The Midlife Hormone Reset: Brain, Metabolism & Balance with Dr. Mariza Snyder | HFYH #141

**Dr. Mariza Snyder** (0:00)
Perimenopause is a neuroendocrine transition, and it is driving a lot of neuroinflammation. This is affecting women's cognitive function. They're not able to focus as well, or they don't have the same level of mental energy. They can't have 100 tabs open the way that they used to. You know that you have the capability, but then there's this bandwidth that begins to shift, and it can be hard to recalibrate your identity.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:25)
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.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:49)
Hi, everybody, and welcome back to HOT For Your Health, where I talk every week to fascinating clinicians, movers and shakers, innovators. And this week, I have Mariza Snyder. She is, by training, a chiropractor who has expanded her practice over the years to become a powerhouse advocate for midlife women. She's leveraging more than 17 years as a practitioner, an author, and a speaker to spark a massive movement for women in perimenopause. And I'm so proud that you have come out with the first book specifically addressing the perimenopause.
It came out in October. It's been amazingly received. And it's really meant to prepare younger women for the inevitability of our menopause. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

**Dr. Mariza Snyder** (1:47)
Vonda, it is such a pleasure to get to be here with you.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:50)
You know, this is the first exposure, other than on Instagram, of my audience to your work. Tell us your pathway. You went to school, you were trained in musculoskeletal health. How did you start caring about the whole health of a woman?

**Dr. Mariza Snyder** (2:07)
Yeah, I want to start from when I was really young. I, at seven years old, I started getting migraines.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:12)
Oh.

**Dr. Mariza Snyder** (2:12)
And my life was peppered with them. High school, I spent most of my years in school missing out on slumber parties and testing and carrying, et cetera, migraine in my purse to a point where I ended up getting ulcers before I even got into college. And I had been to every neurologist and doctor you could possibly imagine. And I was told before 18 years old that I was going to always have them, that this was going to be my life. I was going to always be riddled with chronic pain. Wow. And so I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world. And I actually was headed to med school. But while I was applying and got into UC Davis, actually UC Davis Medical School, while I was working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I was a biochemist for a couple of years. I had another colleague of mine who was a physicist in my particular lab that had chronic migraines as well. And they had a practitioner who was on my way home in my commute in the Bay Area who had cured their migraines. What? And I was like, what?
I don't believe you, but I'm willing to try, you know. And after, because it had been, I guess, now 15 years or something like that, that I had, or no, yeah, something similar to that. I had had migraines for quite some time. And went to this integrative practitioner, it was multiple practitioners. They were acupunctures, upper cervical chiropractors, like all different types of providers. But it was a very integrative way of thinking about healing the body. And sure enough, after about 90 days, I was migraine free for the first time in almost my entire life. And I completely shifted careers and trajectories. I thought, my gosh, there's something to this. Like, if I could heal children of their chronic pain, of their migraine pain, like sign me up. And so I shifted gears and went in a different direction. Finally got into practice in 2008 Yeah, 2000, yeah. And I had predominantly a midlife female practice. 95% of my patients were women in midlife who were struggling with chronic migraine pain. That was kind of my practice at the time. And I realized that many of these women, I didn't know at the time that it was perimenopause, but I knew that they were headed into menopause or they were in early menopause. And I started to notice that a lot of my patients were siloed. They had cardiologists. They had psychiatrists. They had orthopedic doctors. They were just being siloed in multiple different directions. But I knew that there was an underlying situation that was going on, and it was related to their hormones. And that was when I really started to shift gears towards women's health. So I've been working in women's health since 2009, give or take. And I shifted my entire practice to women's health about two years into my work, particularly when my mom was going through perimenopause, and I watched this very strong, vibrant woman become a shell of herself. And I got a front-row seat to her perimenopausal journey, and I realized that so much of what my patients were going through was what I was watching my mom go through. And I just knew that we were failing women left and right, and I wanted to be a part of that solution. And so I started really focusing on how can I help women navigate this profound transition?