What High-Performing Work Cultures Get Wrong About Women’s Health

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed on the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates. Any questions or common should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W four WN Radio. This is Beyond Confidence with your host d W. Park. Do you want to live a more fulfilling life? Do you want to live your legacy and achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals? Well? Coming up on ZVO parks Beyond Confidence, you will hear real stories of leaders, entrepreneurs, and achievers who have stepped into discomfort, shattered their status quo, and are living the life they want. You will learn how relationships are the key to achieving your aspirations and financial goals.

0:52 Moving your career business forward does not have to happen at the expense of your personal or family life or vice versa. Learn more at www Don't divpork dot com and you can connect with tv ants contact dants divpark dot com. This is beyond confidence and now here's your host, div PORNK. Good morning, It's Tuesday, and of course I'm. So thrilled to be here with you today. We're going to be talking about an issue which is not talked about a whole lot, and it's important to have those hard conversations. So I hope each and every one of you is entered the new year with positivity and energy. And of course there are going to be ups and downs, remember that, and let's get started.

1:46 Hello V A Happy New Year, Happy New Year. Welcome doctor Marina. And we usually start out. From the childhood or early youth. Do you recall a moment or a person who left a positive mark on you? You know, I have to say that my mother left the most positive mark on me. My mother was a working woman in the nineteen fifties and sixties in Canada, which was actually quite unusual. Most of my friends and classmates their mothers were stay at home moms, so that was a bit unusual. And she also really made me believe that anything was possible. Whatever I set my mind to is possible. And I have really kept that with me.

2:29 My mother's still with me. She just turned ninety seven. Oh wow, congratulations. And she lives a walking distance from me, and she still has that influence in my life. That's wonderful. And when you say that she is just very close to you at a walking distance, is she living by herself? So she's in what's called independent living. It's a residence, but it requires an amount of independence, which she still has. And yeah, it's a very good setup. It's very close to me, so I'm able to pop in and see her often and we still have that close relationship.

3:12 How wonderful. So when you were a little girl or as you were growing up, did you know that you wanted to go into medicine? You know, I Onys seriously thought about it around the age of sixteen. My sister was five years older, is five years older, and she was already at university and she started asking me, you know, what do you want to do? And I think that was the first time I really thought I have to make a decision here. And I immediately said that I wanted to go into medicine because I was just fascinated by how the body works. My initial thought was that I was going to be a psychiatrist, which is interesting because my sister ended up becoming a psychiatrist and I ended up being an obstetrician because I changed my mind a few times about what I wanted to do along the way.

3:59 Absolutely, and I'm assuming you have practice for quite a few years. Now, getting on thirty five. Wow, So a. Lot of personal experience and a lot of field experience and nothing beats that. So tell me you talk about that. Women's fertility is a signal of their overall health. Tell us a little bit more about that. Well, I think most people think of fertility problems as separate from their overall health. It's really dealt with almost as a plumbing problem. You know, if the egg can't meet the sperm, there's an issue. But there's much more to it than that, because the quality of the eggs depends on a woman's health, and it's the same with men and sperm quality and quantity, and these have been affected by environmental factors, lifestyle factors. We're seeing a lot more lifestyle associated disease, whether it's diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and these are affecting fertility. But yet nobody really thinks about that in conventional medicine. It's more of a naturopathic, functional medicine approach, which I have learned about in my career for the last twenty years, I've been very open to having a more holistic view, and I really believe that conventional medicine has missed the vote on this one.

5:31 We really have to look at fertility as part of overall health. That is definitely a point that needs to be raised and people need to become aware. So I work in the corporate and US corporate industry, working with leaders and professionals, and of course a lot of my clients are bemen. And then what happens is, of course, if you've had kids, depending on which of life you're in. It may matter, it may not matter. And again, as you mentioned about the fertility, and we will talk about for all the phases of women's life. So let's say you know, women.

6:11 Are in twenties, they're not as much worried because that's out there. So how would you tell. Young women because we don't know, I mean, you know, it depends. It's very women's specific whether they're going to have kids or not. But rather than just kind of thinking fertility as an indicator of having children, Like, how can you bring that in in thinking in the mindset of women as a general overall health indicator. You know, I think it's education, And it's not just education of the women. It's also education of the doctors of family doctors for instance, who are often approached by younger women with menstrual problems, whether it's painful periods or irregular periods, and they tend to want to solve the problem, but they don't think about the fertility issue. And I think women have to know that menstrual problems can be an indicator that there could be a fertility problem down the road if they're not ready right now, and it shouldn't be overlooked, you know. They doctors often tend to give women the birth control pill because it regulates your period.

7:23 It makes them less painful, and it seems to solve the problem, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. It just covers it up. It makes it bearable, and somebody has to have that discussion that you know, eventually this man is to be an issue with fertility, and the sooner you find out, the better, because you can deal with it. There are things you can do, and that conversation has to be had and not overlooked. And I think perhaps we need to educate women earlier in high school. You know, there are sex education classes, and you know kids are taught about these things, but it's a different view. It's more like prevention of teen pregnancy, which you know, I agree is a very important issue. However, they have to discuss the fertility issue as well. Don't take your fertility for granted. Don't assume it's going to be there in your late thirties if you're delaying for that long.

8:15 And many women are now because of economic conditions, because they want to pursue their careers, they want to find the right partner, obviously, and these things seem to be taking a lot longer than they used to because there's such high expectations of finding the perfect mate, of you know, being well established financially before you even try to get pregnant. That's not how our parents. Used to be. They didn't consider all these details. Hell times change. So when we are talking about education, so educate our audience as to, you know, what they could be thinking in the given time we have and if they're having issues, what kind of question or what kind of conversation they can have with the doctors.

9:04 So you know, when they approach the doctor about painful or heavy periods, certainly you know look at treatment options, but first, you know, make a think about the potential underlying problem. Is there en demetriosis, is their polycystical varian syndrome, because these things have implications for the future, and discuss it with the patient Before you just cover up the problem, you have to, you know, have that idea that there might be something further down the line. And you know women will say, well, I'm not ready to get pregnant now, but there's still a lot of health improvements you can make that will help you help your health right now and help the problem down the road so that you're ready when you feel ready to get pregnant your health is better.

9:53 And what are some of those things that they can do. So every lifestyle and thing that you can imagine plays a role. For instance, diet is very important. We know that the healthier the diet, the better your fertility, and the more unhealthier diet, the more you eat fast food, the less likely that you are to get pregnant. So I talk a lot about diet and one of my solutions is to use nutrogenomic testing. I don't know if you're aware of what that is. It's genetic testing which can be done by a mouth swab or a saliva sample or blood work where you can tell what kind of diet you should be on and what kind of supplementation you require, and that can really boost your fertility.

10:39 So I really believe in personalized medicine. I don't believe we all need the same thing. We require different things and different diets depending on our genetics. And now that information is available, but not to the regular conventional doctors don't really know about it. So it's more functional medicine doctors. If a patient is interested, they have to reach out and learn about these things because it's going to take a while for conventional medicine to catch up. It's always very slow to change. So let's say, if somebody is interested, where can they find more information about it? So it's you know, now with the internet, with chat, GPT, there's so much available and there are practitioners who offer these nutri genomic tests. There are different companies. There is a Canadian company in Toronto called Nutrigenomics. With an X and they offer a fertility panel. It's seventy snips, which is seventy gene variations which they have chosen which are particularly important for your health, and they can interpret it in terms of what you should do to improve your fertility.

11:53 That's one test. There are others available, and there are tests that are proven to actually improve pregnancy outcomes, like less gestational diabetes and less pregnancy induced hypertension. So that is actually to me when I read about that. This study was done ten years ago, but it's groundbreaking. I don't know why we don't talk about it more because there's nothing else that we know of that can change those rates of occurrence of those problems, and yet it isn't discussed in conventional medicine. So I mean, the same can be said for exercise. You know what is the best exercise and how much and when? What about sleep?

12:39 Sleep is incredibly important. We know that women who don't get enough sleep or get too much sleep are less fertile, and the same goes for men. Men's sperm counts have decreased by over fifty percent into generations the average sperm counts, so men right now are much less fertile than their grandfathers were. And there was a wonderful book written by Professor Seana Swan about this, and she alerted us to the fact that this was happening over six or seven years ago. And she believes that a large part of it are toxic chemicals are in our environment. And that's again the elephant in the room. It's something that conventional medicine doesn't talk about, but we have to take seriously.

13:22 It is a major problem. Yeah, it's so as we are talking about all of that, you know, let's kind of talk about women in workforce. And even before we kind of go in there. So work is very stressful. Every year it is do more. Okay, you did excellent, if you're getting a high rating, then next year you've got to even perform better. So that pressure and the ambiguity and the speed, especially with the advent of open and artificial intelligence, you got to keep on doing better and better. So the stress is almost in bread in our daily lives and over the weekends.

14:13 Our youngsters have a way like, you know, let's all kind of get together and they stay late. I don't know if you've noticed. It with younger generation or not, but The whole idea is let's get together socialize, which is great. But when they're socializing, a couple of things that I've observed in my young clients is that they stay out late, two, three, four am, and that's fashionable because if you're not then it's almost like you're not part of the group. And another thing is that a lot of drinking kind of goes on, nothing wrong with it, it relaxes any thoughts on that. Well, this this is an issue because I don't know if you're aware, but fifty percent of pregnancies are under Land.

15:01 So unfortunately, in those cases, you know, women haven't taken care not to expose themselves to alcohol or cannabis or other things, and that is an issue. Alcohol there's no safe level in pregnancy. We know fetal alcohol syndrome can occur with any intake of alcohol, and that's a terrible condition. Not to speak about fertility rates in general, but so alcohol, smoking. We expose ourselves willingly to a lot of these things and there's a very negative impact. So while people are out socializing, what would be your message to them.

15:44 You know, I'm not saying don't enjoy yourselves. We all have to live we have to enjoy ourselves and socializing is one of the ways we get over our stress. You know, we're all stressed. The whole world is stressed. What's important is how we manage the stress. We need a solution that works for us, and that's different for everybody. You know. It might be getting together with friends, it might be doing yoga, it might be meditation, it might be just getting enough sleep. But there are a lot of things out there that can be very, very helpful. I recommend heart math to my patients. Have you ever heard of heart mouth? Why don't you tell our audience about it? I'm sure not everybody has heard about it.

16:25 Yeah, So basically a heart math. They have an app which you can use on your smartphone which measures heart rate variability, and in fact, there's a lot of ways of measuring it now like our rings and fitbits are now measuring heart rate variability. The thing about the heart math is that it can actually train you. It has a program where it trains you to breathe and do a meditation like activity to try to improve your heart rate variability, which is actually a general measure of your health. The higher your heart rate variability, the lower your cancer rates. The lower your inflammation rate, the lower your problems with getting pregnant. Even so, if you are able to move the needle on your heart rate variability, you can improve your health and that is a marker of stress low heart rate variability. So I like that because that's something you can do on your own. You can take your own time, ten minutes a day and do it. Where's other people prefer organized programs for groups, and there are specialized ones that do, like online webinars which teach you how to deal with stress on a day to day basis, and these have also been proven to improve fertility. People need to be aware of them, and they need to think that this is part of living in this day and age, that we need to have a stress management

17:59 something that we do to manage our stress appropriately. And that is different for everyone. Right, So in your experience, tell us if you have any stories, like you know how you've helped people. Well, certainly it goes from very simple help to much more complicated help. So in terms of the simple help, unfortunately, it's been shown that many women really have no idea how their cycles work, how their hormones work, even when they're most likely to be able to get pregnant. They've probably been taught in high school and perhaps forgotten it didn't seem very important, so they don't have a great idea of when they're ovulating and so forth. For instance, I had one couple. This was years and years ago.

18:49 They had been trying to get pregnant for over years. She had regular cycles. They weren't painful, but only upon questioning after she's been trying for over a year about her cycles, it turned out that she didn't have twenty eight day cycles, which are average normal cycles. She actually had twenty four day cycles. And this actually happens as you get older, your cycles ten to shorten. In your forties, your cycles are often shorter than they are in their twenties. But what that means is that the time that you're ovulating in the cycle is earlier. If your cycle is four days shorter, you're probably not ovulating on day fourteen, you're ovulating on day ten. Oh. So she was actually missing her fertile window every month, thinking she was doing the right thing having sex on day fourteen of her cycle, which would have worked that she had a twenty eight day cycle. So that little piece of knowledge she got pregnant very quickly. So knowledge is extremely important. But then also, you know, stress, which we have so much in our society and which often is not acknowledged or dealt with, is a big fa All doctors and obstetricians have seen the couple who's trying to get pregnant, who's trying to do everything right, but they're stressing themselves by the whole experience. And sometimes it's better to say, let's just stop worrying about this for a while, let's just take a break and not try

20:21 to have sex at the right time, not to do everything possible to get pregnant, and often that in itself helps and the pregnancy rates are better. You know, the couple who has you know, given up trying to get pregnant, they finally adopt a child, so they don't worry about it anymore, and they're the ones who are likely to get pregnant. We see that all the time. So that's a you know, acknowledgment that that stress is a factor that should be addressed. Okay, now that's that's a good one that you know you mentioned about it. So let's say a woman who's in twenties, what can she do like you know, she's not thinking I'm getting pregnant. She's still on her career path and all that. And there are a lot of young women, some of my clients, who have come and said like they're freezing X. And so let's talk about in two general perspectives. One as a general what should she be talking to her doctor for her overall health.

21:25 You mentioned that a lot of women don't know, and then I'm doing it, So what would be those questions to ask? So the unfortunate thing is that regular conventional doctor is not well trained in lifestyle medicine, and they also are overly busy and they don't have time to talk about it. So it's probably I think for a young woman it's probably best to either inform themselves or look towards functional medicine or naturopathic doctors who are much more oriented in this way, you know, to find out what diet is the best, what you know are used neutra genomic testing, but also recognize how stress plays a role, how lack of exercise plays a role. Sleep is very important. But the big elephant in the room is these toxic chemicals in the environment which we are all exposed to. I'm not saying you cannot be exposed to them, but you can mitigate the risks by decreasing your exposure. So I send patients to the Environmental Working Group. Are you aware of the EWG? This is an American not for profit organization that informs the public about pollution and how to mitigate the consequences. It's a very interesting organization. And so

23:00 have an app that you can download on your smartphone which is called the Healthy Living App, and that you can scan products within the store before you buy them, whether it's personal care products, cleaning products, anything we use in our household can have chemicals and it most of them do, and this tells you the toxicity rating of the product. So if you recognize that you're a regular shampoo is actually highly toxic, then you can scan other products and find things that are less toxic to use. And you know, women are well known for using many personal care products and most of them will have toxicity in them, So minimizing your toxic exposure. And you know in our houses, our houses are actually more toxic than the exterior and air quality is another issue. I actually recommend that people use a good HEPA filter where they sleep, even if they have a household filmlter for the air, those are not that great. It's amazing how much more particles you trap, even if you have a household filter and you also have another HEPA filter, and how much we can breathe these in. And these dust particles contain chemicals.

24:17 For instance, furniture drapes, carpets have anti fire agents that are meant to you know, if there's a house fire, not to burn, but those chemicals are very toxic to of us. If you can also, water filters are very important. This is a United States organization, so they don't have this part in Canada. But in the US you can look up your water quality in any municipality by your zip code on the website. So my daughter moved to a small town in New Jersey. So I looked up the water supply and I was shocked that there were thirteen contaminants that were above acceptable levels. And some of them were things like chloroform, which I don't know how that gets into the water supply of no idea, but other chemicals that are quite toxic hexavalent, chromium, I don't know if you remember the Air and Brockovich story, Oh yeah, definitely.

25:16 So the woman in California who was a paralegal who found out that I think it was the Pacific Gas Company was actually they were dumping hexavalent chromium into the water supply because of some manufacturing process, and that actually poisoned the water supply. Many people died of cancer. This was the biggest lawsuit to date. I was thinking it was a three hundred million dollar lawsuit back thirty years ago, first thing of its kind. They actually had to close that town down. They couldn't get the hexavalent chromium out of the water supply. They just raised the town to the ground. So that was in my daughter's water supply.

25:56 So when I found out about this, I bought her a reverse osmosis filter countertop filter. I had it mailed to her house, and then I bought her a hip hop filter for her bedroom. And this is actually she was the one who started me on this whole research project because she did ask me to pay for her to freeze her eggs when she graduated from medical school and she was starting a residency in emergency medicine, which I knew would be very exhausting and stressful. And you know, when I thought about it, I said, You shouldn't be trying to freeze your eggs when you're exhausted. Those are not high quality eggs. They're less likely to fertilize. You need to nurture your eggs. You need to put them in a good environment from all points of view before you freeze them.

26:41 Wow, so yeah, I go. Sorry, very helpful. So can you tell us the website of that Environmental Working group is EWG dot org. Ah EWG dot org. Yes, so these are the things where people can and I'm so happy that you're sharing these resources because people are unaware. We are not even kind of thinking. We say that, oh, we're exposed to chemicals. It's all outside. But based on what you're telling we can control our internal atmosphere. We can make things better for ourselves. It's not just like okay, yeah it's out there. We can do anything.

27:25 Yeah, now, there's a lot we can do about it. There are also treatments for high exposures, but that's a whole different topic, like it would be another book, so I didn't write about it. The first thing you should do is reduce exposure, and you know, if you need treatment, that's another story. Because those chemicals can affect you, and it affects some people more than others based on our genetics, because we metabolize our food according to our genetics, and some people metabolize food and drugs and exposures talks a city not so efficiently as other people, and they're the ones who are most likely to get side effects and problems.

28:11 And do you have a list of all these resources on your website? So I must say I don't at this point. My website is still developing. I do talk about these things in my book. My book is not published yet, it will be within the next few months. And you're right, I probably need to work on my website as well to have this information available. That's another step in the process. Definitely. No, we appreciate you bringing all these things to our notification and like you know, it's important, like because if you are not aware of it, if you don't notify, and that's the whole purpose of our show, so that our audience can live a better life, and we want to be able to make them aware of it, and we can do that bad.

29:06 And what we could do is also important to. Even kind of create a follow up, so if somebody were to kind of reach out to you where could they. Reach out through my website? I have, for instance, I do a weekly blog on fertility issues and people can sign up on the get website. I also have information about my upcoming book and a wait list that you can sign up for if you're interested in being informed as soon as it comes up. So that information is there and people can contact me through the site if they want to give me a shout out or ask me questions. And what's your website?

29:47 So it's doctor Marina obgyn dot com. It's d R Marina obgyn dot com. Well fantastic and. As women are KNA, you have talked a lot about like seeking out naturopathic doctors. And actually one of my clients, as she was going through fertility issues, she reached out to multiple doctors and did not feel the connection. So how would you say, like, how can women find out who is a doctor, you know, who cares, who's well educated? Because nowadays there's so much noise that it's very hot.

30:28 That's true, that's true. Well, you know, word of mouth is often very important if other people have gone to somebody that they connect with and they like. But the internet can be very helpful. There's a lot of natural paths who specialize in fertility and functional medicine doctors as well. Some of them have written books. There is. A group of people who they sort of connect with each other and they have written books. So I connect through a lot of conferences that I go to. Now I'm actually very interested in longevity and I'm using the same knowledge that I use in longevity medicine to apply to fertility because it's actually whatever it impacts your health is going to impact your fertility as well. So it's you have to acknowledge that.

31:27 That definitely makes sense. So any tips you'd like to share with her audience, Well. My biggest ask is, don't take your fertility for granted. Don't assume that in fifteen twenty years it will be there for you, because fertility decreases with age. Women are only born with a certain amount of eggs and they decrease over the time. But egg quality is also an important factor, which at this point is not really measurable inside a woman. However, for instance, for women who are dying doing IVF, when an egg is extracted for IVF purposes, clinics now use artificial intelligence. They can actually photograph the egg and they look at the nucleus, the cytoplasm, the cell wall, and that AI can determine the chance that that egg will be fertilized. So that is a measurement of egg quality. But we can only do that if the egg is outside of the body, So if your egg is still inside your overy, that technology is not available.

32:32 But who knows it might be one day that would be great. Yeah, I'm sure it's coming. And so thank you, thank you for sharing all the you know nuggets and all that. And as we. Come close to the end of the show, do you have any last minute thoughts or any advice for our audience. I really think that couples need to approach that together. We now realize that men are fifty percent of the fertility equation. It was always thought that miscarriages are due to the mom. That's not true at all. We now know that sperm is responsible for forming the placenta. Without a good placenta, there isn't a good pregnancy, and a lot of early miscarriages are actually sperm issues with DNA deletions micro deletions that can be causing that. So men have to improve their health as well as women. So it should be like a project for both, not just the woman thinking about it.

33:39 Absolutely, that makes sense, and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Absolutely, and thank you wonderful audience. I know the topic was a little little hard and little of that, but the thing is it's important to have those hard conversations rather than avoid them. It can save a lot of heartache down the road. So hope you pay attention to your health and thank you on for making the show possible. Be well and take care into links time. Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence with your host d W. Park, we hope you have learned more about how to start living the life you want. Each week on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who've experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships.

34:33 During Beyond Confidence, Vapark shares what happened to her when she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly with people across the globe. She not only coaches people how to form hard connections, but also transform relationships to mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life they want. If you are ready to live the life you want and leverage your strengths. Learn more at www dot dvpark dot com and you can connect with vat contact at dvpark dot com. We look forward to you're joining us next week. Hmm