Have you ever felt that when it comes to your health care, you're just not being taken seriously?
As a woman, I can totally relate to that.
And today, on the podcast, we have a special guest, Dr. Mario Conor.
She is co-founder and chief medical officer of Vory Health.
She is also the chair of the Board of Directors of Movement is Life,
which is a non-profit coalition committed to advancing health equity.
And she is the author of her most recent book, "Taking Care of You,
the Empowered Woman's Guide to Better Health."
And today, we are going to be talking about how you can advocate for yourself when it comes to your health.
Let's get into it.
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You're listening to the Soul Online Self-Care Podcast.
I'm your host, Tina Stinson, and I had a stroke at the age of 39 from stress and burnout that shook my world.
And now I'm laying it all out, the deep-level self-care practices and mindset shifts that I needed that kept me healthy, balanced, and thriving.
Join me in this intimate space as we explore healing, resilience, and a soul's journey to alignment.
This is where real conversations about deep-level self-care happen.
Let's get into it.
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Hello, Dr. Mario Counter.
It's such an honor to have you here today.
I want to welcome you to the Soul Online Self-Care Podcast.
Tina, I'm just delighted to be with you and your podcast team.
Thank you.
To get started, if you could just tell everyone a little bit about yourself and your background, that would be great.
I'm an orthopedic surgeon.
I did my training at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and then I went on staff at Mayo Clinic Florida, where I was actually the first woman orthopedic surgeon in the whole Mayo system.
And I've been the first woman in many orthopedic categories, many professional societies.
And then I retired from Mayo in 2015 when I went to Yale to work on an integrated Musculoskeletal Center.
And then in February of 21, I left Yale to co-found Vore Health, which is a startup.
And we are a virtual first nationwide Musculoskeletal medical practice.
Our philosophy is that patients need a more holistic approach to their Musculoskeletal conditions.
And I don't translate that, like spine and orthopedic problems.
Because there's a lot of inappropriate surgery that happens.
And we know that we can help people get better without an operation if they're given the right care.
I agree with that.
I'm a big runner.
And in the running community, I see a lot of surgeries that happen very quickly before there's anything else tried beforehand.
To avoid the surgery.
Like something as simple as weight loss.
You know, so I see that a lot.
I can imagine that you run into that quite often.
Correct.
And you know, just along that line, we know that women have more weight problems than men.
And particularly individuals of color have a higher rate of being overweight and obese.
And while we have these new weight loss drugs that have come onto the market that can be very helpful.
There's a couple really important things about these drugs.
One is that when you lose the weight, you often, you will typically lose lean muscle mass as well.
Anybody taking these drugs has to also focus on exercise and maintaining lean body mass, meaning muscle.
Number two, if you don't change your lifestyle, when you stop the medicine, most patients gain the weight back.
This is why supporting patients in a different way that really helps them address lifestyle issues that are impacting their health.
And for us, it's musculoskeletal, so back pain, e pain, et cetera is so important.
Yeah, there's so many different questions that I want to ask you because I feel like women don't really get the care that they need in general.
They get kind of pushed aside quite often, like and prescribed almost anti and anxiety medicine for almost anything that they're experiencing or birth control.
And at the same time, also as women are going into menopause, there's so many different changes that are going on in their bodies.
It's like you don't even know what direction to look in or what to focus on.
It's like we're losing our muscle mass.
We have to learn how to take care of our bones.
And then at the same time, we're losing very important hormones that support our bodies.
And we're dealing with chronic inflammation and all these kinds of things.
And it's almost like you have a brand new body every single day.
And so overall, maybe you could talk about what can women do to really support their health and advocate for themselves when it comes to finding a doctor that's really going to listen to them and put their care first.
Oh, this is like, you know, the fantastic, the question for women, right?
Yeah.
I'll start with a shameless plug for the book that I co-authored with woman, Ken Wauha, who's a medical anthropologist.
And the book is called Taking Care of You, The Empowered Woman's Guide to Better Health.
You can Google it, find it on Amazon.
And we wrote the book with 111 women contributors.
And so we have a couple of different physicians and a few other clinical types to really give the everyday woman the knowledge that will help her advocate for herself in a more effective way with her health care team.
And we focus the book on kind of current state of medical care, like, should Google be your first responder and how to find the right, the right doctor.
And then we go into 55 common clinical conditions, which are the, I'll call it the non bikini areas.
Okay.
Here's one of the other problems, Tina.
Women's health has focused on, and not that this is an important, right? Women's health has traditionally focused on breast cancer and reproductive issues.
Okay.
But that's just a portion of what impacts us as women.
We get near arthritis at a much higher rate than men and as an orthopedic surgeon, this was one of my particular clinical areas.
So, so like, why don't we understand more about that? You know, I'm one of the few researchers that investigate this and we found true sex differences in the tissue of our three to knees females compared to males.
So, okay.
So then what are we going to do about that? So this is totally under researched. It's underfunded.
The, the point is is that women are not little men.
The females are not little males. Yes. Okay. And so in our 55 common clinical conditions, which range from, you know, anterior cruciate ligament chairs to low back pain, to heart disease, to depression, to my grains, etc.
We talk about, you know, what is the condition, what causes it? Can it be prevented? How is it treated? How does it impact women differently than men?
Because almost all conditions are different in women than in men. Yes.
So, one of those reasons, whether different can be sex based, meaning biologically driven, some of that could be gender driven, meaning more societal influence of how females are raised, you know, in our society.
And then finally, a list of questions that you can ask your health care team.
Which I think is actually the best part of each of these. And then we have the final section is really about how women can take more control of their own health and their health behaviors and support other women.
And I use the term be, you know, be a health promoter.
What can we individually do to promote just not just our health, but the health of those around us? Yeah, I think, and I think that the younger we can start doing this, the better.
Like, I feel like, you know, when you're getting into middle age, like, I look at my health care and I'm like, I wish I knew this, I wish I knew this was going to happen so that I could have prepared myself for this.
And I knew that I was going to lose most of my muscle mass, like, I'm 55 now and I could feel it happening, I could see it happening because I'm a runner.
And so I can actually see it happening. I'm like, I wish I knew this, maybe if I knew this, I would have lifted weights more certain times in my life, you know.
So, like, just learning about the differences, like you said, between men and women, and am I correct to say that most studies, most medical studies, including studies done on pharmaceuticals are done on men and not women.
That's, that's correct. Now, there's been improvement in that because a decade or so ago, the, the basically the NIH said, OK, you have to start including women.
Including women in clinical trials. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's mind blowing.
It is mind blowing. Yeah.
And they're rational again, remember, we're in a very patriarchal society and medicine, particular remains very hierarchical and patriarchal.
The rationale was, oh, women are so complicated, you know, they have these menstrual periods inflectuating hormones. And so we can't study women because there's all these other factors that could influence, we'll say, the drug.
Yeah. OK.
And then the drug goes to market 50% 51% of the population are female. Yeah. And we know this is a problem because if you look at at medications that are pulled off the market after FDA approval after they've gone through every single bit of safety regulations, right.
And then we're pulled off because of adverse side effects in women. Interesting. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. So we are still not.
I'd say we're still not doing a good enough job.
Now, you have to really investigate for yourself. And then still then after investigating, it's hard because even if you read studies.
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And so I'm going to give you the story and the important nuggets on this.
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And then you're going to live versus how the rate of decline of your bone strength.
A peak bone mass or peak bone mass occurs in our early 20s.
Right. So, so it's very important for our daughters, right, that they're involved in athletics, that they're building that strong peak bone mass.
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And then you get to menopause, right, the question is hormone replacement therapy.
There's a lot of confusion about what is the best approach, right, because remember.
A few years ago, there was a study that came out that said, well, hormones are going to increase your risk of breast cancer.
But that was a very specific hormone that a lot of people that do hormone replacement therapy do not like to use anymore from what I understand, right.
And now the now I'd say we've had some correction of that.
And now it would be okay, hormone replacement therapy is is good.
Okay, I mean, there may be some specific instances where somebody has a higher risk of breast cancer. And you know, I mean, there's always outliers, right, but it is exactly.
People have the medical community has come back around to saying, okay, hormone replacement therapy for the woman in menopause, that's okay.
However, they're also saying you only need that for a few years, right. And I actually don't know that we have good data to say that that's true because, because if women stay on estrogen longer, it helps keep their bones strong.
Among other things too, it helps, yeah, a lot helps a lot of things like heart disease, your risk of diabetes, I'm trying to remember some of the other things. Oh, Alzheimer's.
Low risk of risk of Alzheimer's.
You have to remember every cell in our body has a sex. And the function of that cell is influenced by that sex, which goes beyond just the presence of estrogen and testosterone because we tend to think of, you know, just estrogen or testosterone is driving all these sex differences, but that's absolutely not true.
There's there's many, many things that are influenced by sex that's not just related to estrogen and testosterone, however, in this case, like, you're a woman sells are used to having estrogen.
And now she doesn't have estrogen because she's gone through menopause. And I kind of look at that is, you know, my cells don't, my cells aren't so happy.
That's for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's an understatement. Yeah. So, so going back to some of the things that we could do for ourselves.
When it comes to vitamin D, I keep hearing and I'm not sure why this is that you should take vitamin D3 with K2. It's important to have vitamin K.
Now, I don't know why that is. Maybe you could school me on that a little bit. Is that something that's true or?
I don't actually have a reference for why people have focused on K.
Vitamin D3 is the best form of vitamin D to take.
And it's so easy to take. I have, you know, little gel caps and vitamin D goes by international units, not milligrams.
And I just take a thousand international units pretty much every day or, you know, five days a week.
And it's very, very hard to overdose on vitamin K. I'm sorry, I'm vitamin D. Yeah.
So an easy thing is go out to the go out to your vitamin shop wherever you shop for your vitamins and get yourself some vitamin D3.
And that's a good thing. Yeah. Most of us don't get it, you know, the better way to get vitamin D is through a natural exposure, meaning being out in the sun.
Because that's how God actually designed us to get vitamin D. Vitamin D does not occur commonly in most food.
That's why you see no was enriched with vitamin D. Yeah. Okay. But when we get older, the lipid layer underneath our skin, thin, which is, you know, our, our skin isn't as nice.
And that lipid layer is what the ultraviolet rays of the sun interacts with to actually make the vitamin D precursor. So a whole point is as we get older, it's harder for us to naturally make vitamin D.
And if we live in a northern climate, you, you could run around the streets of Boston naked.
And you will not make any vitamin D precursor. Yeah. The strength of the ultraviolet rays of the sun are not strong enough to convert the lipid layer under your skin to make the vitamin D precursor.
Yeah. And also a lot of us when we're going outside, we're protecting ourselves from the sun. We're constantly told to protect ourselves from the sun.
And I mean, I could validate this. I'm in New York and not in the winter so much, but in the summer months, I'm a gardener. So I am outside and I'm a runner. So I'm constantly getting a lot of sun, a lot of sun.
And my vitamin D levels are always low. They're, they always seem to be low. So I have to supplement with vitamin D. And I think it's very important to get that check to know that, you know.
I agree. But even in New York, except for the summertime, the strength of the ultraviolet rays are not going to be strong enough to help you make vitamin D in the summertime.
I mean, if you're fair skinned, you're fair skinned on fair skin. I have to sunscreen or I will sunburn.
Oh, yeah.
So so that blocks the conversion of vitamin D.
Exactly. So to finish off this interview, I would like to just ask you, how can people connect with you best? And like, how could they learn more about health disparities, which is your business? And I know you already talked about your book and we'll put your
links to your book in a show notes, but tell me more about health disparities.
And so, one million more women.org, okay, with the number, the new moral one. And and the purpose of this website is really to have women share their stories about their experience.
So I would ask any anybody that's interested go on. I mean, we keep the stories anonymous. We're not, you know, sharing your name or identity.
And try and start this movement of one million more women receiving more equitable health care.
This is so I like that. This is really cool. Put that in the show notes also.
So that people could, I think it's really important to share stories, you know, because the more we share stories, the more we realize that we're all in the same boat and we're not alone.
And we're not the only ones experiencing all the things that we're experiencing. So I love that. And I'm definitely going to check that out.
Is there anything else that you would like to say to the listeners?
I chair a national nonprofit multi stakeholder coalition called movement is life.
We're focused on addressing health disparities, particularly in the, you know, musculoskeletal space.
And we have a fantastic annual summit this year. Actually, it will be in Atlanta, Georgia. We oftentimes have it in Washington, DC, but we're going to Atlanta this year.
November 14th and 15th. You can go to the website, which is movement is life community.
And I'll send you the link. You could put that in the show.
And our website, we have lots of information there. And anybody that's really interested in the health equity space.
It's an amazing meeting. I would say very unique. And one like you've never experienced before. So I would encourage people to join us.
And that's so many great resources. I want to thank you for everything that we talked about all your knowledge and all of these resources.
Thank you so much for coming in the soul and self care podcast. I really appreciate it.
Tina, it's my pleasure. And, you know, just wishing all the women that are listening or anyone who's listening, you know, good health and.
And encouraging them to basically be unafraid to advocate for their own health care needs.
Absolutely. I can't think of a better way to end this podcast. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Did you guys know that the soul align self care podcast has a community. It's called the soul align self care insiders.
And I would love you guys to join us over there. So the link will be in the show notes. And I want to say we do so many cool self care practices over there.
So if you really want to up level your self care, join us on the insiders.
Okay, I'll see you there. Bye.
