Essentials: How to Optimize Your Hormones for Health & Vitality | Dr. Kyle Gillett

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion about hormone health and optimization with Dr. Kyle Gillett. Dr. Gillett, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I'm super excited to talk to you. You are an encyclopedia of knowledge about hormone health for men and for women across the lifespan, so I have many, many questions. When someone comes to you as a patient, in terms of hormone health, wh- what are the sorts of probe questions that you ask and, and what are you looking for? And I ask this because I'd like people to be able to ask some of these very same questions for themselves.

So when you do a physical exam and a history, you have a lot of different parts. You have your history of present illness, if they have a complaint. Maybe the patient doesn't have a complaint. In that case, things like their social history and their family history are extremely important, because that gives you a- an insight in th- into their genetics and an insight into their hormone health. So patients will tell me, "Oh, I'm doing okay," but it helps to ask them, "Well, how are you now?" Let's say the patient is 50. "How are you now versus when you were 20? And what has changed?" So I've got the question a lot, "How do you get your doctor to order a better lab workup or to in- even include your basic hormones?" And there's no magic answer to that. But what really helps is you tell them, you know, "My energy is not as good as it used to be. My focus is not as good as it used to be. My athletic performance is not as good as it used to be." So you don't have to have a pathology in order for a lab to be indicated. You just need to have that pertinent symptom.

Would you say that using the approach you just described, that it's, um, equally effective for men and women, or do you find that, um, for one reason or another that men and women have different challenges in and advantages in trying to access their deeper hormone data?

With women, there's a lot more objective data. So if they're having menstrual irregularities or if they're not having a period, if they're having too heavy of periods, then those are things that they talk about very frequent- frequently with their doctor. Men are more hesitant. Men really want to know what their testosterone is. But they r- at the same time, they really don't want to tell their doctor how their libido is or how their energy is, because it- it's almost like, um, they feel less masculine or they feel less like a guy when they say that, even if they're just talking to their doctor about it.