Lorne Brown:

We have Dr. Lara Briden on the Conscious Fertility Podcast, and she actually practice’s in and lives in New Zealand, but she is a fellow Canadian from Alberta, Canada. She’s a naturopathic doctor and bestselling author of the books, Period Repair Manual and Hormone Repair Manual Practical Guide to Treating Period Problems with Nutrition Supplements and Bioidentical Hormones. And so grateful to Lara because she was in Vancouver and did an integrative talk with our local naturopath, Kali MacIsaac and also Fiona McCulloch, and we started to give some of your books away as door prizes and people are really appreciative of that as well. So thank you. She has a strong science background. Lara sits on several advisory boards and is the lead author on a couple of peer reviewed papers as well. She has over 20 years experience with women’s health and currently has consulting rooms in New Zealand where she treats women with PCOS, PMS, endometriosis, perimenopause, and many other hormone and period related health problems. Lara, I’m so glad that I get to talk to you on our Conscious Fertility podcast today.

Lara Briden:

Thanks for having me, Lorne. And of course, we got to meet in person last year, which was fun. It was nice in this era of everything over Zoom and everything online. We got to do an online event.

Lorne Brown:

It was nice. We had people online and we had people in the room with us, and now it’s getting a little more common 2023 as we record this. But yeah, it was nice to be in your presence. Now, I wanted to chat with you because you’ve written a lot about hormonal health and it’s a big part of your practice, and I think about the women that we see and our approach are similar, our clinic and how you approach that. A healthy cycle seems to be important not just for people’s wellbeing, but also to create a healthy baby and to optimize your fertility. I’m assuming you subscribe to that idea.

Lara Briden:

Oh yeah. Although truthfully, full disclosure, I don’t treat a lot of fertility because I’ll just tell you why, because female hormones are only one small part of that puzzle. As you know, there’s egg quality, which relates to hormones, but there’s immune function in the woman, and then there’s all the whole male side of things, which is huge. So yes, I mean, I can slot in on the female hormone side of things, but it’s always just one part of fertility.

Lorne Brown:

That’s why I wanted to talk to you is because when it comes to reproductive health, one of the things we look at is do you have healthy hormonal cycles? Do you have balanced hormones that’s going to contribute to the environment that’s going to support the maturation of the egg and it reaching its peak fertility potential? So what is that considered a healthy cycle? Then I see women saying, my cycle’s normal. My medical doctor said my cycle is normal, and normal doesn’t always mean healthy. So how would somebody know that they have hormonal problems? Then why do they seek you out? Yeah,

Lara Briden:

I think the first step is to reframe a cycle as an ovulatory cycle. So everyone thinks about the period as the main event of the menstrual cycle, but actually ovulation is the main event, and that’s from a general health perspective as well as obviously from a fertility perspective, but I don’t know if people, your listeners realize, but it’s actually quite common to have what are called an ovulatory cycles. So you could be even having semi-regular bleeds and potentially not ovulating at all, or having what’s called subclinical ovulatory disturbance where you maybe are ovulating, but you’re not forming a strong corpus luteum, you’re not getting that robust luteal phase. So yeah, an answer to your question, step one is to ask the question, am I ovulating with these cycles and track that preferably with temperatures. I’m guessing you’ve had guests before that talked about a bit about cycle tracking and using under the tongue temperatures for tracking ovulation. It’s extremely helpful.

Lorne Brown:

And then there’s some salivary testing, or sorry, not salivary urinary testing that you can do to test to see if you’ve ovulated. They look for the downstream metabolites of the progesterone, even like the actual,

Lara Briden:

Oh, yes, actually there are some progesterone urine tests. Yeah, I haven’t used those clinically, but that’s another option. And there’s

Lorne Brown:

Blood tests, but you’re saying just having a bleed, although usually the doctors will say, if you’re bleeding monthly, you’re ovulating monthly, and you’ve known through the research that you’ve been involved in that sometimes you can have a bleed and it was a non auditor bleed.

Lara Briden:

Exactly. And ovulatory, so some of that research is coming directly from your neighbor scientist, Darly Pryor at Emcor, which is pretty close to you actually just a few blocks away. She did a study. She’s a famous Canadian scientist, an expert on ovulation. She runs the Center for Ovulation, menstruation and Ovulation Research, and she discovered that it was close to a third of cycles or an ovulatory. It’s invisible and ovulatory cycles, and that’s just in women who are basically healthy, but ovulation is one of the first things to go with health, right? Ovulation is hard to do. So as soon as there’s any kind of stress or even just social stress or emotional stress or illness or nutrition not dialed in, ovulation slows down. It either stops, doesn’t happen, or like I said, ovulation could happen but not robustly. And a lot of that’s to do with egg quality.

That’s to do with the, not just that in that cycle, the formation of the corpus luteum, which is what makes progesterone, but all the kind of monk fleeting up to that and the health of the follicles, the little baby eggs, the little baby follicles as they were on their, what I call a hundred days to ovulation on their journey to ovulation. They need to be fully nourished, have all the right hormonal signaling, including stress hormones and not too much inflammation and not too high insulin, and all those things happening so that when one of them wins the race to ovulation and ovulates, that that’s a nice strong follicle that forms a nice corpus and makes lots of progesterone. That’s what you want.

Lorne Brown:

So I want to kind of unpack that a bit. What you shared is sort of that hundred days, so that follicular genesis, determining that egg quality that lasts a hundred days is that time when the follicle can reach its peak fertility potential. And the follicle is kind of, I’ve heard people call it, it’s the baby house, it’s supporting the egg, so good mitochondria health, good blood flow, like you said. What’s the blood sugar level? What’s the hormonal signals like inflammation signals, nutritional profile? Here’s something, Lara, I shared this once with a reproductive endocrinologist and they said it was theoretical. They said, it makes sense, we got to do more research because they didn’t consider spotting an issue in reproductive endocrinology. They’re like, oh, luteal phase defect went out in the eighties, is kind of to quote, and I know as a naturopathic physician, you don’t want to see spotting. You look at that as a sign of an imbalance, right?

Lara Briden:

Correct. Yeah. I mean, there could be lots of reasons for it, but yeah, yeah,

Lorne Brown:

Definitely. Yep. And so I said, well, here’s my thought. And I came from a yin yang Chinese medicines perspective. So you got the egg and the follicle are one, they’re together at one point in time, and then as you shared, the egg is released into the tube and the corpus luteum, the follicle becomes a corpus luteum, it produces progesterone. So one way to kind of assess the quality of the egg is if the corpus luteum cannot produce progesterone for those 14 days, or there’s a lot of spotting, or you have that luteal phase defect, well, since we were once one and it’s the follicle that’s charging, supporting the egg during those a hundred days, then if the corpus luteum doesn’t look great through how we see progesterone, theoretically I speculate that maybe the egg isn’t great as it could be because it didn’t have that great follicular support.

Lara Briden:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you articulated that very well. That’s what I was leading unsaid to some extent. But yes, the journey of the follicles is going to result in both a healthy egg itself and that egg quality is important for fertility and the corpus luteum that formed from the follicle that held the egg, yeah, they’re one and the same. I think that’s,

Lorne Brown:

And progesterone is important. It helps with the window of implantation and maintains the lining. So I would like to talk. I know we’re short on time today for our interview, and I wanted to grab some really good pearls from you. The things that I think of where some of the hormonal imbalances are obvious are conditions like endometriosis and PCOS and PCOS is a really common obligatory disorder. Can be. So you’re seeing this in your practice written about it

Lara Briden:

For sure. Yeah, those are probably the two most common conditions, I guess. Yeah, I’m happy to talk about them. They’re quite different from each other actually. They’re very, very different. And endometriosis, I would argue is less or hormonal condition and more a bunch of other stuff including immune. I mean, we could maybe come back to that, but

Lorne Brown:

We think it, it’s an everything condition and I’ll share, that’s where we gave several of your books away and people are so appreciative. You did the documentary film below the belt related to endometriosis and how it’s misdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, and just all the suffering. And so it was just nice to introduce people to your work through giving out your, and so thank you for giving us this book so we could share them with the people that came to our workshop. So can we start, thanks for sharing that. So I’d like you to talk about both PCS is one of my favorite things to treat because I think it’s one of the things that responds well to the kind of medicine that you’re practicing, but I’d like to hear a little bit about the endometriosis because a lot of women may have it but don’t know they have it. And so if you could talk a little, some of the symptoms to show that there’s an issue there, then I’d love to hear about your approach to polycystic ovarian syndrome as well.

Lara Briden:

Okay, so in my books, the angle I take, and I have a YouTube video about this. I’ve spoken about it at some length actually on my blog and on YouTube, and it’s primarily, I would argue, a disease of immune dysfunction. It’s in the territory of autoimmune disease very close to that. It’s influenced by hormones, and endometriosis is influenced by hormones, of course, as almost everything is, but it’s very influenced by estrogen. Estrogen is just gasoline on the fire of endometriosis. It’s hard to have any active endometriosis lesions without estrogen being present. But my approach with my patients, because estrogen is very beneficial. So the medical approach, as you know, is to kind of shut down estrogen unless you’re trying for pregnancy and then they try other strategies. But I feel like a way better approach is to dial down the inflammation, which usually involves dialing down the inflammatory reaction, the immune response, which a lot of it’s to do.

This won’t surprise you. I think from a TCM lens, it’s a lot to do with the gut. Microbiome is quite a strong degree of intestinal permeability. With endometriosis specifically, it sounds weird, but specifically some of the bacterial toxins called LPS, that’s exiting the gut basically ending up in the pelvis and inflaming those lesions. So that gives us a really good way in as natural health practitioners, we can fix the gut. A lot of it links with endometriosis. A lot of it links to a condition called SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which you’ve probably had guests talk about before. Plus, there’s always going to be a genetic vulnerability. Endometriosis does seem to be quite strongly genetic, so some women just would never get endometriosis no matter what kind of the state of their gut or state of their estrogen or anything, that’s just never going to happen for them.

You sort of have to have the system primed for in a few ways, including having a certain autoimmune type of immune system or vulnerability. But the other thing that’s going on with Endo, I’ll be honest, the last couple years I’ve been talking to some other practitioners, there’s a brilliant book coming by an Australian gynecologist. I’m going to just give her a plug now. Her name’s Peter Wright. You might be able to have her on your podcast one day. Her book’s coming out later this year in 2023, and she’s really raising some very interesting questions about just separating out pelvic pain, acknowledging that pelvic pain and endometriosis kind of get sort of mushed together, but they’re actually separate. And there’s some real question marks around for some women about the presence of those endometriosis lesions, how significant that event is, how much that’s actually related to the pain.

So there’s some question that possibly Peter Wright says, I hope I’m quoting her properly, but she thinks some of these lesions in some women are just physiological, like a little bit of retrograde menstruation that ended up there, but the body’s going to clean it up and it doesn’t really mean anything per se, and yet other women can have quite active inflammatory lesions. So this is what I mean about endometriosis is a very complicated condition, and certainly it can affect fertility. I think its effect on fertility has a lot to do with just the inflammatory environment and the whole pelvis, not just the lesions themselves, but just that we talked about the follicles needing a safe, happy environment to grow up in. When that whole pelvis is inflamed, that leads to poor egg quality and endometriosis. That’s one of,

Lorne Brown:

We lose eggs, the quality is diminished, and we also, uterine receptivity becomes an issue as well

Lara Briden:

For sure. And the implantation, the endometrial lining becomes, yeah,

Lorne Brown:

But what you’ve highlighted here though I really want to emphasize is the inflammation, but so much the gut health and through diet and lifestyle, stress and emotions can impact our gut microbiome. And I think even in the reproductive world, mainstream conventional, they’re starting to think about the microbiome, the vaginal microbiome and the uterine microbiome at least, but it’s becoming more of an understanding that it has a systemic effect on the body.

Lara Briden:

For sure. Yeah, there’s a lot of research into endometriosis in the microbiome, and what I’m actually talking about is the pelvic microbiome, which is weird. We think of this, the gut microbiome, as you pointed out, there’s the uterine microbiome for sure, vaginal microbiome. There’s actually a microbiome in the pelvic cavity itself, and women with endometriosis have, I think it’s six times higher levels of e coli particular bacteria in the pelvis, which is

Lorne Brown:

How do you address it then? Because the conventional way, there’s obviously excision surgery there is shutting down the hormonal system like Lupron, drugs like that. What would be your approach if somebody has been diagnosed with endometriosis? What’s kind of your approach for that

Lara Briden:

Antimicrobials to start with often? Yeah. I mean it depends on the case, obviously. And certain antimicrobial herbal medicines you cannot use during pregnancy. So you’d have to sort of weigh that up and decide what treatment protocol you’re going to do. And I’m curious, again, I know you are a TCM practitioner, so I can get you to weigh in. I do use berberine, some of the berberine containing herbs that from a TCM perspective, that clears dampness, that clears some of that damp heat, which is microbial basically,

Lorne Brown:

Well, similar because your colleague and friend, Dr. Kali MacIsaac at our clinic at Acubalance, we tag team, we integrate, and so she’ll do the anti microbe carbos. She does that. Dietary changes, and this is after testing sibo, doing the gut microbiome test, and then we’ll use the herbal, but there’s not a one size fits all as in the Chinese medicine. It’s how they’re presenting because not all women diagnosed with endometriosis present the same symptoms either. And so we really look at how the body is presenting? And then it is, there’s MINDBODY stuff, there’s the supplements, there’s the diet and lifestyle. Sometimes there’s certain antibiotics and anti microbes that you talked about.

Lara Briden:

And then it sometimes needs to be a pelvic therapy, like a physical therapy component to endo. It depends because there’s a whole pelvic floor spasm and the nervous system and how that can become quite overactive, hyperactive. So that’s endo and it’s a big one.

Lorne Brown:

And we are not doing an endo talk today, but we just wanted it to talk, but I wanted just because you’re here, it’s always good to tap into your knowledge. And then I’m just thinking PCOS for example, because not when you were here, were you involved in some PCOS research or reviewing it.

Lara Briden:

Yeah, well, this was a good memory. So I was in Vancouver to meet up with Jerilynn Prior who we just mentioned.

Lorne Brown:

She’s the endocrinologist locally

Lara Briden:

Retired. She’s a reproductive endocrinologist. Yeah, she’s a researcher. Her research lab is just blocks away from you. And they’ve been running, I think they’re close to finishing it, a clinical trial of what’s called cyclic progesterone therapy for PCOS. So that’s using natural progesterone essentially. But they’ve been using the prometrium, which is the prepared version of body identical progesterone. And one of the papers I wrote actually was with Lyn Pryor about the mechanisms of progesterone for PCOS because progesterone can have quite a nice anti androgen, so testosterone lowering effect in women, and it also can promote ovulation by providing this sort of beneficial negative feedback to the hypothalamus, to the brain, because as you pointed out, one of the key features of PCOS can be an ovulation or just not regular ovulation, and that’s important. Reestablishing ovulation is important for fertility, obviously, but also for general health because it’s by ovulating regularly, then women make more estrogen and progesterone, and then that in itself can help to relieve some of the androgen symptoms and even some of the metabolic symptoms. So yeah, I mean PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome is kind of by definition the situation of androgen excess or excess testosterone in women when all other causes of androgen excess have been ruled out was always in that sense, it’s kind of an umbrella diagnosis. It’s like anyone who’s got high antigens who doesn’t fit into some other category gets thrown under the PCOS umbrella, which does mean different people can eat different things. So it’s perfect for naturopathic medicine and integrative medicine you can treat the individual try to figure out,

Lorne Brown:

And the reason you’re talking about ovulation and how it’s so important in PCOS is because if you’re not ovulating, then we have a lack of progesterone. Right, exactly. So we’re missing that. And do you find a lot of the women that we’ll see have been put on birth control pills? These aren’t the ones that we’re trying to conceive, but that’s how they were managing their PCOS like symptoms. Is that a beneficial approach or how do you see that from your naturopathic lens?

Lara Briden:

Well, my book books are essentially all about how to come off the pill, how to not take the pill, all the ways you can avoid pregnancy and treat menstrual symptoms

Lorne Brown:

Through your lens. What’s the reason why you want to support women not needing or helping to come off the birth control pill? What is the bias there for you that you know that they may not be aware of, that you have an interest in them not needing that

Lara Briden:

Because women benefit from their own hormones, estradiol and progesterone that are not the hormones in the pill. I mean, I think maybe I’ve come to realize a lot of people do, and even doctors do kind of think that the pill contains estrogen and progesterone. It contains analogs of those hormones. But the big difference is in progestins, which are the synthetic versions of progesterone used in the pill and real progesterone, they have very different effects in the body, very, very different effects. In particular, one of the best examples of, well, there’s two examples that illustrate how different the pill hormones or the contraceptive drugs are from real hormones is one is around breast cancer risk. All types of hormonal birth control carry a slight breast cancer risk. I don’t like to overstate that it’s small, but it’s mostly from the progestin. Whereas arguably progesterone, our own progesterone that we make, or you can take as prometrium according to Professor Prior, it probably reduces the risk of breast cancer.

So that’s one example of how they’re different. The other way they’re different is progesterone is really good for the brain and progestins are not. And here’s an example. The progesterone that we make with a natural menstrual cycle converts to what’s called a neurosteroid. It’s kind of like a neurotransmitter slash hormone called allopregnanolone. People don’t have to remember the name of it, but just know the brain loves it. It’s really good for the brain and the progestins in all types of hormonal birth control, none of those progestins convert to allopregnanolone. So when you put a young woman on any type of hormonal birth control, you’ve essentially robbed her of her own progesterone and replaced it with a medication that is not the same at all, especially for the brain. And that might be why, for example, we’re starting to see some worrying signs in the research that especially young people, girls who are put on hormonal birth control, it’s teenagers grow up to have a triple the risk of depression and anxiety later in life, even once they stop the pill because that formative years of brain health is so important, and that’s when we benefit from real hormones, estradiol and progesterone.

I always talk about how this cavalier way that we’re like, all women don’t need their own hormones. Come on. We’ll just put them on the pill, and then they just only let them ovulate when they’re ready to have a baby. That would be saying to men, oh, come on, you don’t need your own testosterone. What are you worried about? Well, just suppress your testicular function and suppress your testosterone and replace it with this drug that’s only kind of like testosterone, but mostly estrogen and it’s probably going to cause depression and affect your brain development over your life. But don’t worry, because that’s what everyone else takes. That’s essentially where we’re at with the pill right now

Lorne Brown:

And that’s why I wanted to talk to you and I’m so glad you’re writing your books. And so what would be some of the natural approaches then to help somebody with a metabolic disorder like polycystic ovarian syndrome? Are you using dietary tools?

Lara Briden:

Yeah, PCOS responds incredibly well to natural treatments and an answer to your previous question of why not take the pill for PCOS because it doesn’t, the problem with PCOS is that you’re not ovulating and you potentially have insulin resistance. The pill suppresses ovulation and promotes insulin resistance, so it has done

Lorne Brown:

Nothing. So we got to say that again because we even talked earlier about egg quality, how blood sugar regulation can impact egg quality. And so you’re sharing that if you go on birth control pill, that ovulation, it doesn’t fix ovulation, even though you may be getting a bleed, it’s not an auditor bleed, and the hormones that you are replacing do not have the same impact on the body as the bioidentical. So your goal is to get them ovulating so they have their natural estrogens and progesterones. Correct.

Lara Briden:

And both just to say again, because we know that the contraceptive drugs in the pill compared to our real estrogen and progesterone, those contraceptive drugs do seem to promote or worsen insulin resistance. And that kind of paradox has been known for a while doing a few papers about that. It’s like, oh wait, wait, why are we giving medications essentially that cause insulin resistance to women that already have insulin resistance? It’s not ideal,

Lorne Brown:

And that was the best tool that conventional medicine had, so that’s why they’re doing it. But there are other paradigms or practices of medicine like naturopathic medicine and you guys address this differently. And so diet, there’s supplements you do to help regulate sugar. And so can you share a little bit

Lara Briden:

The top supplements everyone should know about? I always feel like I’m doing an infomercial for, it is inositol. I love myo-inositol.

Lorne Brown:

I do it because I’m a little heavy in the waist, so I started taking it for that reason because blood sugar regulation,

Lara Briden:

I’m taking it for sleep, actually, that’s why I feel like I’m doing an infomercial. It does lots of things actually. It’s good for thyroid. It helps with intracellular signaling. So it gets right down into the nuts and bolts of hormonal signaling for a few hormones. It enhances insulin sensitivity, it promotes ovulation. It’s inexpensive. It’s safe when you’re trying for pregnancy. This is why I feel like,

Lorne Brown:

Do you ever use the Chiro with myo-inositol or do you stick with the myo-inositol?

Lara Briden:

I have a podcast episode about that, so if anyone wants to check that out, you could put it in the show notes. 

Lorne Brown:

Yes, let’s just give a shout out to your podcast so they know how to find it. Do you know the episode number by chance or the title?

Lara Briden:

No, I don’t. I’ve only honestly had 12 episodes. It’s somewhere in the middle. It’s just in the name of the episode. And yeah, researching that episode, I really was able to finally get my head around it de chiro. You need to be careful with D-Chiro with PCOS compared to myo-inositol and D-Chiro and osteo does promote insulin sensitivity. It’s okay to have a little bit of it in there, but too much chiro can prevent ovulation.

Lorne Brown:

So the 40 to one ratio is what most of the

Lara Briden:

Companies, 41 is fine. Yeah, that’s what you can have to do 40 to one or you can do straight my own aol, whichever is kind of easier and more accessible. I think that’s fine. You just wouldn’t want to do straight de chiro, at least not for PCOS. Yeah, so there’s that. Yeah, there’s what else? Zinc? Zinc. Zinc is my other favorite one. Anti-Androgen for women and well cyclic Predict one therapy. So that’s

Lorne Brown:

What I got to tell you. One of my favorites. You didn’t say one of my favorites, so I’m going to check in with you. I bet you probably, so the myo-inositol is sometimes with the D-Chiro 40 to one ratio, and I love N-Acetyl Cysteine.

Lara Briden:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. I prescribe it for a lot of things. I prescribe it for endometriosis as well. Same for some of its anti-inflammatory effects. Yeah, I think it’s great. It can be a great supplement for lots of different things for sure. So that’s good, actually, PCOS can respond to lots of different strategies. Again, it can be very individualized for what’s going on for the woman. And then there is the cyclic progesterone therapy, which we mentioned before that LY prior just probably finished a clinical trial on that. And one of the problems they had with recruitment for that trial, of course, women participants had to agree to not take the pill. They had to use cyclic progesterone instead of the pill. That was sort of the whole point. So I think they’ve finally finished it now, and we’ll hopefully publish those results, which will be great to see. Great thing about progesterone is it induces a bleed, so it can give you withdrawal bleeds, at least at first. But unlike the pill, it actually promotes ovulation rather than suppresses it. So it’s safe when you’re trying. It’s also you’re for pregnancy, you can use

Lorne Brown:

It and it’s, it’s cyclical, if you’re taking it, you’re not taking it all month long. You’re taking it and having a break and it’s that cyclical use is what’s going to help support ovulation. Yes.

Lara Briden:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Lorne Brown:

I mean this is what, and I remember we do the cyclical progesterone often and Kaylee’s greatly influenced by Lyn’s work and from her connecting with you as well, how we use it. And again, the acupuncture, the supplements, it’s just a really nice imbalance metabolic disorder that I think responds to the diet, the supplements, the acupuncture. It does the cyclical progesterone. And have you found, it’s been, my experience is when you give somebody birth control pill as you shared, and then they come off of it for if they’re diagnosed with PCOS back when they weren’t trying to conceive, it doesn’t correct it. The PCOS is right back to the observatory disorders. So it was like a bandaid effect. It wasn’t fixing

Lara Briden:

Mass symptoms. Yeah, it gave you withdrawal bleeds that meant nothing. Right? It didn’t correct the underlying ovulation problem. It worsened it.

Lorne Brown:

We’ve seen witness observed anecdotally that often when we work with women that are trying to conceive and we help them start get ovulating, if they weren’t or just have their ovulation more regular, they had such a delayed ovulation, like every 45 to 60 days that after having baby, that they continue to cycle. They don’t need to go back to treatment again. Do you see that pregnancy,

Lara Briden:

Pregnancy can be just a massive hormonal reset. Makes sense. The whole system recalibrates. Yeah. I’ve certainly seen that with patients where they’ve maybe had a terrible time with PCOS, very worried about having to go through it all again with their second baby. And I’ll say, look, you may find after your first pregnancy and delivery that boom, you just, everything’s okay now it’s possible.

Lorne Brown:

So as we wrap up, I have another question then on this because most of the women I see that have a diagnosis of PCOS or we help them determine that they have that diagnosis through their physician through signs and symptoms because if they start to ovulate, they’re coming to trying to get get pregnant, we have that pregnancy, which you said is a great reset. So I have a question because not all the women you see are trying to get pregnant, but they have PCOS if they’re coming with irregular or non auditor cycles and they go through your program, they work with you and they have three to four months of regular cycles. Are you able to pull them off of the myo-inositol and all those things and cyclical progesterone and does it hold or do they need to keep going? The natural approach?

Lara Briden:

It’s an excellent question, and the short answer is it will usually hold. I talk to my patients about getting the ball rolling, getting the bolder rolling once ovulatory cycles are going and robust and as long as you’re healthy, they should keep going. So I certainly had patients who use cyclic progesterone for six months and then can come off it. It depends on the individual again. But no, I would say that you’re not necessarily going to always need those supplements of all the long-term ones though, myo-inositol is a nice one. So good for everything, especially if someone has been tending to insulin resistance and wants just a way to stay on top of that and keep their cycles going and keep their insulin sensitivity good, then I think that it could be quite helpful to stay on my own in another hall. But in answer to your question, no, there’s a hope they might just be able to find, well, I’ve just got normal cycles now. I’m ovulating monthly and everything is good. That’s definitely possible.

Lorne Brown:

So how do they find you? So website, Instagram, your podcasts, your books, which I think are excellent, we’ll put them in the show notes as well.

Lara Briden:

Yeah, I’m easy to find. Everything is Laura Bryden, so laura bryden.com and you can link to my podcast from there, the Lara Bryden podcast. And all my social media is at Lara Briden and my two books are Period Repair Manual and Hormone Repair Manual. And I don’t know if I mentioned it already, but I’m currently writing a third book, which is all about insulin resistance. So I’m very interested in that as a topic. This will be for women primarily, but yeah, there’ll be lots about PCOS and perimenopause and postpartum as a time of potentially insulin resistance, unfortunately. Yeah, so there’s just lots to look at there and it’s a lot more than just, it’s not one size fits all diet. There’s lots of things women can do.

Lorne Brown:

There we go. Dr. Lara Briden, and thank you very much for joining us on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Lara Briden:

Thanks, Lorne.