So let's start there.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty well documented, like what chronic stress does to us now, right? You know, and everybody's talking about like nervous system regulation.

I think, you know, you and I have been practitioners of Chinese medicine for two decades, two plus decades at this point.

We see it a little different.

Of course, we understand the fight or flight response and what's happening in the body physiologically.

I would generally say what it's doing is it's, you know, your body has two choices every day, all day is, am I going to go down the rest, relax, reproduce pathway? Or am I going to go down like the survival pathway? That's it.

And so you basically can't have both.

So what do you think we're getting wrong about the age conversation? Maybe not you and I, but what do you think the overall fertility space is getting wrong about the age conversation?

Before we get into it, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about, um, ovarian aging, including what happens in women with, you know, the, the normal, uh, expression of time as we get wiser and older, what can happen with our ovaries, and then also that component of the premature ovarian insufficiency, what it is and how does it happen, maybe why it happens.

Sure.

Well, first, ovarian aging.

I mean, I think the, the main story that we've all been told is it's just set in stone that as you age, ovarian, uh, reserve and ovarian, um, quality, egg quality is going to decline, and more particularly after the age of 35 that we're gonna fall off the, the fertile cliff and our ovarian reserve and quality of eggs significantly declines and at a rapid pace.

The current model of research doesn't, doesn't support that.

You know, this is, this is an old school dogma and one that many do not like pushback on But, but the current research really tells a com- a different story.

It's, it's more about mitochondrial function and the environment in which those eggs, uh, and your ovaries are aging in that, that impacts the, the biological clock and things like insulin resistance, inflammation, immune signaling, uh, all of which I, I go, I go deep into in my book, and I know you're, you're very familiar with, with all your work on, um, Hashimoto's.

But if you were to be very intentional in it with a woman who had Hashimoto's, maybe elevated thyroid antibodies, you know, her thyroid function, let's just say she's on thyroid medications and she's still looking to get pregnant and keep a pregnancy, what are the things that you'd be talking to her about?

Can you just talk to us a little bit about how joy, pleasure, and nervous system regulation actually influence hormones and egg quality, and in measurable ways?

Traditional Chinese medicine, which is...

You know, I have a master's degree in that, and it was one of the things that really called me to the medicine.

We truly believe every disease, so disharmony, dysfunction, has both a physical and an emotional correlate.

And so you can't look at it and not look at both sides.

And vitamin J or joy is the antidote to fear.

It's the antidote to anxiety, right? So it's, it's about finding joy now, not when I get that positive pregnancy test or when I get that euploid embryo, right? It's creating this sense of, how can I have joy and pleasure and really nervous system regulation in my everyday life? And when we're in that constant stress mode or that do, do, do mode, fertility simply doesn't thrive when the body feels under threat.

And then how for patients who are on a fertility treatment journey already doing egg freezing or IVF, h- what do you recommend patients do to help create the best outcomes as far as labs, lifestyle shifts, and also how should they emotionally prepare as well?

But what do you say when someone comes to you and they've had that experience, what are the next steps that you would take them through?

You know, I'm usually looking at their labs.

I'm looking at their, you know, if they've done IVF, I'm looking at their cycles, doing, you know, our full intake from Chinese functional medicine perspective, which really looks at the whole body from sleep to digestion, to skin, to hair, nails, you know, just a whole picture of things.

And I like to inform them and educate them.

I'll tell them about, you know, the biggest research paper of its kind, look at 20,000 eggs of women undergoing IVF, just eggs.

They were not fertilized.

They were just eggs.

I

Why do you think fertility is often misunderstood as something purely biological when it is clearly more complex than that?

I just think that's how the Western medical model breaks it down.

Everything is so compartmentalized and seemingly black and white.

But if we just think about just in the context of traditional Chinese medicine, which is part of one of my degrees, you know, for studying acupuncture and herbology, you know, we're always looking holistically.

And I think one of the things that really drew me to Chinese medicine was the fact that emotions play such an important role.

And I would even extend that to say spirituality plays such an important role in the overall presentation or expression of someone's health and vitality.

But it's just, Western medicine really just still sticks to like, what can we study in a randomized controlled trial? And what does that tell us? You know, it's, it's still just has this very black and white imaging.

First off, I want to understand, for those of us who may not know, what is autoimmune, what are autoimmune conditions, and how do these factors that I mentioned initially combine with autoimmune issues? How do these factors actually influence something as physical as conception?

So could you give us a brief background and let us know about you?

Sure, me.

You know, I've been doing this work, similar to you, two decades as an acupuncturist and herbalist.

And prior to that, you know, en route to medical school.

So I have my biology degree, my chemistry degree, I have a partial master's in neuroscience, and then I became a medical school dropout.

became a Chinese medicine practitioner, loved every second of that transformation.

And I'm summing it up in a, that was a big, that was a big shift for me in my early 20s.

What are some of the main things that you've seen like that we're having trouble in conceiving? Like why are people you think, that's a very broad question, but what are like the statistics of people not being able to conceive?