Take Back Your Health: Hormones & Longevity with Dr. Catherine Johnson | HFYH # 126

**Dr. Catherine Johnson** (0:00)
We have medications that are basically the female version of Viagra. Why are we not talking about it? Why is this not the hottest selling thing out there? So I think, too, we have such stigma around sex. Your sex life is a very important part of your longevity.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:18)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health and culture as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, welcome back to HOT For Your Health, where I am joined by a brand new guest, but whom I met last year, and it's just a joy to have met her. And you are probably going to feel this today, but Dr. Catherine Johnson has such energy, like bling. I mean, you're just so energetic, and know so much about the field of precision longevity. And in fact, your companies are called Precision Medicine. You have three offices, two around Chicagoland. And I didn't know, but you also have an office in Naples, which is not far from me now. But you are an allopathically trained medical doctor and have really honed your practice to be focused on whole health and longevity. And I want to talk about that approach today and why you made a switch from traditional allopathic practice to this. So welcome to HOT For Your Health.

**Dr. Catherine Johnson** (1:43)
Thank you, Dr. Vonda Wright. I am happy to be here. I'm hot for all that you do. I'm a podcast listener. And yes, we had the pleasure of meeting at a longevity physicians meeting back in New York. And I think we both felt this energy and passion and enthusiasm for the work that we do. And I came from academic emergency medicine. And so I was teaching medical students in residence, both at the University of Chicago and Loyola University. And my passion for teaching now is translated into very personalized consultations that I offer patients on a one-to-one basis in this Precision Medical Care practice. And this is a practice where I've advanced my training into functional medicine, obesity medicine, age management medicine, menopause care. I'm one of these lifelong learners and a bit of a unicorn, because I could afford to sort of abandon my clinical practice and pursue something very different, because once I learned about precision medicine, which is, I would just say simply, the right treatment for the right person at the right time. And we know we're biologically distinct, so uniquely different. And the genetics impact this, the genomics, the expression of our genes. This is based on what we know with environment, diet, feeding, sleep, and certainly relationships. So I love to study this and then help each of my patients identify how they're aging, what the biomarkers of aging are, both from laboratory data as well as body composition data. And we really do what I call as a chart biopsy.
And that's something I learned in academics too. Before you walk into the patient's room, you want to review the chart, get a sense of where do their biomarkers trend, what has been their health history. So before patients come for consultation to my practice, we invite them to share as much of their health history as they're willing to, have them fill out an extensive questionnaire that asks about their sleep, their faith, their relationships, their stressors, and also their supplements, their diets, their purpose. I think that's really important too. When we send a large comprehensive panel of labs that include hormones, inflammatory markers, nutrients, and of course lipids, and we're looking at Omega levels, we're looking at inflammatory markers, and I help everybody understand using data, how they're aging. So it can be like insulin resistance, it can be osteopenia, sarcopenia, it can be inflammation, lipids, and then of course mental health stress. And we know immune senescence, our bodies become less resilient. And so I think it's helpful to understand, I'm aging at a different rate than you're aging. And when I can show you and teach you how you're aging, and then we can precisely add interventions, therapeutics, then we can start really studying one person at a time. When I include this intervention, what change do I see? And so we create a precision plan for each person, and we create a scientific hypothesis of what's happening with the body at the time. And then we track and trend more data over time, and we keep making adjustments to the plan in the pursuit of what is optimal health. And optimal health, we have some pretty good ideas of where your metabolic markers should be, just like you see with bone density. Where is somebody, what is their bone density at age 30? And similarly, how good did we feel at a certain age, and where's the delta from where that is today, and how achievable might it be to get your blood sugar to those levels, to get your resilience showing up for you. So, we can age with more strength and enthusiasm, and then share that message with more doctors and patients.