Do Hormonal Changes Affect the Body Overnight? Menopause & Andropause Explained

November 04, 2026

In this episode of the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast, Jodi Duval, Dr. Allen Bookatz, Dr. Scott Sherr, and Dr. Ted Achacoso explore:

Does Menopause Change the Body Overnight? What does a large-scale analysis of laboratory data reveal about changes across the menopausal transition, and why can the experience feel sudden even after years of gradual change?
What Is Andropause, and How Does It Differ from Menopause? Why can age-associated hormonal changes in men develop gradually over decades, and why might these changes go unrecognized?
Can Low Testosterone Explain Mood Changes and Fatigue? What does the research suggest about which symptoms are most specifically associated with low testosterone, and why should mood and energy be assessed separately?
Why Look Beyond a Single Hormone? How does the interconnected hormone network, from the pineal and pituitary glands to the thyroid, adrenals, and gonads, influence the way clinicians assess hormonal health?
What Can Clinical Metabolomics Reveal? How can hormone measurements be interpreted alongside nutrient status, metabolic patterns, sleep, body composition, and daily function?
How Does the Cell Danger Response Fit into Hormonal Health? What is the proposed relationship between cellular defense, metabolic changes, and recovery, and what are the limitations of applying this model to andropause?
Can Everyday Habits Support Hormonal Health? How might consistent wake times, morning light, a dark bedroom, and appropriately paced movement provide a practical starting point for supporting sleep and recovery?
How Can You Track Changes Beyond Lab Results? Why can monitoring sleep, morning energy, mood, desire, and recovery help build a more individualized picture of health over time?
What Does Hormone Balancing Mean in the HOMeHOPe Framework? How does a network-wide approach differ from focusing on a single hormone, and why are measurement, individualized assessment, and follow-up important?

What We Discuss:

00:00 – Two Bodies, Two Hormonal Timelines
00:44 – Does Menopause Change the Body Overnight?
01:54 – What 300 Million Lab Tests Reveal About Menopause
02:50 – Why Menopause Can Feel Sudden
03:14 – Menopause's Staircase vs. Andropause's Slow Decline
04:16 – Looking Beyond Diagnostic Thresholds
05:12 – Testosterone Decline and Male Aging Studies
06:26 – Andropause, Mood and the Little Red Corvette Syndrome
07:45 – Which Symptoms Track Most Specifically With Low Testosterone?
08:39 – Why Hormone Replacement Isn't the Whole Answer
09:02 – The Hormone Network: From Pineal to Gonads
10:05 – Hormone Balancing and Clinical Metabolomics
10:53 – The Cell Danger Response and Hormonal Health
12:06 – The Hormonal Ramp vs. the Cellular Alarm
12:34 – Morning Light, Sleep and Chronobiology
13:32 – Tracking Sleep, Energy, Temper and Desire
14:28 – Measure the Network, Not the Node
15:25 – Confirm, Stabilize, Restore and Challenge
16:08 – What Does Better Health Feel Like?
16:17 – Evidence, Limitations and the Need for Better Studies
16:44 – Designing an Individualized Hormone Study
18:20 – Three Takeaways on Menopause and Andropause
19:18 – Hormone Balancing vs. Hormone Replacement
19:53 – Disease Management vs. Health Optimization
21:01 – Two Bodies, Two Clocks: The Closing Perspective
22:05 – Final Thoughts and HOMeHOPe Resources

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Dr. Scott Sherr: 3:00 AM, a woman, 51, kicks off a soaked sheet and wonders whether her body changed overnight. Down the hall, her husband, 47, sleeps fine. For a year he's been short-tempered, flatter, and last weekend he test drove a red convertible. Two bodies, two clocks. Did either one really change overnight?

[00:00:22] Jodi Duval: Welcome to the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Jodi Duval, naturopathic doctor and health optimization practitioner. With me are Dr. Allen Bookatz, emergency physician and HOMe doctor who steers the ship, and Dr. Scott Sherr, board-certified internist and HOMe doctor, and the one and only Dr.

[00:00:44] Jodi Duval: Ted Achacoso, founder of the clinical framework of Health Optimization Medicine & Practice. So here's our question, simple to ask and surprisingly rich to answer. Does menopause really change the body overnight? [00:01:00] Well, we'll open with menopause because a huge new laboratory study shows the transition written far beyond the ovaries.

[00:01:08] Jodi Duval: Then we'll cross the hall to the story that gets far less airtime, andropause, and the slow hormonal shift in men that rarely gets named and then often mislabeled. And then we'll land on what HOMeHOPe does with both, balancing the entire hormone network from the pineal down to the gonads instead of replacing a single hormone.

[00:01:29] Jodi Duval: This episode is for clinicians and for anyone living one of these two stories at home. So gentlemen, don't reach for the skip button. This one is about you as well. 

[00:01:41] Dr. Allen Bookatz: All right, everybody. Here is our $64,000 question today. Does menopause really change the whole body overnight? Dr. Scott, let's start with what the data shows.

[00:01:54] Dr. Scott Sherr: All righty, let's do it. So Pridham and colleagues in Nature Medicine worked from more than 300 million laboratory tests in [00:02:00] two big data sets. One was an Israeli health system with about 1.3 million women aged 30 to 70 checked against the American NHANES survey. They reconstructed how the population's labs moved across the menopausal transition.

[00:02:13] Dr. Scott Sherr: 52 of 90 tests showed significant step-like changes. 

[00:02:16] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Whoa, did you say 52 out of 90? So we're talking like more than half that light were lighting up, right? 

[00:02:22] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yes, well beyond the reproductive panel too, some even more in a good direction. Anemia-related measures can improve after the transition, which makes sense.

[00:02:31] Dr. Scott Sherr: One precision point, because it answers your question, this is a largely cross-sectional and computational reconstruction across many women. It shows a population step, not one woman's labs flipping between Tuesday and Wednesday. 

[00:02:43] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay, so the answer to overnight is no then, right? No. Hmm. Okay. 

[00:02:50] Jodi Duval: So yeah, not overnight, but plenty of women would tell you it does feel pretty sudden.

[00:02:57] Jodi Duval: So perimenopause can run for [00:03:00] years and cycles go irregular, sleep frays, the thermostat goes haywire at 3:00 AM, and the final period is a landmark you only see in the rear view mirror at a full 12 months or more later. 

[00:03:14] Dr. Ted Achacoso: That landmark is exactly where our story turns, Jodi. For many women, the ovarian signal falls within a relatively short window at the end of that long transition.

[00:03:24] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Picture a staircase with a long landing and then a real step down. Ordinary male aging has no step, no final period, no rear view landmark, nothing to name. In many of the men I see clinically, the drift starts in the 30s, roughly a percent or two a year, and it varies a lot from man to man. It's a ramp so gentle he doesn't notice he's walking downhill.

[00:03:46] Dr. Ted Achacoso: A sudden loss after surgery or testicular disease is a different story, and that one belongs on the disease track. 

[00:03:52] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay, so the ladies get a staircase and the men get a treadmill set to what? A slow decline? 

[00:03:58] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes, with a [00:04:00] display tape over. 

[00:04:01] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Hmm. Okay, so that makes what menopause the doorway here and what andropause is the, like the room that n- most of us never even walk into?

[00:04:09] Jodi Duval: Women at least get a word for it, Allen. Men mostly just get a punchline and a convertible. 

[00:04:15] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Ooh. Hmm, I 

[00:04:16] Dr. Ted Achacoso: might take that. And that's why HOMeHOPe has made andropause one of its home topics. Our frame fits it. Illness medicine asks what's wrong and organizes its tools around a diagnostic threshold. On a ramp that's low, a man can sit on the safe side of that line for years, and the safe side of a line isn't the same as running well.

[00:04:35] Dr. Ted Achacoso: HOMe asks what's right, what does a hormone network look like when it's running at full strength, and how far has this man drifted from it? 

[00:04:43] Dr. Scott Sherr: And that's the whole body question in slow motion. The menopause data shows the transition across the dashboard. For men, the question is whether the same spread happens, just stretched over decades.

[00:04:52] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Speaking of stretch marks and this is whole body change in slow motion here, right? Probably the most maybe middle-aged [00:05:00] sentence we've ever spoken on this show. 

[00:05:01] Dr. Ted Achacoso: And the most important one. Remember, just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy. It only means that you're not sick. A fi- 45-year-old man with no diagnosis can still be running his network well below what it's built for.

[00:05:12] Dr. Allen Bookatz: All right, so Ted, you said a percent or two a year. Where does that number come from? 

[00:05:18] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Partly from my clinic and partly from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study. Feldman and colleagues followed men aged 40 to 70, 1,709 at the start, more than 1,100 of them for seven to 10 years. Total testosterone fell about 1.6% a year on average with the same men.

[00:05:38] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Bioavailable testosterone, the fraction that tissues can actually use, fell 2% to 3% a year. So you're old, Allen. 

[00:05:46] Jodi Duval: The slippery slope is real. The stretchy slope. But that's an average across a lot of men. 

[00:05:51] Dr. Ted Achacoso: It is, and averages hide people. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging followed testosterone in men and women from 30 to 96, [00:06:00] and total and bioavailable testosterone traced different trajectories.

[00:06:04] Dr. Ted Achacoso: So which number you draw changes the story you tell. Some men barely move, others slide fast. That's why a birthday is never the trigger for anything in HOMeHOPe. Measurement is. 

[00:06:14] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, and so through the HOMeHOPe lens, those cohorts are a starting map of populations. The study I'd want to follow is one man, the same morning draw repeated with his sleep, body composition, nutrients, and function tracked alongside.

[00:06:26] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Ooh, sounds like a movie trailer. One man. The 40-something guy who's irritable, flat, maybe in a midlife crisis. What do we see with that, Ted? 

[00:06:36] Dr. Ted Achacoso: I see Allen.

[00:06:40] Dr. Allen Bookatz: I walked right into that one. 

[00:06:43] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Clinically, this is where andropause hides. In my experience, it often shows up first in temper, not in the bedroom. Anger, a short fuse, a grayness around 40. In my clinic, I meet men who arrive with an SSRI and midlife crisis label. Some call it the Little Red Corvette syndrome, [00:07:00] a man trying to rebuild the world he lived in when he saw Saturn Sky, the car, the playlist, the haircut, the other woman.

[00:07:07] Dr. Allen Bookatz: And what about growing your hair out? Does that count? 

[00:07:11] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well- 

[00:07:11] Jodi Duval: Yeah. ... that, 

[00:07:13] Dr. Ted Achacoso: that, th- that's a sign that you're trying to recapture your, your hair when you were youthful, right? Because you were in a military school and it's always cut. 

[00:07:21] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah. It was taken from me. So I'm getting from you, Ted, that the car dealership is not a clinical metabolomics lab, huh?

[00:07:28] Dr. Ted Achacoso: No, and neither is Allen's temper. There are reasons to measure, not results. Mood has many sources, and testosterone doesn't explain every angry or depressed man. My point is that in the men I see, the network often wasn't measured before the label arrived. 

[00:07:45] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yes, and Wu and colleagues in the European Male Aging Study looked at 3,369 men aged 40 to 79 across eight centers with morning testosterone.

[00:07:56] Dr. Scott Sherr: Three sexual symptoms tracked most specifically with low testosterone. Mood and [00:08:00] fatigue on their own didn't single it out. 

[00:08:02] Jodi Duval: And so when we're looking at it through the HOMeHOPe lens, that study says track desire, mood, energy, and strength as separate signals, each against the person's sleep and metabolism instead of one blurry low T verdict.

[00:08:18] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yes, and as an internist, I'd separate three things that get blurred: the ovarian transition, confirmed hypogonadism, which is a diagnosis, and the gradual, uneven age-associated drift many men live through without any diagnosis at all. Disease is diagnosed and managed on the illness medicine track. Health is detected and balanced on the HOMeHOPe track.

[00:08:37] Dr. Scott Sherr: Both run at the same time. 

[00:08:39] Jodi Duval: So the obvious fix people reach for is testosterone. Have more testosterone. But there's-- And there's also a clinic on every corner. But Ted, isn't that the answer? 

[00:08:50] Dr. Ted Achacoso: That's a move a HOMeHOPe doesn't make, right? We don't do hormone replacement therapy, not BHRT, not TRT. We do [00:09:00] hormone balancing for health optimization.

[00:09:02] Dr. Ted Achacoso: The key word is network. The major hormones run as one system. The pineal, the pituitary, the thyroid, the thymus, the pancreas, the adrenals, and the sex organs. The gonads are just one node in that teaching map. Touch one node in a neuroendocrine network and the rest of the network moves. 

[00:09:18] Jodi Duval: Just like that to that mobile over the baby's crib.

[00:09:21] Jodi Duval: You know, tug the giraffe. Tug the giraffe. Goodness me. And the whole mobile swings. 

[00:09:30] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, that's probably what happened. Um, you know, that's why, uh, there was a-- there's a baby underneath the giraffe. 

[00:09:36] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, that's what I was thinking. 

[00:09:37] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Um- 

[00:09:37] Jodi Duval: Yeah, yeah, yeah ... 

[00:09:39] Dr. Ted Achacoso: but that's beautiful, Jodi. Yes. Pull on the g-gonna giraffe.

[00:09:46] Dr. Ted Achacoso: And the rest of the mobile answers. That's why HOMeHOPe measures the whole network before anything moves and measures again after. One giraffe, whole mobile. 

[00:09:57] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay. So other than, you know, [00:10:00] measuring the, the tugging of a giraffe, does HOMeHOPe ever actually use hormones? 

[00:10:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes. Bioidentical hormones sit on the first line of balancing agents right beside active nutrients.

[00:10:10] Dr. Ted Achacoso: They're chosen after we measure the network, and the target is the network, not the node. The framework is the distinction. It doesn't make any hormone agent risk-free, which is why this is clinician work, measured and monitored. The technique is network-wide range shifting towards metabolomic neotization, moving the whole set of related values towards the average of healthy 25-year-olds.

[00:10:33] Dr. Ted Achacoso: That's a youthful population benchmark, not your own lab result from age 25, and it's a direction, not a number everyone must hit. This person's network decides how far. 

[00:10:43] Dr. Scott Sherr: Which is why clinical metabolomics matters here. One testosterone number tells you about one node. The HOMeHOPe dashboard reads the hormones with the nutrient network that builds and clears them.

[00:10:53] Dr. Allen Bookatz: So you know what I've not heard discussed yet on today's episode? The cell danger response. I'm really surprised at that, [00:11:00] Ted. Where does it fit in when we talk about andropause? 

[00:11:03] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Underneath everything. Illness medicine deals with organs, the testes, the ovaries. HOMeHOPe deals with their common denominator, the basic cell, and illness medicine is downstream of it.

[00:11:13] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Robert Naviaux describes cell danger response when a threat exceeds a cell's capacity for homeostasis. The cell shifts its metabolism from building towards defending. Once danger is handled, a choreographed sequence of anti-inflammatory and regenerative pathways turns its back towards healing. 

[00:11:30] Dr. Scott Sherr: And the alarm itself is a molecule we all know well, Ted, right?

[00:11:33] Dr. Ted Achacoso: ATP. Yes, ATP is fuel inside and a flare outside. Naviaux describes stressed cells releasing extracellular ATP as a danger signal to their neighbors, and if the response persists after the danger is gone, the whole body metabolism is disturbed. That's his mechanistic model, not a study of andropause. HOMeHOPe brings it to the hormone network as a clinical question.

[00:11:54] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Is this person still in defense or ready to rebuild? That's why facilitating resolution of the cell danger response [00:12:00] is a core expertise of the HOMeHOPe practitioner. You don't rebalance a mobile while the ceiling is still shaking. 

[00:12:06] Dr. Scott Sherr: That giraffe, man. But 

[00:12:07] Jodi Duval: yeah. So Ted, when we look at this, how do you know which is happening, the ramp or the alarm?

[00:12:15] Dr. Ted Achacoso: It can be both, and you can read the pattern. No single biomarker panel or symptom complex proves a CDR state. HOMeHOPe reads it as a pattern across the seven pillars and follows the response. Then the sequence is confirm, stabilize, restore, and challenge. Sequence beats intensity when the reserve is limited.

[00:12:34] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay, folks, it's time for our 1-cent solutions. The price is right here. So Dr. Ted What is the smallest, most useful thing someone can do that doesn't require any labs or any money? 

[00:12:49] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Start at the top of the network with the pineal. It releases melatonin in darkness, a night signal. When light reaching the eyes helps set the brain clock that coordinates the network.

[00:12:58] Dr. Ted Achacoso: So for two weeks, get [00:13:00] up at the same time every day, weekends included, and step outside for 10 minutes of morning light. At night, make the bedroom properly dark. That's chronobiology, and it costs less than a cent. 

[00:13:11] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yes. And sunlight's still free last I checked, at least in most countries. Maybe not North Korea.

[00:13:16] Dr. Scott Sherr: Why does it matter for testosterone specifically anyway, Ted? Re- remind us. 

[00:13:19] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Because testosterone lives inside the time network. Timing matters even for reading it. The European study drew morning blood for exactly that reason. I'd rather study the conductor before anyone touches a single instrument. 

[00:13:32] Jodi Duval: And of course, this isn't just for men.

[00:13:35] Jodi Duval: For a woman in perimenopause waking at 3:00 AM, a cool dark room, a fan by the bed, and a fixed wake time give her network something steady to hold onto while the ovarian signals are changing. 

[00:13:47] Dr. Allen Bookatz: What about our guy with the convertible brochure, 

[00:13:50] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Ted? Actually, I know of a guy, not with a convertible brochure, but with a brochure for a hyperbaric chamber that was so expensive, right?

[00:13:58] Dr. Ted Achacoso: And end up buying it. [00:14:00] Um, add two things. First, a notebook. Two weeks, four lines a day. Sleep, morning energy, temper, desire. Keep them as separate lines, not one blurry verdict. Then he walks into a clinician's office with data instead of a vibe. Second, a daily movement he can comfortably recover from his current level.

[00:14:19] Dr. Ted Achacoso: A walk after dinner, the stairs instead of the elevator. If he wakes up recovered, that's his stable base. Challenge comes after the stability, not before. 

[00:14:28] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah. And for the clinicians listening, here's the clinic version. Measure the network, not the node, and let the person in front of you decide which markers matter.

[00:14:37] Dr. Scott Sherr: If testosterone is part of the picture, read it in the morning, know whether it's a total or bioavailable, and read it beside whatever thyroid, adrenal, metabolic, and nutrient context that person's history calls for. Same time of day, same conditions every time you remeasure. And for women in the transition, the same logic applies.

[00:14:56] Dr. Scott Sherr: Read the ovarian change alongside thyroid, adrenal, [00:15:00] insulin, and sleep because the menopause data says the change doesn't stay in the ovaries. 

[00:15:04] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Same mobile, uh, different giraffe. Then compare to optimal, not to normal. Normal is not optimal. A reference range compares a value with a reference population.

[00:15:14] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Doesn't tell you how well this person sleeps, recovers, or functions. The optimal range asks how close their network sits to a healthy young adult. Then balance and measure again. Detect, balance, remeasure. 

[00:15:25] Dr. Allen Bookatz: This giraffe's getting around here. So w- Ted, uh, walk us through the order of operations, say, in, in a clinic.

[00:15:32] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, it's really very simple. Confirm Stabilize, restore, and challenge. Confirm anything that belongs on the disease track. Then stabilize sleep and light first because that's cheat safe ground. Restore what the measurement shows is short. Only then ask more of him. Heavier training, bigger changes. 

[00:15:51] Jodi Duval: And so then what does better actually look like before any lab number moves?

[00:15:56] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Health markers you can feel. Steadier sleep, mornings [00:16:00] with some drive in them, a longer fuse, recovery after a hard day that actually happens overnight. Funny how overnight is a word we like after all. 

[00:16:08] Dr. Allen Bookatz: All right. Now the next better question Dr. Scott, be our toughest peer reviewer here and give us the data pulling us the other way.

[00:16:17] Dr. Scott Sherr: Okay, so three findings to chat about here. In the European study, mood and fatigue alone didn't identify low testosterone. The sexual triad tracked best. In the Massachusetts cohort, 1.6% a year is an average, and an average describes a group, not an individual man. And in the menopause data, hormone therapy associations appear, but the authors flag healthy user confounding and call for randomized trials.

[00:16:39] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay. So if HOMeHOPe would design a study, what would that look like, Ted? 

[00:16:44] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, the study is one that follows people, not populations. Recruit men from 30 to 60 and women entering perimenopause. Measure each person's network repeatedly at the same arc, the hormone axis from the melatonin timing down to the gonads, the nutrient [00:17:00] cofactors, the metabolomic pattern, plus cell danger response markers as we establish them.

[00:17:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Track health markers, not just disease markers. Sleep continuity, grip strength, recovery after exertion, mood, desire, and energy as separate lines. Then compare network-wide range shifting with single hormone replacement with adverse effects recorded as carefully as benefits. Each person is his or her own control.

[00:17:25] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Uh, and what would count as, say, success in that story? 

[00:17:29] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Not the testosterone number on its own, Allen. A man who sleeps through, recovers, uh, from his Saturday run by Monday, and whose family notices the longer fuse before he does. 

[00:17:39] Dr. Allen Bookatz: And nobody gets a Corvette as the control condition? 

[00:17:43] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Or the other woman. The budget committee already said no.

[00:17:49] Dr. Scott Sherr: And the Naviaux side gets its own thread. His paper maps the danger metabolism. The clinic version measures it in real people and follows whether resolution tracks with recovery. 

[00:17:58] Jodi Duval: So which turns that [00:18:00] population staircase from the menopause study into one woman's actual timeline. 

[00:18:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Exactly, and it feeds the health optimization index or that HOMeHOPe is establishing with the CDR index as one component.

[00:18:13] Dr. Ted Achacoso: That's a research agenda. Measure the network, balance the network, and document what changes in the life attached to it. 

[00:18:20] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Okay, Al. It's time for our take home three. Dr. Scott? 

[00:18:24] Dr. Scott Sherr: All righty, so first one, menopause doesn't change the body overnight, obviously, but the transition is written across far more than ovaries.

[00:18:32] Dr. Scott Sherr: More than half of 90 lab tests step with it. The whole network registers the change, so read the whole network. 

[00:18:37] Dr. Allen Bookatz: All right, Jodi, what's number two? 

[00:18:39] Jodi Duval: Yeah, so and number two, andropause is the slow story. Ordinary male aging brings no final period and no landmark. Just gradual drift that differs from man to man, and it can go unnamed for years.

[00:18:52] Jodi Duval: So fixed wake times, morning light, and a four-line notebook start making it become really quite visible. 

[00:18:59] Dr. Allen Bookatz: All right. [00:19:00] Dr. Ted, take us home. With number three 

[00:19:03] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes. So third, HOMeHOPe doesn't replace one hormone. It does hormone balancing for health optimization across the network from pineal to pituitary, thyroid, thymus, pancreas, adrenals, and gonads.

[00:19:14] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Touch one node and the whole network moves. Balance the mobile, not the giraffe. 

[00:19:18] Dr. Scott Sherr: We love the giraffe in this one, huh? So Ted, people will hear 25-year-old benchmark and file this under anti-aging. Is this what you mean? 

[00:19:26] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Anti-aging and re-rejuvenative medicine treat aging as a disease that shortens lifespan.

[00:19:32] Dr. Ted Achacoso: HOMeHOPe pursues healthspan, quality of life, by balancing anabolism and catabolism according to the life cycle of an organism. Any longevity is a beneficial side effect. 

[00:19:41] Dr. Scott Sherr: And it isn't a testosterone clinic with better branding. 

[00:19:43] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Replacement is organized around one node, the gonadal hormone. HOMeHOPe is organized around the network.

[00:19:49] Dr. Ted Achacoso: It asks what the whole system needs to work the way it was built to. 

[00:19:53] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Now I'll just say before we close here, uh, I'll just say a word about my own house. You know, in the ER, I'm really fortunate that we [00:20:00] don't have many people coming in with menopause and andropause as, you know, chief complaints, and that's 'cause, you know, we're, we're really good in, you know, at those things like acute care, traumas, heart attacks, bloodstream infections, sepsis, all that, all that good stuff.

[00:20:14] Dr. Allen Bookatz: And, you know, but for those, m- you know, most of our clients and patients out there, right, that have chronic issues, the answer has really been only drugs and, and more surgery for them, and it's organized around some type of a diagnosis or, or an endpoint of a disease that, you know, we've been watching them sort of fall into.

[00:20:33] Dr. Allen Bookatz: That's just 'cause what-- That's, uh, that's what, what we're trained to measure and look for. And so that threshold that tells us whether disease is present and there and, and that, that certainly matters, uh, but it doesn't measure whether an entire network is actually working well across, like, a 20-year ramp here.

[00:20:50] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Exactly, Allen. As one of your colleagues told me, "I am the only sta- person standing between you and God." But HOMeHOPe, h- uh, you know, however, reads [00:21:00] the ramp while it's still a ramp. 

[00:21:01] Dr. Scott Sherr: Okay, so it's back to that house at 3:00 AM. She's kicking off the sheets. He's pricing convertibles. 

[00:21:09] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Neither changed- What 

[00:21:09] Dr. Allen Bookatz: about the gir- What about-- Oh, what about the giraffe?

[00:21:11] Dr. Ted Achacoso: No, uh, actually, Allen, it's more like it's pricing very pricey, uh, h- HBOT chambers, right? Um- 

[00:21:22] Dr. Allen Bookatz: I know. 

[00:21:24] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Neither changed overnight, Scott. Her network took a real step down after a long landing. His has been walking down a ramp for years without a sign on it. HOMeHOPe gives both of them the same thing: a measured network, a direction towards youthful balance, and a sequence that respects the person.

[00:21:41] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Disease is managed. Health is optimized. 

[00:21:44] Dr. Scott Sherr: Trademark. And maybe he keeps the convertible too, huh, Ted? 

[00:21:47] Dr. Ted Achacoso: He can keep the car, not the other woman. Well, balance the driver. We'll balance the driver. 

[00:21:55] Dr. Allen Bookatz: C- can they take a trip to South Africa maybe for a safari? [00:22:00] 

[00:22:00] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Do you see some giraffes? See some giraffes. Yeah. 

[00:22:03] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Oh, 

[00:22:03] Jodi Duval: goodness.

[00:22:04] Dr. Allen Bookatz: Jodi, please take us out here. 

[00:22:05] Jodi Duval: All right, well, we've got giraffes, convertibles, trips to Africa. We've got hyperbarics. We've got a whole 

[00:22:12] Dr. Scott Sherr: lineup here today. Lots of midlife crises going on 

[00:22:14] Jodi Duval: right there, you know? Yes. Mm-hmm. Interesting. And that is our ep- episode, folks. So we had menopause open the door for us.

[00:22:21] Jodi Duval: Andropause turned out to be the room that we were exploring in. If you're a clinician who wants to read the whole hormone network instead of one number, start with Clinical Metabolomics, the Foundation Essentials module, and then Chronobiology and Evolutionary Medicine, home of the cell danger response.

[00:22:39] Jodi Duval: So you can find them all at homehope.org. And thanks for listening. Go get some morning light or evening sunset. And until next time, don't forget to like, subscribe, comment what you'd love us to talk about or how you would like us to improve [00:23:00] our podcast here. And we hope you, uh, enjoyed today's episode, and we'll see you back on the next Health Optimization Medicine Podcast.

[00:23:09] Jodi Duval: See you later.