insights

IFM staff member Kalea Wattles, ND, shares how empowering it can be for patients to understand how they can improve ovarian function. True preventative medicine starts with education at an early age. Listen to the full video here.

Transcript:

A really fascinating thing about our ovaries and the eggs within them is that they’re with us our entire lives. And even further, they’re in our bodies when we are fetuses in our mother’s body. In the Functional Medicine timeline, when we’re looking at antecedents and we’re considering our preconception care when we’re in our mother’s womb, this is a really important aspect of our ovarian health. I want women to feel empowered throughout their lives to support their ovarian health, because we know that things like antioxidant status, oxidative stress, hormone balance are all crucially important for our ovarian function and the health of our eggs within them.

One of my goals as a women’s health practitioner is to start bringing this up when women are in their adolescence. That’s true preventative medicine. Empowering women to participate in their own health, and to have the knowledge that they have a say in how their ovaries function and the longevity of their ovarian health starting in their teenage years, I think can be really impactful.

When I was a medical student rotating through the local fertility clinics, I heard this theme so many times… Women who were struggling with their ovarian function would always say, “If I only would have known,” or “if I would have known, I would have done something.” This power to start when we’re teenagers using our strategies in Functional Medicine to improve mitochondrial function, to reduce inflammation, to support hormone balance—that is something that can preserve ovarian function into the future.