ATHE_Transcript_Ep 615_Dr. Amy Killen
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. Yes, I'm a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can, and that's why I created the Well Beyond 40 to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive.
In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out.
So obviously I'm fascinated with [00:01:00] all things longevity. And I'm sure you are too, if you're listening to Well Beyond 40, and part of longevity that we don't talk about for women is sexual health. And I have decided recently that this shouldn't be the conversation you have with your girlfriends over wine.
This should be a conversation we're all having. We need to bring it out into the daylight. And so I have been assembling amazing experts to talk about it. And today we have Dr. Amy Killen. Who I've known for years and I'm super excited about this because she's really been focusing a lot in sex and skin.
Two very important things again that especially in sexual health we're not talking too much about. She is a longevity and regenerative physician and she has a practice in Park City, Utah. She has been doing stem cells and all sorts of different regenerative therapies, peptides, hormones, et cetera, for nine years now.
She's way ahead of her time. She's also a speaker, educator, and the co [00:02:00] founder of the Human Optimization Program. And we are going to be diving into sexual health. What actually is it? How do you know if you're sexually healthy? How much should you have? If you're not, what can you do about it? Bioidentical hormones.
Should you? Shouldn't you? When should you start? All the good stuff. So stay with me. I will be right back with Dr. Amy Killen.
Amy Killen, welcome to the show.
Dr. Amy Killen: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. It's good to see you again. I know.
JJ Virgin: This is like selfishly, the only way I get to see you is just invite you on the podcast. Thank you. And it's weird that you've never been on the podcast. I don't know how that happened. So I'm glad we're rectifying it.
And I'm really excited because just recently I just interviewed the founder of Meet Rosie and it just dawned on me that we never talk about sexual health on the show. Now we talk about sexual health amongst girlfriends, but it's really not a conversation that we've taken on. And I am going to [00:03:00] change that because I think it's ridiculous to have this thing that we kind of quietly talk about in the corners.
And the reality is I think when we even talk about sexual health, it's hard to even have a definition. Right? So I'd love to just even start there as to, for you, what is sexual health? And then what does it mean to be sexually healthy?
Dr. Amy Killen: To me, sexual health means all the things, you know, that influence sexual health are healthy and robust.
So that includes physical health, mental health, emotional health, you know, your relationship health. As well as, you know, like environmental health and all the things that are kind of influencing how you think about sex and how your sex life is going. All of those things are healthy and you feel good about your sex life.
So that's different for everyone. Like obviously frequency and partners and all of that is very different, but do you feel happy? Do you feel good? Do you feel content with what's happening with your sex life? And if so, then I consider you to be pretty sexually healthy. It's interesting.
JJ Virgin: I think of it like [00:04:00] exercise, you know, an old exercise physiologist and exercise has always been a weird thing because people say, Oh yes, I exercise. Well, that could mean everything from, you know, I walk once a week to I go to CrossFit and I'm competing in the games, everything in between. It seems like the same with sexual health. Like there's not a specific, this is the prescription.
Although I remember hearing my buddy, Dr. Daniel Lehman was talking about cardiovascular risk and men and that men need to have sex three times a week. You know, which I immediately picked up because I thought, well, that's great. You know, it made me, all my male clients were like, write me a prescription for that, please.
Right. Yeah. It leads to that question because I, I know a lot of girlfriends who are not sexually active at all. They're just feel like they're done with it, which I think is really sad. How important is it for you to be sexually active? And is there like. You know, kind of a minimum dose for health.
Dr. Amy Killen: I guess the [00:05:00] short answer is for women, we don't really know.
There are several studies in men, pretty large studies in men from all over the world that show that having sex at least one to two times a week reduces all cause mortality by about 50%, if you look at those numbers and that's cardiovascular disease risk, that's cancer risk. These are, you know, not necessarily causal, so we don't know that having sex is causing this, there are more correlations, right?
For men, one to two times a week seems to be the magic number for reducing mortality risk.
JJ Virgin: Well, and also reducing crabby, cranky. And reducing that.
Dr. Amy Killen: It doesn't seem to be as much about quantity as it does quality. And there haven't been as many studies in women, unfortunately, but there was one, for instance, that was published in the 80s that looked at things that improve longevity, lifestyle factors that improve longevity in men and women.
And in men, it was the quantity of sex that was correlated with longevity. And in women, it was the quality of sex, whether it [00:06:00] was enjoyable, whether they liked it, whether they felt bonded and intimate and all of those things. So I tell women, you know, obviously you have to have some quantity in order to have quality, but I think focusing on the quality may be more important for women.
JJ Virgin: That's so interesting. Well, it's also, we're so much more complicated. Man has sex, he comes, we're done. It's a total crapshoot with a woman, right?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yes, which is why, you know, we've had a hard time getting good, you know, medications and drug therapies and things like that, that really work for women. Whereas you have Viagra and all these different drugs that work great for men, they don't really work as well for women because for us, it's not just about blood flow.
There's so many parts of it that you have to get right. The mental part, the emotional part, the relationship part, all of that comes into play much more, I think, in women than it does in men.
JJ Virgin: So when do you start to see, like, things becoming more challenging for women. I mean, at first I would think, well, gosh, the minute you have kids.
That changes a lot of stuff, you know, and then you start to go into menopause. That [00:07:00] changes a lot of stuff, but are there just kind of seasons as this goes through, or is there a kind of an area where we start to really get into more issues?
Dr. Amy Killen: What happens? Yeah. I mean, there definitely are seasons and I think you nailed it.
Like getting pregnant post childbirth, obviously is a least romantic thing.
JJ Virgin: A lot of us are like,
Dr. Amy Killen: don't touch me.
JJ Virgin: And stay away. I know my breasts look amazing.
Dr. Amy Killen: And that's totally normal to have waxes and wanes. I think that you want to be careful of that when you have, is it the wanes that are low or the waxes?
Whatever the low dips are. I think it's the wanes. You don't want them to last too long, especially if you're wanting more, but certainly perimenopause, you know, those 10 years before menopause, we start to see testosterone is really starting to go down quite a bit. And then absolutely at menopause, when you lose estrogen and progesterone and testosterone is going down, if you're not replacing those hormones especially, then we see a big dip in sexual activity and interest in having sex.
JJ Virgin: So, how [00:08:00] mission critical is it then to do like hormone replacement therapy for this? Is this something you can do through diet and lifestyle alone, or is this something that you really want to start to look into hormones?
Dr. Amy Killen: I'm a big advocate of hormones in general. So I think if you ask me any question related to health, if hormones are important, I would say yes.
Certainly you can do it without hormones, but I think Why suffer? Why suffer? Why suffer? There's so many medical benefits, you know, long term benefits for your brain, your blood vessels, your pelvic floor, your muscles, your bones, you know, all parts of your body in having hormones as you get older. So I would say if you can do hormones, if you don't have a reason not to, I'm all for it.
JJ Virgin: I am a huge proponent of hormones. And just fortunately, I was telling a friend, you know, on my 50th birthday, I had this girls weekend in South Beach with Dr. Anna Kabeca, Dr. Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Jen Landau. I was like, I was surrounded by like the top, you know. So I've been supported through this from the very beginning.
Cause when, [00:09:00] when I was 49, my son nearly died and like everything went sideways fast. But I just remember when I was seeing people one on one, you could tell. Whether they were on hormones or not before they said anything by purely looking at their labs, looking at their skin. I mean, it was so clear and just things like being able to put on muscle, have a better mood, be able to think straight, all of that.
So I agree with you. I'm a big proponent of this. So at what point is someone's going through all of this? Do you start to look at hormones for them?
Dr. Amy Killen: You know, I look at hormones pretty early on with anyone. I mean, I certainly, anyone in the 40 plus age range. But even before that, if you, you know, you want to look at thyroid, you want to look at other hormones, also, you know, stress hormones like cortisol, as well as the sex hormones for all women that are having any kind of medical problem.
Cause you know, it could be your thyroid. Low thyroid is a common cause of low libido. It's a common cause of weight gain, the common cause of sexual dysfunction. And as you know, the [00:10:00] reference ranges of what's considered low and what's considered optimal. Those things don't always go together with traditional medicine, and so making sure that your thyroid is optimal is going to help with everything from fertility to sex drive.
So I think getting some baseline labs is important whether you're 30 years old or 40 or 50, if you're having any kind of concern like this.
JJ Virgin: Let's like be honest about that. Those thyroid numbers in the traditional labs are ridiculous. They are. I cannot believe that this hasn't been corrected yet.
Dr. Amy Killen: It's crazy.
I've had like good friends of mine that have come to me and said, Hey, you know, I had my thyroid checked cause I gained 20 pounds and my skin is dry and I feel awful and I have no motivation, but my TSH is like seven and they told me that I was fine, that they would see me next year. I was like, no, that's not, it's not fine.
So yeah, it's a big problem.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. It's wild. I actually just had a woman DM me on Instagram. Her husband's 45, his testosterone is 350. His doctor told him he was in the normal range. [00:11:00] And I went, Oh my, find a functional doctor. Like, are you kidding me? So it's not just happening to us women, even though it feels like a lot of this is the research is not done on us, et cetera.
So. Thyroid is a big one and I think people don't think about that in terms of sexual health. What are some of the other things that could be impacting? And when we look at any kind of sexual dysfunction, I would imagine there's everything from mechanical things like dryness or maybe pelvic floor issues to libido.
Like, what are all the things that can go sideways and what can cause those things to happen?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, so I think of it as the four H's. I had to kind of play this a little bit. The four H's that I think about. So the first one is head, and that's anything, you know, emotional, psychological that's happening in your brain.
So that could be history of trauma, or PTSD, or depression, or any kind of problem that's, you know, mostly a mental emotional kind of thing. And then that second H is hormones. So, you know, that's all the different sex hormones. That's the cortisol, [00:12:00] thyroid, all of those things. The third H is heart. So that's the cardiovascular system.
So obviously you need blood to be able to go down to your sexual organs in order to be aroused and have stimulation, all of that. And one of the things that I think women especially don't think about is that as you get older, as you develop atherosclerosis, you know, plaque in your blood vessels, which can eventually lead to heart attacks or strokes, that same plaque is happening in the blood vessels that lead to your vagina and your clitoris and your sexual organ.
Just like men, we get erections, you just don't see them, they're just hidden, but you have to have blood flow. And so lack of blood flow is definitely a cause of sexual dysfunction in women. But because we don't have a good way to measure that. We don't even know how common it is, but that's definitely something to think about.
And then the last H, the fourth H, is what I call his and hers, which is just the actual structures, the actual genitalia, the pelvic floor, the muscles that support it, and then the actual structures themselves. So those are kind of my four H's that I start with as a framework to look at what could be [00:13:00] going on with you.
JJ Virgin: And as far as pelvic floor goes, I mean, how common, because you just don't hear that talked about at all. I would assume that someone probably only think they had a pelvic floor issue if they were a little incontinent, but like how common are pelvic floor issues? And then what types of things are you doing about them?
Dr. Amy Killen: Pelvic floor issues are pretty common. And I think most people, like you mentioned, will think about, you know, after you have a baby and you have the weak, loose pelvic floor muscles know, do Kegels and you'll be fine. And that's certainly, Kegels do have a place in, in certain patients where we call, that's called hypotonic pelvic floor, where the pelvic floor muscles are weak and loose, and that is one thing that's common, but other thing that's fairly common that people don't talk about is hypertonic.
Pelvic floor where the muscles are tight. They're weak, but they're tight. So it's kind of like if you worked your bicep every day all the time and you never let it relax. then your bicep over time would actually get weaker. That happens with the pelvic floor. So a lot of things can cause that. Like if you have [00:14:00] chronic pain, for instance, in your lower back, or your hips, or you're just, you hold your abs in all day.
Like a lot of women, you know, we hold our abs in because we don't want our belly to show. And so you go all day and you're holding those abs in. That pelvic floor can actually get really tight because your abs are connected to the pelvic floor muscles. And so by doing that, you may be causing your pelvic floor to be tight, which can cause pain.
It can cause incontinence. It can cause difficulties having sex. So a lot of that pelvic floor therapist, like a physical therapist is a great person to get checked and then it can give you some exercises to either loosen it up or tighten it up depending on what's going on.
JJ Virgin: Yeah, it's, it's interesting.
It's just one that really isn't, isn't talked about. You were not at MindShare Summit this year, but our future of health talk winner is a gal who's a pelvic floor therapist, Jonna Danielson, and she brought the cooch ball, which first of all, don't we love the name. I heard her do this talk and she had a longer talk and she had the cooch and the gooch ball because guys don't know they have a [00:15:00] pelvic floor, right?
So she had one for them too. It was pretty funny. But just something that you sit on every day to help strengthen, which was pretty interesting. Yes.
Dr. Amy Killen: That's interesting. Yeah. I'll have to get one of those. Yeah. They're very cool.
JJ Virgin: It's a great something for you to know for your patients, because it's like an easy enough thing to do for a couple of minutes at home.
You just sit on this cooch ball. Yeah. I like it. Yeah, it was funny. She got like the whole audience sitting on cooch balls. Not at my chair, but at this other thing. I'm like, she's got people sitting on stage on a cooch ball. I go, this is classic, fabulous. And speaking about that, like pelvic floor exercises.
I'm just going to assume, and I know what they say about assuming, but I'm just going to assume that people who are more physically active, because if you look at everything in longevity, I feel like being an exercise physiologist, we're finally getting our due. We're not like the lowly person over there.
Like if you were going to pick one thing in longevity to focus on, to me, it would be exercise. What are things like diet and exercise that can make a difference here?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, absolutely. Being physically fit [00:16:00] is going to help in so many different ways. Obviously it keeps the pelvic floor muscles healthy.
That's important and strong, but it's also going to have benefits on your, for your cardiovascular system, obviously, which is important for that blood flow piece, it's going to have mental benefits. As you know, you're keeping your brain and your, your emotional state healthy and less depression, less anxiety.
That always leads to better sexual function in general. So it's going to help with that piece of it. It helps your hormones too. If you're physically active, it's going to keep, you know, for instance, if you're lifting heavy weights frequently, then you're more likely to have higher testosterone levels, which is going to be important for your hormone piece.
So I think you're right. I think exercise is probably the number one thing that you can do, you know, lifting heavy as well as doing some interval training and sprints and things like that to build muscle, but also to keep your sexual organs healthy and keep your brain healthy so that you actually want to have
JJ Virgin: sex.
Yes. Amen to that.
What else can work beyond exercise?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, so diet. You want to eat healthy foods, you know, lots of protein, lots of good healthy [00:17:00] fats, lots of fiber. Get some good vegetables and polyphenols and things that are going to be antioxidants to help reduce inflammation and reduce cardiovascular disease and improve your hormones.
All the things that we know are good for longevity are also good for sexual longevity. And same thing, you know, stress management is important. A lot of your hormones compete with cortisol. So if your cortisol is going really high because you're really stressed out, you may not be making as much of some of these sex hormones.
And so making sure that you're keeping your stress levels down with meditation or going out in nature and going on long walks or whatever it is that you do that helps keep your stress control is important. And then the other thing that I think is really important is, is sleep. And I love sleep. You know, I was an ER doctor for 10 years and I didn't sleep.
And then I had twins and one more and I had several years of continuing to sleep. And so now that I can sleep, I love it. But a lot of the hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, for instance, are made primarily at night. And so if you're not sleeping well, if you're not going through all the phases of sleep, you're not making key hormones that are going to [00:18:00] help with, you know, you being interested in sex and actually being able to have sex and being able to have orgasms and all of that.
So sleep is super important as well.
JJ Virgin: So sleep, my big rocks for longevity are. Diet, especially protein, heavy weights, just like you talked about with kid training, and sleep. Like, how are you helping a patient recognize if they're getting quality sleep, and if they're not, what are you doing about it?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, there are obviously a number of sleep trackers out there now that you can use.
We have an app that, I was kind of a part of a company that just came out with an app called Inno1 Plus, that it takes all of your wearable data, whether it's from. Auraring or Whoop or Biostrap, your Google Fit, whatever. It takes them together and integrates them. And you can tag things you're doing during the day.
You know, whether it's exercise or red light therapy or blue light blockers or whatever you're doing. And it starts to kind of make sense of the things that you're doing as far as what's actually affecting different parts of your sleep. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's a free app. You can go on [00:19:00] inof1plus.com.
But it's a free app and so you can look at that over time and you can say, hey, you know, it turns out that when I have dinner at nine o'clock at night, that's affecting my sleep latency and my REM sleep by this much. And so here's how I can change that. So you can actually make very specific kind of granular decisions based on that information.
So I think it's, you know, uses AI, which of course is, is everywhere these days, but things like that. But also just common sense stuff, like making sure that you're sticking with a schedule, that you're seeing the sun in the morning, getting that circadian rhythm reset, making sure that you're not doing lots of bright light at nighttime, calming down the last few hours, getting rid of screens in your bedroom, you know, those kinds of things that I think we think of as like sleep hygiene can make a big difference without even having to track anything.
JJ Virgin: Yeah. And I think that's important. You know, there's so much out there about all these cool gadgets and different hacks we can do, but I always go back to, well, let's go back to eating, exercise, and sleep and basics first, like, are you getting those things [00:20:00] dialed, but assuming that someone listening is. I know you're doing some super cool stuff in the whole longevity regenerative front with stem cells, peptides, et cetera.
So what I'd love to do is dig into a little bit of that, what you're doing at your clinic, but also supplements in general. Are there supplements that you find, especially in the area of sexual health, that can be really helpful?
Dr. Amy Killen: I do love supplements. I have a supplement company. We do a longevity focused supplements, just kind of help the whole body because obviously the healthier you are, the more sex you want to have.
People ask me this a lot. There are not actually too many things that I think are all that effective for helping with, for instance, you know, boosting testosterone. Or improving libido. I mean, there's a few things, you know, maca has been studied and horny goat weed has been studied. There's a few things that have a little bit of evidence, but I don't find most of those as compelling as just, you know, eat healthy, exercise, sleep.
I don't think there are hormones likely and hormones.
JJ Virgin: Like, okay, your testosterone is low, take testosterone. [00:21:00]
Dr. Amy Killen: And that's the same thing. Like after menopause, people are always asking me, like, I want to do, I want to do menopause naturally. Like, I don't want to take anything. Like what supplements can I take?
And I'm like, save your money. And get yourself some good bio identical, body identical hormones. They will make a much bigger difference and they're not going to be that expensive. And so I do think supplements are great, but I don't think that they work for everything. And this is one area they're not as good at.
JJ Virgin: You know, it's interesting there too. And I just ran into a gal at a conference. I was speaking and she waited for me afterwards. She goes, I'm doing everything you just said to do. I've, you know, went into menopause five years ago. So five years post. And nothing's working because I'm going to do it naturally.
I go, and what's the difference between taking hormones versus supplements? Right. The hormones to me feel more natural than the supplements would be, right? So as I'm going, I don't even understand what you're… Get over yourself. Go take the hormones.
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah. You have an estrogen deficiency. I give estrogen.
You don't have a horny goat weed deficiency. Or ginseng
JJ Virgin: [00:22:00] deficiency. It's like, come on. I will tell you, we, we went to Bali this summer. And so we decided that on our way back and forth between Bali, we always like to do this to time zone adjust. And we like to split up our trips. So we decided to stop in South Korea, obviously not North Korea.
We went to South Korea and we were with Ann Shippey. And on the way back, we'd gone to the DMZ and she goes, I really want to go buy ginseng. And I'm like, okay. She goes, I feel called to it. I'm like, all right, fine. So turns out there's a ginseng museum. You have to have an appointment, like this whole thing to go to this thing.
We go at Sunday morning at 9am to the ginseng museum. It was quite amazing. Needless to say, we walked out with a couple of years worth of ginseng. We had one whole suitcase that was just loaded with skincare and ginseng from Korea. First of all, the food, the skincare, the music. I was [00:23:00] like, I love this place.
I'm staying. This ginseng of anything that my husband has tried. I was like, what did you do? He's like, it's that ginseng. And they were like, this is ginseng. You can only get this specific thing here. It was the best sales. Everybody in sales should go through the sales training of what they did for this ginseng, because we were like, we'll take it all.
You can't get it when you're out of the country, unless you're on the list because you bought it already. I'm like, okay, fine. We got years worth, but what a difference. So it is, has been the only thing I've noticed that has made a difference is this very specific.
Dr. Amy Killen: Well, I'm going to need your recipe here in the content for the channel.
JJ Virgin: You can only get, so who knows? Let's talk about some of the fun stuff that you're doing. Cause I know that you've been big. I mean, early on, you were starting with stem cells. And I think probably some peptides and stuff too. So what are some of the different things that you do in your office? And you're still in Park City, right?
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, I live in Salt Lake, work in Park City. Yeah, we, I do stem cell procedures and you're right, I've been doing them for, I guess, nine [00:24:00] years or something. I do what I call skin and sex. So I do stem cells for aesthetics, you know, for skin rejuvenation, for hair, to increase hair health and hair growth. And then I do the stem cell injections also for sexual health for men and women.
For sexual health, I'm injecting stem cells directly into the clitoris and into the top part of the vagina, like where the G spot or the G zone is. Of course, we numb it up with I was just going to say, okay, so We actually, a lot of our patients are asleep because we do these big stem cell procedures. So we actually have anesthesia.
We put, give you a little ketamine and propofol and let you have a nap. And that's actually fantastic. We do multiple, you know, joints and things too. I inject into the sexual organs, just a little bit of stem cells. And then we also have other options, you know, things like, like you mentioned, like there's some peptides out there.
PT 141 we've used for years. Now it's actually an FDA approved drug for women, which is great. What's unique about that drug is. Valisi is the name that's, that's FDA approved, but you can get it as a peptide as well still. But it, it works in your brain and it works on the [00:25:00] melanocortinid pathway. So essentially, it makes your brain more interested in having sex and it also increases arousal.
So it increases libido and arousal. And pleasure. So it kind of works on that. Now, the only problem is it also causes nausea in about half of people. So like, it's one of these things where you have to kind of like be. We have to be a little lucky and a little careful. It also lasts for like six hours. And so I've had patients tell me like, they'll like wake up in the middle of the night and like, they're like, super horny.
And they're just like, Oh my gosh, this is not what I wanted. I wanted to sleep. So it's kind of weird that way, but, but
JJ Virgin: you just need it with…remember that Viagra commercial about warning, erections can last for hours. So you just need to take that when you're…
Dr. Amy Killen: Exactly. You need a lot of time.
JJ Virgin: It's like, oh my goodness, hold on, I've got to throw up first and then I'll be right back.
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah, it sounds pretty sexy. You know, peptides like that are in other peptides that we've done. It's getting harder and harder to get peptides these days,
JJ Virgin: but… Tell [00:26:00] everyone what peptides are just in case someone isn't aware of them.
Dr. Amy Killen: So peptides is just a little bitty protein, so it's a chain of amino acids, you know, usually less than like 30 or 40 amino acids long.
And so it's like a small part of a protein. There's hundreds of different peptides out there. Some of them are already FDA approved drugs, like insulin is a peptide for instance. But there's many others out there, but they have very specific actions. These are things that are already in your body that we found ways to make, you know, out of your body.
From increasing your sexual desire to helping to heal musculoskeletal injuries for sleep. There's all kinds of peptides and we used to use them quite a bit. We're using them still, but there's some FDA changes that have come about recently in terms of what we can use and not use.
JJ Virgin: That's a whole conspiracy theory that we could rabbit hole you.
Dr. Amy Killen: Yeah. Put a pin in it. Talk about that at the next event that we're at together.
JJ Virgin: Okay. And the stem cell therapies that you've been doing, what kind of results are you seeing? We've
Dr. Amy Killen: had some amazing, I mean amazing results. I, I would [00:27:00] say about 80 percent of people have improvements when I'm looking at like sexual improvement will have improvements there.
Unfortunately, there's still some people that don't. It kind of depends on what's going on, but we can see improvements in sensation. So especially for women, like postmenopausal women, especially, they tend to have, start to have less sensation down, down in those areas and less pleasure and maybe a harder time reaching orgasm.
So. We're able to oftentimes reverse that. We can also all see improvements in stress urinary incontinence, which when you jump or laugh or sneeze and you have a little bit of urine leakage, very common in women especially. And that can be improved oftentimes by injecting the area just underneath the urethra.
So that can be helpful. And sometimes we'll also see improvements in sex drive. I think it's more because… If sex is more enjoyable and you like it more, then it sends signals to your brain that you want to have it more, right? Like we're not affecting the brain directly, but I think that it's that feedback loop that we're affecting.
Awesome.
JJ Virgin: I know you have a lifestyle challenge you've put together and you're going to give everybody It for free, my favorite word. So tell us a little bit [00:28:00] about your BEAMS challenge.
Dr. Amy Killen: What is it? Yeah. So, you know, I, I love all the technologies and I love stem cells and all the hormones and all the things that we can do, but I, I think it's very important for all of us to do the things that we can do on our own for free to be healthy as well.
Like the things we've mentioned before. So the BEAMS, so BEAMS is B E A M and then four S's and that stands for belong, eat, activate your brain, move, sleep, stress, sun, and sex. And so it's the things that you can do at home to be healthy. So we have a whole 26 day challenge and an ebook, and I'm going to give it to you all for free, that basically walks you through kind of step by step, day by day, how do you bring these things into your life and kind of a fun way so that by the end of it, you've incorporated a lot of new habits that are fun and easy that you can take with you to be healthier just in general.
So it's beams. life is the website, 4S is for that.
JJ Virgin: And I will put it at jjvirgin.com/DrAmy. I hear all about all this and it seems to me that let's say someone coming [00:29:00] in For any of these treatments with you, like if they did this first, I would say do the diet, exercise, lifestyle stuff, add in the hormones so that you don't, you can use just the amount you need and not try to override bad lifestyle with hormones.
Cause then you're using a drug rather than getting it back to natural levels and then use these other things.
Dr. Amy Killen: Absolutely. In fact, we won't like with my stem cell patients, I won't. Do procedures on people if they're not generally healthy to begin with, if they're smoking, if their blood sugars are too high, if they're not already trying and, and working themselves, then I don't do the procedures because I really do feel like in order for the, you know, you're planting seeds, but in order for the seeds to grow, you have to have a fertile soil kind of situation.
JJ Virgin: That's so good. Imagine if With semaglutide and terzepatide, if doctors required people to be on the right diet and exercise and sleep program before they were allowed to have any of the weight loss drugs, imagine how different things would be there. [00:30:00] You wouldn't have the side effects that we're seeing.
Crazy. Yes. Well, one can dream. All right. I'm going to put this again at jjvirgin.com/DrAmy. And I'll put all of your social stuff there too. You're doing cool, fun stuff on Instagram because you are out, you're out living what you tell people to do. So it's fun all real. Thank you.
Thank you. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great. And more importantly, that you're built to last. And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website, jjvirgin.com. And make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode at subscribetojj.com. See you next time.
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