Medical Disruptor™ by Dr. E

My voice decided to take the week off due to a fun side effect of my treatment, so this is a pre-filmed, pre-hair loss me. Enjoy the encore episode. This week on The Medical Disruptor, we’re running an encore of one of the most requested episodes we’ve done. Does this sound familiar? You’re on thyroid medication. Your TSH looks fine. And you still can’t get through the afternoon without lying down...

You’ve been on something for your anxiety for a while now. It helps… but nobody ever told you where the anxiety came from in the first place. Some diagnoses explain what’s wrong. Others just name what you’re feeling and move you from searching to managing. This week's guest on the Medical Disruptor, Dr. Courtney Snyder, has been a psychiatrist for thirty years. She trained at Baylor, Columbia, and...

Everyone is telling you to get on hormones right now, which could be great advice for some, the thing is perimenopause is where that advice gets complicated. Dr. Jen Pfleghaar is board certified in emergency medicine and went back for a fellowship in integrative medicine while she was still pulling ER shifts. On menopause, she and I don’t disagree at all. Estrogen protects your brain, your bones,...

Everyone in your family has diabetes, so you figure you are going to get diabetes next. That is not actually how it works. Dr. Kien Vuu was chief of interventional radiology when he got the diagnosis himself. Diabetes, high blood pressure, about fifty pounds he didn't want, and a handful of prescriptions. He was forty. If he had stayed in the system he trained in, he says he would still be on all...

Autoimmune disease is showing up in people with no family history, at ages nobody expected, and most people say that it's bad luck or bad genes. Dr. Aly Cohen stopped accepting that answer twenty years ago, and it started with her dog. He was a four and a half year old golden retriever who got sick out of nowhere with autoimmune liver disease, which is rare for dogs. She started looking at his wat...

Perimenopause does not always start with hot flashes. Sometimes it starts with anxiety out of nowhere, or sleep that falls apart, or ringing in your ears, or just the sense that you are not quite yourself anymore. If you keep being told you are too young for menopause or you still get your period so you’re not perimenopausal you need to watch this episode. Dr. Tara Scott is a board certified OBGYN...

Your fatigue never lifted. Your brain fog never cleared. You had COVID, you technically recovered, and you have not been the same person since. Dr. Robin Rose is double board certified in internal medicine and gastroenterology. After she left conventional practice she started running much deeper bloodwork on everybody, and the same things kept showing up. White counts in the twos and threes. Ferri...

If your child has eczema that keeps coming back, gets constipated for days at a time, or has had one ear infection after another, this episode is for you. These usually get treated as three separate problems by three different specialists. This week's guest, Dr. Sheila Kilbane says they are often one problem showing up in three places, and dairy is frequently part of it. She is a board certified p...

If you are on hormone therapy and still dealing with dryness, painful sex, or leaking when you laugh, this episode is for you. Estrogen and progesterone do a lot of good work. They protect your bones, your heart, and your brain. But systemic hormones do not reach everything. There is a whole area of your body they mostly skip, and that is where a lot of women are still struggling in silence. Dr. A...

High cholesterol does not always start in your diet. When your thyroid is slow, everything in your body slows down with it, including how you clear cholesterol. So you can eat well, move your body, do everything right, and still watch that number climb. If you were handed a statin prescription and never had your thyroid checked, this episode is for you. McCall McPherson is a PA and the founder of...

If you have not slept properly in years this episode is for you. You lie down exhausted and your brain goes a million miles an hour. You wake at 3am for no reason and you are running on empty. This week's guest on the Medical Disruptor, Dr. Daniella Marchetti, holds the highest credential in behavioral sleep medicine. She works with veterans at the VA and with women in private practice, and she no...

Have you been exhausted, carrying weight you cannot lose, losing your words mid sentence, feeling older than you are? Those are not four separate problems. They are energy problems, and your body makes energy in one place. We all learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Then we closed the book and never thought about it again. Which is pretty rude, when you think about it. That...

Half of the people who show up with a heart attack have completely normal cholesterol. That statistic is exactly why I brought back Dr. Philip Ovadia, a board certified cardiac surgeon who spent years operating on hearts while morbidly obese and pre-diabetic himself. In 2016, before Ozempic or any of the GLP-1 medications existed, he lost 100 pounds and reversed his own prediabetes, and it changed...

Your thyroid does not make one hormone. It makes five. Your last panel probably only tested one. That gap is exactly why I brought Dr. Amie Hornaman onto the show. In this episode of theMedical Disruptor, she shares her own thyroid story, including the 25 pounds that showed up in a matter of weeks and the seven different doctors she saw before anyone gave her an answer. From there we get into why...

What Is Actually Living in Your Gut That Is Making Every Other Symptom Worse ft. Izabella Wentz Your gut symptoms have a cause. Finding it just requires someone willing to look past the standard playbook. More than thirty distinct root causes including SIBO, parasites, celiac disease, bile acid malabsorption, food sensitivities, and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency can produce the exact same symp...

What Your TSH Number Isn't Telling You ft. Dr. Brittany Henderson Your TSH can look "perfectly normal" and you can still feel exhausted, foggy, cold, and stuck at a weight that won't budge. In this episode of the Medical Disruptor, I sit down with thyroid specialist Dr. Brittany Henderson to find out why. Dr. Henderson is fellowship-trained at Duke, ran thyroid programs at two major academic cente...

Can you heal your gallbladder instead of removing it? Maybe. In this episode I break down what's really behind gallstones, gallbladder sludge, and gallbladder pain, and what you can actually do before surgery. I'm Dr. E, the NP with the PhD. Most people get told "you have stones, let's take it out" and that's the whole conversation. Nobody asks why the gallstones formed, or what happens to your di...

Estrogen is the hormone women are told to fear, and never told it is actually the one they need most. In this episode of The Medical Disruptor, I sit down with endocrinologist Dr. Cassie Smith to dismantle the hormone myth that's kept millions of women suffering: the belief that estrogen and hormone therapy cause cancer. Dr. Cassie trained at one of the top metabolism and endocrinology fellowships...

Menopause doesn't have to be miserable. Yes, we're going to age, and yes, our hormones are going to change, but we do not have to feel old, exhausted, foggy, and brushed off. In this solo episode of the Medical Disruptor, I walk you through how to actually balance your hormones through perimenopause and menopause, in the order your body actually works. Most women get handed estrogen and sent home,...

Why Your Brain Is Starving Even When You Eat ft. Dr. Matt Bernstein What if the symptoms we call "mental illness" aren't really about brain chemistry at all, but about a brain that's literally starving for energy? In this episode of The Medical Disruptor, I sit down with psychiatrist Dr. Matt Bernstein, who trained and taught at Harvard before everything he believed about mental health got turned...

You can eat all the "right" foods and still be starving your body of what it actually needs. Healthy and well-nourished are NOT the same thing, and that gap is wider in 2026 than ever. I'm Dr. E, the NP with the PhD, and this is The Medical Disruptor. In this solo episode I explain why getting all your nutrients from food alone has become nearly impossible, even on a clean, whole-food, plant-heavy...

What if the source of your chronic symptoms has been hiding in your mouth this whole time? In this episode of the Medical Disruptor I sit down with Drs. Ben and Shawn Javid, twin brothers and practicing dentists with nearly 50 years of combined experience, who walked away from conventional dentistry to practice biological dentistry. We get into why mercury fillings are still being placed in millio...

If you've been diagnosed with IBS, or you have ongoing belly issues that testing keeps coming back "clear" on, this episode is for you. IBS is often given as a label once the serious causes are ruled out, but a label doesn't tell you what to do next. Your bowel isn't simply "irritable." Something is irritating it, and identifying that something is where real progress starts. I'm Dr. E, the NP with...

Anxious in your 40s for the first time ever? Before you assume it's anxiety, let’s figure out what is actually happening. In this episode of the Medical Disruptor, I sat down with Dr. Ellen Vora, a board-certified psychiatrist and the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety, and she said something I keep coming back to. A lot of what doctors call anxiety in women over 40 is actually perimenopause. Proges...

Why Your Thyroid Is the "Check Engine Light" Your thyroid is the check engine light, not the engine. With Hashimoto's, the real story is happening in your gut, your immune system, and your stress physiology, often years before your thyroid shows it. If you have Hashimoto's and you're only chasing your thyroid numbers, you're missing the bigger question: why is your immune system attacking your thy...