first chapter, of the book Testsosterone, but some men would receive and use only a small portion of the circulating hormone. Their cells were “resistant”, therefore they required a higher concentration of hormone, to activate their cells. This very important fact in endocrinology has

    • 20 min
    Protein is your body’s vital building block

    Protein is your body’s vital building block

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    When I tell my patients that they need a high protein diet, all they can think of is meat…but protein sources are found in many parts of our diet and eating a variety of protein sources is the key to health, we should find out what we should eat and why?
    Protein contains amino acids that are the major building blocks to make our muscles, skin, connective tissue, tendons, ligaments and bones.  It also supplies the components of our skin, hair and nails, and carries with it calcium (the major component of bones and connective tissue).  Protein is found in cheese, milk, all milk products, whey for protein shakes, pea protein, fish, all seafood, chicken, lamb, eggs, Quinoa and beans for building muscle. Pieces of proteins make up every fluid the body makes, including hormones, enzymes, peptide communicators, the immune globulins, semen, breast milk, and vaginal discharge….is it any wonder that I tell my patients to increase protein in their diets!
    Despite the need for amino acids and short chains of amino acids called peptides, we also need a variety of foods, all colors at every meal to provide the other building blocks of our body.  For example, fat is a very necessary food for every person, at every meal.  When I was pregnant, I wanted to feed my baby everything she needed to build a healthy beautiful brain, so I ate Braun Schweiger every day (made from liver) for lunch with a salad.  The Braun Schweiger provided Rachel, my daughter, with the building blocks for an amazing brain. Our brains are almost all fat.  That is the type of tissue that nerves are made of, but nerves also need B12 to work properly and B12 is primarily from animal products. It is relatively easy to include fat in our diets, but it is truly difficult to get enough protein to build muscle on a vegan diet. My vegan patients must be experts in obtaining protein from their diet and must be aware of the components in all the food they eat to get the proper nutrition.
    Carbohydrates are made for “action”.   Carbohydrates are required for exercise, walking and brains also burn carbohydrates when you are doing “brain work”. Carbohydrates are stored as fat if we eat them but don’t exercise!  Think before you eat carbohydrates about your next 12 hours and whether you are going to exercise to burn the carbohydrates in your diet.
    So How Much Protein Do We Need?
    Growing teenagers, people who lift weights and try to gain muscle, pregnant women (need a minimum of 100 grams a day) and patients like mine on testosterone need more protein in their diet than the average sedentary, adult.
    To quantitate the number of grams of protein you need to sustain your body with a high percentage of muscle, a person needs more than ½ their weight in grams of protein. For example, a 125 lb. woman with average to high muscle mass will need more than 62.5 grams of protein a day. A person with higher muscle mass will need more than that.
    For athletes, weight lifters, patients trying to lose weight and sustain their current muscle mass, they need to eat the equivalent number of grams of protein to their weight, every day. 
    To do this a person will have to know how many grams are in each serving of their current foods and if they aren’t eating enough, they should add high protein, low carb protein shakes times before or after they work out or exercise.  A typical protein shake will have 15 to 20 grams per serving and less than 5-10 grams of carbohydrate.
    An average size  hamburger has about 20 grams of protein.  Add beans, peas, cheese, yogurt, butter, ricotta cheese, milk, eggs, custard, chicken, fish fillets, shrimp, and protein bars.  Be careful not to overeat carbohydrate with your protein which can cause you to gain fat, while you make muscle.
    Why do we need more protein on the days we work out, especially with weights?  Weight training is a grea

    • 17 min
    What to Replace Simple Sugars with for Weight Loss and Building Muscle

    What to Replace Simple Sugars with for Weight Loss and Building Muscle

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    There are almost as many different human metabolic variations as there are people in the world.  Our genetics make us all unique in ways that vary the way we can lose weight or even gain weight. On the other hand, we all had to descend from humans who survived famine, lack of water and lack of nutrition sources, so in one way we are all the same…we have genes that helped us survive times that required of us the ability to maintain our weight even without eating!  The people who genetically were unable to gain fat and keep it to hold them over during famine just didn’t make it to an age they could procreate. The rest of us whose ancestors survived, have given the majority of us the genes to maintain body fat.
     
    Unfortunately, we have been blindly unaware of what man’s evolution and progress has led us to physically, and most of us are over-fat, and have trouble losing it!  The very genes that allowed us to survive the beginning of man’s existence, are the same ones that make it hard to become slender. In addition, in our current societies in the western world, food is plentiful and inexpensive.  Our genes have not changed, but our environment has, and we are becoming sick because of our obesity…how do we survive this “new world”?
    You may hear a lot about insulin resistance, and I talk about it a lot on my Healthcasts, but it is insulin resistance that has allowed us to survive and has also led us to obesity today.  The humans who were insulin resistant who also held on to their fat in times of starvation are also the humans who have become obese in the face of plenty. We can’t change our genes, but we can turn some of the obesity genes off through lifestyle and sometimes with the help of medication.
    Despite our basic sameness, we are also each individual, and genetically programed so that some of us lose weight if we restrict calories, others lose weight only if they exercise; Some of us don’t lose weight with exercise; some people don’t lose weight with carbohydrate restriction or fat restriction, and some do.  This is the ugly truth that lies behind the millions of books on diet, none of which work for more than a small number of us, and because it is a diet we can’t maintain it...what we need is to determine is the best weight loss program for each of us, by using trial and error, or by using genetic testing that tells us what our best pathway to a normal weight looks like.
     
    To begin we must take baby steps and learn about food and what the words mean that we use when referring to food.  Because there are many people who may have several hurdles to jump before they can live at their healthy weight, we need to all speak the same language of weight loss.
     
    So let’s start with a bit of education about food.
     
    WHAT IS A SIMPLE SUGAR?
     
    A simple sugar is a nutrient meant to give you energy for physical activity. Eating a small amount of a simple or a complex sugar before exercise is a good idea. However, if you sit most of your day, working with your brain instead of your body, simple sugars can increase your fat storage because you aren’t physically working. This is true whether restricting sugar is your genetic method of weight loss or not. Too many simple sugars make you hungry and cause everyone to overeat.….causing weight gain and fat gain. So what are simple sugars?
     
    Examples of simple sugars:
     
    ·      Sugar, white, cane  and brown
    ·      Molasses
    ·      Regular Soda
    ·      Agave
    ·      Honey
    ·      Syrup-maple or any
    ·      Rice, white and brown
    ·      Cereals-all
    ·      Oatmeal
    ·      Donuts
    ·      White potatoes
    ·      Bread
    ·      Pancakes/waffles
    ·      Noodles
    ·      All Grains: wheat, oats, rice, corn and anything made from them including flour
    ·     

    • 28 min
    ust for Men: Prostate Cancer Can Be Diagnosed Without Blind Biopsies

    ust for Men: Prostate Cancer Can Be Diagnosed Without Blind Biopsies

    See all the Healthcasts at https://www.biobalancehealth.com/healthcast-blog
    This subject is for men who have had a high PSA and who have been advised that they need a prostate biopsy to determine if they have cancer. Many men go into the doctor for the biopsy necessary for diagnosis without expecting the “blind biopsy” procedure that is done through the rectum and is extremely painful when the doctor blindly takes pieces of the prostate…over and over again.   Blindly, means he is randomly picking a place to biopsy without a real target….with the urologist biopsying everywhere in the prostate 10 or more times. Finding a small cancer with this random or “blind” biopsy method is a less than effective way to find a small area of prostate cancer. Men who have had this procedure done rarely agree to a second round, under any circumstances and I agree with them.
    I always do a PSA test before I treat a man with testosterone so I often am faced with the question of what advice I should give him in this situation before I feel it is safe to give him testosterone. Of course, if he has prostate cancer, even a high PSA, I will not give a man testosterone until his urologist says he is safe to receive it.
     Until recently there was no radiologic way to screen a for prostate cancer. Now urologists use Ultrasound or MRIs to find an abnormality in the prostate that they can biopsy.  This makes the procedure both more accurate and less painful.
    The way this procedure was done in the past, and is still done throughout the US, always caused me to wonder why urologists hadn’t figured out a way to do it in a way that accurately biopsied a high risk area of the prostate, with one or two biopsies.  Now Urologists use rectal ultrasound or MRI, like Gynecologists use vaginal ultrasounds to find and drain or biopsy ovarian masses, or to harvest eggs in IVF. The urologists have even borrowed the idea to use numbing medicine as well to make it comfortable.  In the last 2 years I have found a few Urologists who have embraced the new, accurate biopsy procedure that used the MRI to find high risk areas and ultrasound to locate suspicious areas for biopsy, then used the same radiologic method to locate and  treat discrete focal areas of abnormality with cryotherapy (freezing) or focused ultrasound. 
    Finally in August of 2023,  a research article titled, “Focal Therapy for Localized Prostate Cancer in Older Men”, was published in the Journal of Urology.
    This article describes a much more accurate method of treating prostate cancer that resulted in the diagnosis and treatment of  low grade prostate cancer without recurrence and without complications, allowing men to have a conservative treatment for low grade prostate cancer, following a less painful and invasive diagnostic procedure. Compassion has finally come to diagnosis and  treatment of prostate cancer. We applaud the authors.
    August 22, 2023
    Focal Therapy for Localized Prostate Cancer in Older Men
    Allan S. Brett, MD, reviewing Habashy D et al. J Urol 2023 Jul Lomas DJ and Frendl DM. J Urol 2023 Jul
    In an observational study, focal therapy was compared with radical treatment.
    At some centers, focal ablative therapy (generally with high-intensity focused ultrasound or cryotherapy) is a treatment option for selected patients with localized prostate cancer. This option could be attractive for some older patients with comorbidities who might be candidates for radical prostatectomy or radiotherapy (according to tumor grade) but who wish to avoid complications from radical intervention.
    Using data from national registries, U.K. researchers compared 262 patients (age, ≥70; median age, 74) who underwent focal ablative therapy with 262 propensity-score–matched patients who underwent radical treatment (mostly radiotherapy with androgen-deprivation therapy). At baseline, nearly all patients had intermediate- or high-risk disease. Estimate

    • 18 min

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
17 Ratings

17 Ratings

KarenDogRescue ,

Great information

Every healthcast episode has a nugget of information that can be used or shared with a friend. Keep up the great work.

OnaWingAnAPrayer ,

Dr. Maupin is a genius

Even as a patient of Dr. Maupin’s I love this healthcast. It is easy to listen to, easy to understand, and entertaining. Dr. Maupin has such an incredible passion for people...I know this personally. I know she’s always in my corner and HEARS every word I say. Her compassion amd knowledge come across in her healthcast.

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