Latest / Clearly Hormonal / From Reset to Clarity: Why “Clearly Hormonal” Was Born

Transcript

From Reset to Clarity: Why “Clearly Hormonal” Was Born · Clearly Hormonal

• 0:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Welcome to Clearly Hormonal, the podcast where we stop googling our symptoms at midnight and actually start understanding what's going on in our bodies.
• 0:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm Dr.
• 0:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Komal Patil- Sisodia, an endocrinologist, internist, obesity medicine specialist, and a Menopause Society certified practitioner.
• 0:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Which is really just a whole lot of words to say.
• 0:19
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Hormones are kind of my jam.
• 0:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've spent 17 years watching women try to navigate their hormonal health without ever having been taught the language for what's happening in their own bodies, and then meeting clinicians who want nothing more than to help them figure it out, but are up against 10 minute appointments in a system that just wasn't built for it.
• 0:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This podcast is my answer to that gap.
• 0:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We'll cover menopause, metabolism, hormones, and everything in between with real evidence, not trends, and without the overwhelm.
• 0:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A quick disclaimer, I'm a physician, but this is education, not personalized medical advice.
• 0:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Take what resonates and discuss it with your own healthcare team.
• 0:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Now, let's get into it and talk about what's clearly hormonal and what's not.
• 1:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Something has been sitting with me for a while now.
• 1:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've been doing this work for 17 years, and the more time I spend with patients really in the room with them listening, the more I keep coming back to the same thing.
• 1:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women are trying to figure out their health.
• 1:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're genuinely trying.
• 1:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're Googling at midnight.
• 1:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're bringing printed lab results to appointments.
• 1:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're tracking symptoms in their notes app because they need someone to take them seriously.
• 1:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are doing everything right.
• 1:30
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And they're still confused, not because they're not smart, not because the information isn't out there, but because no one has given them a clear framework to actually make sense of what's happening in their own bodies.
• 1:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's what the show is going to do.
• 1:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I want to start by telling you exactly why I'm here and why I almost wasn't.
• 1:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If you've been with me from Reset, recharge, first of all, thank you.
• 1:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Seriously, you showed up when this was just me at a microphone and a lot of things I needed to get off my chest, and that mattered to me more than you know, and this rebrand is still me.
• 2:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The same doctor, same mission, same deep frustration with a medical system that keeps failing women.
• 2:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Nothing about that has changed.
• 2:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What has changed is that I've gotten clearer about what I'm trying to do.
• 2:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Who I'm trying to reach and what the show actually needs to be to get there, reset, recharge, made sense.
• 2:23
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I started it was where I was, but I've grown since then professionally, personally, and the show needed to grow with me.
• 2:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So if you're new here, welcome.
• 2:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: You found this at the right time, and if you've been here from the beginning, thank you for growing with me.
• 2:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Let's go.
• 2:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Let me tell you a little bit about who I am and why I'm the person talking to you about this.
• 2:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I am triple board certified in internal medicine, endocrinology and obesity medicine.
• 2:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm also a Menopause Society certified practitioner, which is a credential that matters to me a lot because menopause medicine is.
• 2:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Still treated like a niche, and it's absolutely not a niche.
• 3:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It hits every doctor's office.
• 3:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I run Eastside Menopause and Metabolism, which is a direct specialty care practice in Washington state.
• 3:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I opened it about a year ago, but I've been in practice for 17 years and I'm not saying all of this to, you know, list my credentials or try and impress you, but I want you to understand where, what I'm about to tell you is coming from.
• 3:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This is not wellness content, this is clinical experience.
• 3:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Thousands of patient encounters, thousands of conversations that I've had and a pattern that I can't unsee.
• 3:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But honestly, it starts way before any of that.
• 3:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It starts with my mom.
• 3:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In 1998, I was a senior in high school.
• 3:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My mother was diagnosed with heart disease.
• 3:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She was only 42 years old, and it took two years to get that diagnosis.
• 3:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Two years of something being wrong, two years of navigating a system that wasn't built with her in mind.
• 3:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She's an immigrant woman, which added its own layer of complexity to every single interaction she had.
• 4:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And at some point I will record an episode talking about her interactions with physicians that did not have her best interests at heart.
• 4:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And here's the context that makes that two year delay make even more sense.
• 4:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And even as it breaks my heart.
• 4:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: At that point in 1998, there were only about five years of meaningful cardiovascular research that actually included women five years.
• 4:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The data to recognize what heart disease looks like in a woman, how it presents differently, how it should be approached differently was barely there.
• 4:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So when the diagnosis finally came, stent technology was still new enough that open heart surgery was the only path forward for her, and that surgery was the beginning of a long health decline for her.
• 4:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I often think about what her life might look like today.
• 4:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Had there been more research, more advocacy, more urgency around women's health 25 years ago.
• 4:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That question is part of why I do this work.
• 5:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's not abstract for me.
• 5:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And then I became a patient myself.
• 5:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I struggled with PCOS when I was young, and getting that diagnosis was its own fight because doctors were hesitant to.
• 5:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Diagnose young women with really anything.
• 5:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And it was also looked at as purely a reproductive disorder.
• 5:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And we now know that PCOS has many metabolic implications, including metabolic syndrome, which consists of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, weight gain, increased risk for diabetes and heart disease, and weight was always something that I navigated.
• 5:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Because of PCOS, and that's just the reality of that condition.
• 5:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It affects your metabolism, your insulin, your body composition in ways that don't respond to a textbook.
• 5:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Description of what weight loss should look like, but after the birth of my son, it became a different kind of challenge.
• 5:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Postpartum weight in the context of PCOS is its own thing entirely.
• 6:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I was living it firsthand and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had to reckon with something that I was not prepared for.
• 6:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: As a physician, someone who spent years telling patients that their bodies weren't failing them, that their struggles weren't their faults, that genetics and biology are powerful forces, that lifestyle alone can't always fix.
• 6:23
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had to sit with my own version of that truth.
• 6:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My body was changing in ways I could not control through lifestyle alone and accepting.
• 6:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
• 6:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: There's a particular kind of humility required in asking for help when you are the helper, and I knew logically, clinically, without any doubt that medicine and science exist precisely for moments like this.
• 6:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've actually said those exact words to patients more times than I can count.
• 6:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But knowing something and living it are two completely different things.
• 7:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had to dig deep and talk to myself the way that I talked to my patients first acknowledging that what was happening wasn't my fault.
• 7:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It wasn't something I'd done wrong.
• 7:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It wasn't a failure of discipline or knowledge or will, it was genetics.
• 7:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A hand of cards that I'd been dealt, that I didn't choose and that I couldn't change.
• 7:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What I could do was accept that lifestyle as important as it is, and it is genuinely important, wasn't going to be enough on its own.
• 7:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I needed medical help, and sitting with that as someone who has devoted her career to offering help to others was way more complicated than I expected.
• 7:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The irony is not lost on me.
• 7:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It really isn't.
• 7:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But I've come to believe that the difficulty I had accepting it isn't a character flaw.
• 7:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's core to the human experience, especially the female experience.
• 7:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We are so conditioned to push through, to optimize, to do more and try harder, and accepting our own biology is something outside of our control can feel like giving up.
• 8:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's not giving up.
• 8:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's actually one of the most honest things you can do for yourself.
• 8:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I share this because I want you to know that I understand what that resistance feels like.
• 8:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I felt it and I'm on the other side of it, and then endometriosis.
• 8:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A condition I lived with for years before it was identified.
• 8:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to sit with that for a second because I was a physician when this was happening.
• 8:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had the training.
• 8:36
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had the language.
• 8:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I understood the system from the inside, and I still faced a delayed diagnosis.
• 8:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It took me 10 years to get help.
• 8:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I still had to push.
• 8:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I still had to advocate for myself in ways that I shouldn't have had to after my hysterectomy.
• 8:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I remember the specific feeling of realizing what life without pain was supposed to feel like.
• 9:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I felt better three days after surgery than I had on any day of my period in the last 10 years.
• 9:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That's bonkers.
• 9:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had been living with a baseline that I'd normalized without ever knowing that it wasn't normal, and if I couldn't navigate the system as a doctor, knowing what I know, speaking the language I speak, I kept asking myself, what is it like for everyone else?
• 9:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That's when I knew that seeing patients in a clinic wasn't going to be enough.
• 9:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had to do something more.
• 9:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What I see every day in practice is this, women who are smart, self-aware, and paying close attention to their bodies, who've left appointments, feeling like their concerns didn't quite land, not because their doctors didn't care, but because the system gives a primary care physician like 10 to 15 minutes to cover everything.
• 9:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Hormonal health is still under-taught in most medical training, and there's generally no roadmap for who's supposed to hold this conversation.
• 10:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's just been brushed under the rug.
• 10:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: These women are not wrong about their symptoms.
• 10:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They're a hundred percent right.
• 10:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Their body is telling them something real, and the tools to interpret it just haven't been there for them or for their provider, really.
• 10:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's the gap that I'm sitting in every single day.
• 10:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's the gap the show exists to address.
• 10:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I wanted to name this clearly.
• 10:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to name this clearly because I think a lot of women feel it, but haven't heard it said out loud first.
• 10:36
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The care is fragmented.
• 10:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your gynecologist is manning your cycle.
• 10:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your internist is managing your cholesterol.
• 10:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your psychiatrist is adjusting your antidepressant, and the system isn't built for them to see the full picture together.
• 10:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I think this is one of the downsides of.
• 10:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Learning more, which sounds ironic, but honestly, the more we learn, the more specialized we've had to become because it's impossible for any one person to know everything.
• 11:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And when you can't see that full picture together, it's hard to see that the hormones are like the connective tissue.
• 11:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are affecting everything.
• 11:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your metabolism, your mood, your sleep, your cardiovascular risk, your bone density, your brain.
• 11:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And when each piece gets managed in isolation, the whole story gets missed.
• 11:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've had patients come to see me who've seen four different specialists and gotten four different explanations for the same cluster of symptoms because each provider was doing exactly what they were trained to do within their lane.
• 11:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's not a failure of those individual doctors.
• 11:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are doing their jobs.
• 11:36
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This is a structural problem with how we've organized care and it lands directly on women's bodies.
• 11:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Second.
• 11:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The information that women do get isn't actually useful.
• 11:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Your labs are normal.
• 11:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I have said that countless times I've had it said to me, but okay, normal compared to what?
• 11:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Normal for a 45-year-old woman in perimenopause normal for a 25-year-old.
• 12:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What does the number mean for how she feels?
• 12:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What does she do with it?
• 12:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What do we watch?
• 12:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What comes next?
• 12:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Normal is not a plan and without a plan.
• 12:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women are just waiting.
• 12:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Waiting to feel worse, waiting for something to become ob, obvious enough that somebody finally takes action.
• 12:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Third, and this is the one that really gets me.
• 12:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: There is a fundamental mismatch between what women are experiencing and what gets addressed.
• 12:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I can't tell you how many women have sat across from me and described symptoms they've had for years.
• 12:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Fatigue that doesn't make sense.
• 12:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Weight that doesn't respond to anything.
• 12:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Brain fog, joint pain, sleep that has.
• 12:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Completely fallen apart and when I ask what their previous doctor said, their answer is some version of, they said everything looked fine.
• 12:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I believe that that doctor looked at the labs in front of them and said what the labs said, but the labs we routinely order aren't always the right ones.
• 12:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The visit length doesn't allow for full conversation, and hormonal health specifically falls in this gap in training that most clinicians never get a chance to fill.
• 13:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: You're not making it up, and I want to be really clear about that.
• 13:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The symptoms are real, the gap is real, and that's why this show exists and is being rebranded.
• 13:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And fourth, I need to just say this because I don't think it gets named enough.
• 13:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This is just, this is not just a medical problem.
• 13:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It is a political one, and I know this is going to be polarizing for some, but I wouldn't be being authentic to myself if I didn't say it.
• 13:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I was in fellowship in 2007, my mentor said something to me that I've never forgotten.
• 13:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Actually, he didn't remember saying it to me either, which is really kind of funny in retrospect.
• 13:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: He said that the Women's Health Initiative, the 2002 study that upended hormone therapy overnight and sent an entire generation of women off of their prescriptions, was going to have consequences that went.
• 13:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Far beyond medicine.
• 13:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: He said that we were going to take hormone therapy away from the women who marched for Roe versus Wade, that we were not going to give it to the next generation.
• 14:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that Roe versus Wade would go back to the Supreme Court in my lifetime and it would be overturned.
• 14:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And here's the thing, he was right about all of it.
• 14:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want you to think about what that means.
• 14:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The same generation of women who fought for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights were then denied access to evidence-based hormonal care because of a study that was later found to be significantly misinterpreted.
• 14:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And then the rights they fought for were stripped away in 2022.
• 14:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Women's health and women's rights have always been intertwined.
• 14:36
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The research gaps, the dismissed symptoms, the undertreated conditions, they don't happen in a vacuum.
• 14:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They happen in a culture that has.
• 14:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Historically treated women's bodies as secondary, as complicated, and as not worth the investment.
• 14:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That's the larger context of everything I'm going to talk about on this show, and I think it matters that you know it.
• 14:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So why did I call the podcast Reset Recharge in the first place?
• 15:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Honestly.
• 15:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It captured something I was going for at the time.
• 15:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This idea of reclaiming your energy, starting fresh, feeling like yourself again, and there's nothing wrong with that.
• 15:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Those are real things women want and deserve.
• 15:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's actually what I want, but it didn't really capture what I actually do the, with the name Reset, recharge.
• 15:22
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It could have been a fitness podcast, it could have been a mindfulness show.
• 15:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It could have been productivity things for burnt out executives.
• 15:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was warm and fuzzy and optimistic, and it was genuinely mine.
• 15:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But it didn't tell you that I'm a physician who specializes in hormones or that I'm going to talk about perimenopause and lab values and why your testosterone actually matters or that I'm specifically here for women who've been dismissed and it and are not going to accept that anymore.
• 15:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The name wasn't specific enough to find the people who needed it the most.
• 15:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the women who are out there right now searching for answers at midnight who never search, reset, recharge.
• 16:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The clearer it became, the name had to change.
• 16:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So clearly hormonal.
• 16:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to break this down because both of the words are doing real work.
• 16:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Clearly, this word is about precision.
• 16:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's about cutting through the noise, and there's so much noise in women's health right now.
• 16:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's about evidence over trend.
• 16:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's about clinical reality over wellness marketing.
• 16:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I say something on the show, I'm going to tell you why I'm saying it, where it comes from and what it actually means for you.
• 16:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In my opinion, clarity, being as clear as possible with somebody is an active respect.
• 16:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I know that a lot of providers want to give it.
• 16:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They just don't always have the time or the resources or the visit structure or to go as deep in the conversation that it actually needs to.
• 16:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And this is a show.
• 16:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And this show is a place where we can go that deep.
• 16:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I think you can handle real information and you're going to get it here.
• 16:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Now, second word, hormonal.
• 16:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I chose this word on purpose, partly because I'm an endocrinologist who really didn't love the word hormones, which I realize is hugely ironic because that's literally my job, but.
• 17:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Hear me out.
• 17:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was because hormonal has been used against women for a very long time.
• 17:17
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's been a dismissal.
• 17:19
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's been a punchline, like she's just being hormonal, as if your hormones are an excuse or a flaw or something to be minimized.
• 17:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And here's what I know after 17.
• 17:30
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Hormones are not a flaw.
• 17:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are a system.
• 17:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: They are the reason that your energy, your metabolism, your ability to think through things, your cardiovascular health, your mood, all of it are connected.
• 17:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And when that system is off, everything downstream is affected.
• 17:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's not drama, that is physiology.
• 17:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So I'm putting it right in the name because I am done treating it like something to tiptoe around.
• 17:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm done being the endocrinologist who doesn't like the word hormones?
• 17:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The tagline for this podcast is Hormonal Health without the confusion, and that's the whole mission.
• 18:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That is what we're going to do here.
• 18:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to tell you specifically what the show is going to be because you deserve to know what you're signing up for.
• 18:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're going to cover hormones clearly explained.
• 18:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm gonna try and explain all the jargon that we use on a doctor's office, and I'm not going to assume that you know what all of these things already mean.
• 18:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're going to talk about endocrinology beyond reproductive health.
• 18:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So, yes, we'll talk about menopause and perimenopause extensively, but hormones don't stop at your ovaries.
• 18:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're gonna talk about thyroid, adrenal function, metabolic health, insulin resistance, cardiovascular risk, because that's the full picture and that's what your body actually is.
• 18:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And here's what I think is going to be most useful.
• 18:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're going to talk about what to do.
• 18:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What to monitor, what questions to ask your doctor, what to push back on when the answer doesn't feel right.
• 18:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Not just, here's how your body works, but here's what you do with that information, because understanding is only the first step.
• 19:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: What I want for you as agency, I want for you to be able to walk into your next appointment knowing exactly what you need, knowing how to advocate for yourself, and knowing when to find someone else if you're not getting it.
• 19:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That is what clearly hormonal is for.
• 19:16
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In the next episode, I'm going to zoom out a bit.
• 19:20
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We are going to talk about something that I think we just don't name clearly enough.
• 19:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The different hormonal eras of a woman's life, not just puberty, pregnancy, menopause, but the actual biological shifts that are happening along the way and why understanding them changes how you think about your health at every age.
• 19:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If you have ever felt like your body has changed and no one has told you it was going to, that episode is going to be for you.
• 19:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Going forward, episodes are gonna get progressively more practical and fun.
• 19:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We're building a foundation right now, and then we're gonna go deep.
• 19:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So stay close.
• 19:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And one more thing before I let you go.
• 19:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Part of what I've been working on outside of the podcast in my practice is thinking about how to make this stuff actually structured for women.
• 20:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Not just more content, not just more information, but a real framework.
• 20:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A way to look at the full picture of your hormonal health and actually know where you stand.
• 20:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've teased it a little bit on social media, but I'm building a tool called the Midlife Health Compass, and I want you to know what's coming and when it does, I think it's gonna change how you approach your conversation with your doctor.
• 20:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So more on that soon.
• 20:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Alright.
• 20:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That is episode one, and if this resonated with you, if you heard something in there that sounded like your experience, I want you to think of one woman in your life who needs to hear it.
• 20:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A friend who's been told her labs are fine when she knows something's off.
• 20:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A sister who's been brushed off, send it to her, and this is how we change this.
• 20:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: You can find me on TikTok and Instagram at @drpatilsisodia.
• 20:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss what's coming next.
• 20:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And thank you for being here, for making the switch with me and for trusting that this is worth your time.
• 21:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'll see you on the next episode.