August 18, 2020
Are you struggling with anxiety and constant worry? Do you have panic attacks? These feelings are very uncomfortable and can interfere with your daily life. Why is this happening? On this podcast, Dr. Hotze explains the five most common reasons you may be experiencing anxiety and what you can do about it naturally to feel your best again.
2:01 …anxiety is simply a feeling of uneasiness and irritability.
3:00: Remember, most doctors label your symptoms as your diagnosis. I say, most physicians have a disorder themselves called labelitis. That means they take your symptom and they convert that and just say, it’s a diagnosis. You have anxiety. That’s the diagnosis.
3:18: Well, anxiety is a symptom of an underlying problem. And I want to talk about five specific things that can cause anxiety.
4:16: By the way, if you have chronic pain or chronic allergies, this puts stress on the adrenal gland and the adrenal gland is producing cortisol for the chronic stress.
6:50: When a person has low thyroid, their brain makes lower levels of a neurotransmitter called GABA, gamma amino butyric acid GABA, G-A-B-A, and that can cause anxiety.
10:08: …when estrogen is the dominating hormone and the hormones are not balanced, this affects the neurotransmitters in the brain and can lead to anxiety, panic attacks, a sense of overwhelming doom.
10:54: In men, a decline in testosterone can cause very similar symptoms. Testosterone affects your initiative, your assertiveness, well-being, self-confidence, mood, goal orientation, drive, directiveness, decisiveness, and analytical abilities. These are all brain functions.
13:11: But their estrogen levels begin to decline, as their ovaries shut down at approximately the age of 50 when they enter menopause, and that can cause anxiety and panic attacks as well.
Stacey Bandfield: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. This is Stacy Bandfield, here with Dr. Steven Hotze, Founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. And if you haven’t done so yet, then please visit our website to download all of the podcasts that we have available for you. It is absolutely free, and we know that you will find them very helpful and informative. All you have to do is go to hotzepodcast.com that’s h-o-t-z-e-podcast.com.
Now, this is a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart, because I know of so many people who suffer from this. And it is one of the top symptoms that we get here at the wellness center, when people call and they are suffering from various issues, and that is anxiety. A lot of people suffer from it. If you haven’t had issues with it, then maybe it’s easy to just think, “Oh, how bad could that be?” However, it’s very debilitating for a lot of people, isn’t it Dr. Hotze?
Dr. Steven Hotze: It really is. When I ask you this, are you ready to do a 180 and take charge of your health? I believe that you need a health coach. You need a doctor and a staff of professionals who will help you onto a path of health and wellness naturally, so you enjoy a better quality of life, without using pharmaceutical drugs.
Now, today we’re going to talk about anxiety.
Well if you do, you would be diagnosed by your conventional doctor is having anxiety. And anxiety is simply a feeling of uneasiness and irritability. Of apprehension…
Stacey Bandfield: Maybe even dread?
Dr. Steven Hotze: A dread for no apparent reason. I used to do emergency medicine, years back, back from 1976 until 1981. And it was not uncommon on a shift to see at least one woman who came in complaining that she couldn’t get her breath. She was anxious. She was nervous. And we would give them a prescription of anti-anxiety medication, Xanax, or whatever the anti-anxiety…maybe you gave them…no, I never used Valium, but we would give them some sort of anti-anxiety medication. Give them a shot and calm them down and send them home.
Well, it wasn’t until I adopted natural approaches to health that I began to realize that anxiety was just a symptom. Remember, most doctors label your symptoms as your diagnosis. I say, most physicians have a disorder themselves called labelitis. That means they take your symptom and they convert that and just say, it’s a diagnosis. You have anxiety. That’s the diagnosis. Well, anxiety is a symptom of an underlying problem. And I want to talk about five specific things that can cause anxiety.
1. ADRENAL FATIGUE: First is adrenal fatigue. Now adrenal fatigue is caused when the adrenal gland doesn’t make adequate amounts of cortisol. Now, cortisol is your stress hormone, your long acting stress hormone that your body produces when you’re under chronic stress. Stress of raising a family, maybe driving the freeways an hour back and forth from work in heavy traffic. Maybe it’s financial, maybe you’ve lost a loved one, or a mate, or a child, or a parent. Maybe it’s raising a husband, raising your kids.
All these things can cause a great deal of anxiety and stress on an individual. At which point, a person produces large amounts of cortisol. By the way, if you have chronic pain or chronic allergies, this puts stress on the adrenal gland and the adrenal gland is producing cortisol for the chronic stress. And it becomes fatigue, just like your muscles would if your muscles produce…as your muscles are exercised they get fatigued. Lactic acid is produced and your muscles become sore and you can’t lift anymore or run any farther.
So your body produces cortisol to take care of the chronic stress. Now in acute stress, you make adrenaline. Big football game, you get in a wreck, your heart races. Somebody else, fire in the house. And it’s that quick rush of adrenaline that is for acute stress. But for chronic stress, your body produces cortisol from the adrenal glands, which are the size of walnuts that sit on top of the kidneys, and in your back. You have one on each kidney. So you have two adrenal glands. So if you have adrenal fatigue, this can cause anxiety. And so we can treat for that by simply using natural cortisol in subphysiological doses to support the adrenal gland, to make sure you have adequate amount of natural occurring cortisol.
2. HYPOTHYROIDISM: The second thing that can cause anxiety is hypothyroidism. When a person doesn’t get adequate amount of thyroid hormone from the gland into the cells, it has to go through the blood. You may have plenty of thyroid in your blood. In fact, 95% of the people always are going to fall in the range of thyroid levels in their blood because that’s the way the lab defines what the normal range is. It is as wide as the Grand Canyon, tall as the Empire State Building. Only 5% of the people are going to fall out of range. So you may have clinical symptoms of low thyroid if your thyroid level was optimally here, when you were younger. Now it’s down here when you’re older at 50%, the value, you’re not getting enough thyroid into your cells.
The thyroid hormone that’s made by the thyroid gland is predominantly T4, the inactive or very minimally active, thyroid hormone. It has four iodine atoms. That has to enter the cell. In the cell it’s converted by an enzymatic reaction to T3, three iodine atoms. So the thyroid hormone, that’s the active thyroid hormone, which activates the power plants within your cells to produce energy, your thyroid gland governs your body’s metabolism, the production and use of energy. When a person has low thyroid, their brain makes lower levels of a neurotransmitter called GABA, gamma amino butyric acid GABA, G-A-B-A, and that can cause anxiety.
So the treatment, I believe anybody who has the symptoms of low thyroid, which could be one, some or all of the following:
Women oftentimes with low thyroid can have miscarriages or inability to become pregnant. They’re infertile. They get may get recurrent and chronic infections.
If you have the signs and symptoms and anxiety and panic attacks and headaches, all these things can go along with low thyroid. If a person has the symptoms of low thyroid associated with the anxiety, I do believe that anybody with these symptoms needs a therapeutic trial of natural desiccated thyroid. Now, so that’s the second cause.
3. ESTROGEN DOMINANCE IN WOMEN: The third cause can be estrogen dominance. The other side of the coin is progesterone deficiency. In a normal 28 day cycle, a woman, on day one, the first day of her period, once again begins to start making low levels of estrogen, which build up. And mid cycle she will make progesterone. Estrogen’s the proliferative hormone. Progesterone is a hormone that matures and balances out the estrogenic effect. So it matures the inner lining of the womb as the estrogen causes the uterus or the inner lining of the womb to beef up and become bulky, well the progesterone matures that, preparing the womb for pregnancy.
As women march through their menstrual life, by the time they hit about 35, they make lower and lower levels of progesterone, and estrogen becomes the dominant hormone. Progesterone is deficient. When women hit their early forties, they oftentimes have anovulatory cycles. They literally don’t ovulate. They don’t make an egg, and when they don’t make an egg, the ovary, which produces both the estrogenic hormones and the progesterone doesn’t make any progesterone at all. All they have is estrogen hormone.
What does that lead to? Well, that leads to longer periods. So periods go from three to five days to five to seven days and seven to nine days. They get breakthrough bleeding, they get fibroids, they get cramping premenstrually, may have mood swings, fluid retention. You may have weight gain. You may have headaches. You may have migraine headaches that are debilitating. You can have a host of symptoms, which are falling into the category of premenstrual symptoms for which the pharmaceutical companies give antidepressants and say that’s the treatment of PMS.
Well, the treatment of PMS is to give low doses, physiological doses, of progesterone to balance out the estrogen. And when estrogen is the dominating hormone and the hormones are not balanced, this affects the neurotransmitters in the brain and can lead to anxiety, panic attacks, a sense of overwhelming doom. It can cause a host of problems, apprehension, uneasiness, and women feel this way. Irritability, mood swings. This is very common.
You may have noticed this in yourself, or you may have noticed this in your spouse. The last thing men you ever want to ask your wife when she’s irritable, and blows up at you for no apparent reason, you don’t want to ever say, “Could it be your hormones?” You’ll ask the question one time, after that you’ll learn. You’ll never ask that question again. So an imbalance in the female hormones can cause that.
4. LOW TESTOSTERONE IN MEN: In men, a decline in testosterone can cause very similar symptoms. Testosterone affects your initiative, your assertiveness, well-being, self-confidence, mood, goal orientation, drive, directiveness, decisiveness, and analytical abilities. These are all brain functions. And as men’s testosterone goes down, they go through what we would call andropause. Testosterone levels peak in the early twenties, then falls over a lifetime consistently. So by the time a man is 40, his testosterone level is two thirds to a half of what it was when he was in his early twenties. By the time he hits 50, it’s about half to a third. By the time he’s 60, it’s a quarter of what it was, and it continues to decline.
Stacey Bandfield: That’s a good point, Dr. Hotze. It’s a slow decline, so men may not recognize that as soon as maybe women who have their monthly cycles. But for men, if it’s just through the years, it’s harder to recognize it until it gets more acute.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Men will tell me, “ I just don’t feel as sharp as I used to. I’m not on top of my game anymore. I can’t think as clearly as I used to, I feel down, I don’t have the drive I used to have, I don’t feel as…”
Stacey Bandfield: They’re more indecisive.
Dr. Steven Hotze: “I’m less confident about what I do.” And they have all the experience of life behind them that they gained through their life. But now they just don’t have the testosterone or the drive to make things happen. And they become down and moody and like old curmudgeons. You know? They just become grumpy old men. And testosterone can be profound and have a profound effect on your ability to feel well again and to be able to hit them a lick.
5. MENOPAUSE: And the fifth cause of anxiety can be in women, the decline in estrogen, is they go through the change of life as they enter menopause, which routinely occurs on an average around 50 years of age. It can happen at an earlier age, or at a later age in some women. And as estrogen falls, they get estrogenic symptoms. They get hot flashes, they get night sweats, they get mood swings. They may feel depressed. They have vaginal dryness. They have lost romantic moods and inclinations That also occurs with estrogen dominance, by the way. But their estrogen levels begin to decline, as their ovaries shut down at approximately the age of 50 when they enter menopause, and that can cause anxiety and panic attacks as well.
Stacey Bandfield: You know what Dr. Hotze, that’s a great point. And just recently I was talking to a couple of women who called our center and they said, “I didn’t used to be like this. I didn’t use to feel anxious or have panic attacks. And now I do.” And that speaks to what you were talking about, as a woman changes and goes through menopause, she starts to experience these symptoms that she didn’t have before.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Exactly.
Stacey Bandfield: And that’s very disturbing.
Dr. Steven Hotze: So if you have the symptoms of anxiety and you end up going to see a conventional doctor, they are inevitably going to place you on some form of anxiolytic drug, anti-anxiety drug, antidepressants. They’ll give you sleep medication. All these are very addictive medications that can cause a host of side effects that can even make your symptoms worse because the antidepressants and the anti-anxiety medication, all of those…well, antidepressants can cause you to have outbursts of anger. A dramatic or significant and dramatic increase in suicidal thoughts. It causes you to gain weight. If you weren’t depressed before now or anxious before now, you have all this weight on you. Plus, this loss of romantic moods and inclinations. So it doesn’t help the problem. It really harms the problem. It doesn’t address the underlying cause. Nobody feels anxious because they have low levels of anti-anxiety drugs, or antidepressants or sleep medication.
So what’s the appropriate and proper treatment? It’s simply to replenish the hormones. So what’s the solution to anxiety attacks and maybe depressed moods or mood swings? It’s not pharmaceutical drugs. They’re attended by a host of series of deleterious side effects. They never address the underlying problem, which is hormonal decline and imbalance. So as you mature, as your hormone levels get low, kind of like a glass of water that’s low. You’re at the restaurant, you got a low glass of water. What does the waiter come by and do? He comes and brings you more water. He fills up your glass. So you have a full glass of water. This is what you need to do as your hormones decline and become imbalanced. You need to replenish them and balance them out.
And that’s what we specialize in doing here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, using natural bioidentical hormones. Which means the hormones are biologically identically the same as the hormones that God put in your body. And you made when you were younger to begin with when you felt well. So we simply replenish the hormones and that has a dramatic effect. So that may be supporting your adrenal gland with cortisol. It may be supplementing you with natural desiccated thyroid hormone. It may be replenishing your progesterone if you have estrogen dominance. It may be, in males, giving them testosterone. And in females, did you go through the change of life? You would take some natural bioidentical estrogen hormones. These have a profound effect and a natural effect on restoring you to your youthful self.
Stacey Bandfield: Thank you, Dr. Hotze. And I just want to appeal to all those people out there who do suffer from anxiety. You don’t have to suffer. You can address those symptoms naturally. It’s just so easy to pick up the phone and give us a call. It would be a privilege to serve you. We have served over 31,000 people. We’d love to do the same for you. Our number here is (281) 698-8698. That’s (281) 698-8698. It is a pleasure to have you join us today here at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.
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Since 1989, Hotze Health & Wellness Center has helped over 33,000 patients get their lives back using bioidentical hormones that restore hormones to optimal levels, strengthen immune systems, and increase energy levels. Our treatment regimen addresses the root cause of hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, and candida.
Led by best-selling author, radio host and leading natural health expert, Steven F. Hotze, M.D., our medical team has over 100 years’ combined medical experience backed by a staff of nearly 100 caring professionals who provide an environment of hope and extraordinary hospitality for each of our patients, who we call our guests. It is our deepest desire to help you obtain and maintain health and wellness naturally so that you may enjoy a better quality of life, pure and simple.
Do you want to live a healthy, happy, purpose-driven life? Do you want to restore your health so that your loss of energy, weight gain, joint pain, depression and lack of drive or motivation won’t hold you back from achieving your personal and professional goals?
Dr. Steven Hotze wants that for you, too. In fact, in his powerful and passionate video entitled, “What I Believe”, Dr. Hotze shares how his Christian worldview and pivotal experiences have ignited a deep desire to offer the message of hope and optimal health to all who need to hear it.
At Hotze Health & Wellness Center, our doctors are changing the way women and men are treated through the use of bioidentical hormones. Our natural treatments have helped over 33,000 individuals with hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, candida, detoxification and nutritional deficiencies.
Meet our doctors"After a traumatic accident, I was told that I was in early menopause in my 20s and could never have children, however after restoring my hormones, I am now expecting baby #7!”
Holistic, functional medicine doctors in Houston, Texas specializing in bioidentical hormones, hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies and LDI treatment, candida, detoxification, nutritional deficiencies, longevity and aesthetics.
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