Dr. Erika Schwartz
speaker
88 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Erika Schwartz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
How crazy when you have this huge tool at your fingertips that you're not using it. And then you say, oh, let me give you a pill. What are we thinking? Your mind and your body are one. How could we think that they are separate?
Heather, it's my pleasure. Thank you.
Oh, you're so sweet. And by the way, I think the chronologic age just sucks as an idea. So, out the door.
Well, clearly not from medical school. And clearly not from medical education. I learned it because like everybody else, it had to happen to me. So while I was trained and I knew what I was doing and I ran a major trauma center as my first job at 28, which was unusual for a woman. Think about it. This was in the late 70s, early 80s. Women did not do jobs like this.
So I ran a big trauma center and then I went into private practice and I did internal medicine. and I was just kind of ping-ponging patients, and when I wasn't referring them to specialists, they would say to me, why aren't you referring this patient to specialists? And I'd be like, because I know how to take care of them, and why do I need a specialist if the patient's healthy?
So anyway, what happened when I turned 46, and I'm 74 now, that's why I said to you, age doesn't matter, really. I mean, chronologic age. So I was 46 and I went into menopause and I was treating women in menopause already with all kinds of garbage that we were trained to treat with that were kind of working, kind of not working anyway. So I started feeling not so good.
I started taking care of myself according to what I was trained and it wasn't working. And then one of my patients came in and showed me this prescription and said, why don't you order this at the compounding pharmacy, which I didn't even know what it was. So she said, just write it for me in California. So I wrote it.
I didn't, you know, it was just basically estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, hormones that our body make. So I was like, oh, okay. The woman came back and she was very happy. And I said, what's going on? And she's like, oh, this is what I need. It's wonderful.
So when I went into menopause and I was taking the conventional stuff and it wasn't working, I thought, hmm, let me go back to this pharmacy. So I wrote to the guy at the pharmacy and I ordered the stuff. And I said, can you send me some literature? Remember, this is the 1990s. So there's no Internet. There's no Google. There's nothing.
So except for the libraries and the libraries that I was going to were the medical school library. So obviously they had this much information about anything to do with women's health.
Right. So I said to the guy, send me some stuff. So he sends me some literature and it's pretty good. And it's in the real journals. And it was before we knew that it was all fake. The stuff that they published in the medical journals that were paid for by pharma. But we didn't think that anyway. So it made sense.
And I said, well, why don't you send me whatever you had sent to this woman that I ordered for? And I spent like $450, which was a lot of money in 1996, 97. And I get this box with a zillion things. It has syringes with creams. It has powders. It has pills. It has all kinds of things. And I was like, oh, you know, you kind of need a degree in biochemistry to figure out what to do.
So I'm like so desperate to feel good because it was like an alien had come into my head. You know, I mean, I'm not moody. I'm usually pretty even tempered. All of a sudden, I'm like, I can't live inside my own body, right? I get a notebook out and I start doing it. And I start following the directions. And within a week, shock of all shockers, I feel like myself. So I'm like, wow.
So I called this guy and I say, listen, I have a lot of patients who I have on the conventional wisdom stuff. I would love to send them to you, but you know, $490 a month is a lot of money. He's like, I don't need you or your patients. And he did me the biggest favor because what he did by saying to me, get lost, is he opened the door for me to learn about
So what I did is I found a compounding pharmacy in North of New York City where I was living. And I spent the following three years while seeing patients going home at night and studying and working with this guy in a compounding pharmacy. and develop formulations and compounds that turned out to really work.
So then I wrote a book about it and then it coincided with that study that destroyed the life of 7 million women by saying that hormones cause cancer. So yet again, like the universe steps in to take care of things, right? I get a call from a patient's husband who was running a medical marketing company. who had just sold it for some astronomic number.
And he says, how's this going to affect your business? So I'm like, it's going to be great because people need it. Women need this. And I know from, I read it, I did all the research. This is exactly what we need is not, not only is it going to not cause cancer, it's going to prevent heart disease. It's going to prevent Alzheimer's. It's going to keep your bones strong.
It's going to keep, you know, everything in place, you know, Totally what you want. And he said, OK, can I come in as a partner? So I'm like, sure. Like, do I know what he's talking about? So we opened the first compounding pharmacy that did the formulations that I did. And then I was teaching doctors all over New York and, you know, the university hospitals. And that's how it started.
And then I moved on. I wasn't about making money. I was about helping women, really. The practice was practically all women at the time. Now, ironically, it's 50-50. Men woke up to it. And it was also perimenopausal women. So nobody talked about it. Now I have 16-year-olds in the practice because everybody gets it, brings their kids in, brings their whole family in.
Like you said, the women in their 30s and 40s, and they know what's out there and what can happen. So why don't we prevent it? Because it's all about preventing. We can stay healthy. We can stay looking good. We can stay feeling good. There's no reason not to. So this is the evolution of it. This is where we are. So then I realized it wasn't just about hormones.
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