Just take your medicine that moment when you realize you're nothing more than a number in the health care system a stack of dollar bills Diagnoses is procedures and hopefully insurance payments Take your medicine that moment when the doctor makes you feel like maybe you're never gonna get better. My name is Philip Cowley I've been a pharmacist for 25 years and I realized So many patients have gone through a health care journey where they've utilized parts of the health care system, but more important they got educated and maybe you won't have to take your medicine. It spawned out of fear, if I have to be honest. So GLP Activate happened because I had so many people were worried about getting stuck on shots. Once they lost the weight, did they have to take them forever? So there was this monstrous, huge meta analysis where they looked at every natural substance that helped you produce GLP 1. By looking at, there were three or four main components that made a ton of sense to me. So when Triquetra health, called me up and said, hey, is there any way you can help us design a product? I was already halfway down that road. Triquetra GLP Activate helps your L cells be their best, and those L cells are where you produce GLP 1. If you're looking for a natural way to help your L cells, and the L cells of course produce, you got it, the GLP 1. GLP Activate. Go to TriquetraHealth.com and put in, GLP120. So, there you go. It is an absolutely really cool product and we did it out of a meta analysis so I feel really good about telling people to go there and get it. The first story is my story. 1996, I get off an airplane and the first thing I do is I meet with my bishop. See, I'd spent two years in South Korea, just got off of a mission, and I sat in that office and he said, you've got a year to get married. Yeah, right. That's what I thought. There's no way I'm getting married in a year. That was until nine months later when I walked through the door, smack dab into the woman I would marry. That was because it was at Little Caesars and I just started a new job. And she was looking at the schedule on the other side of the door and I'm lucky I didn't hit her with it. Andrea and I have been now married for 27 years and have four children. This is the story of infertility. Our infertility. The infertility that makes you feel hollow inside. The infertility that eats at you every single day. The infertility that causes endless numbers of fights. Because you always feel a little bit guilty. Maybe you did something wrong. Ashamed because you can't do what everybody else can do. And most importantly, lonely. And if you talk about it with your spouse, you both just feel worse. But really, it's the healthcare system itself that's messed up with infertility. Infertility is a cash cow. It's all cash. Doctors make so much money off of it, and most cases, because it's idiopathic, they have no idea what they're doing at all. See, the first thing you'll do is the same thing that Andrea I did. We went to Dr. Richards, the OB, and he gave her Clomid. What he didn't tell us is that Clomid only gives you 15% chance of getting pregnant. Now, I'm gonna put this in perspective for you. Because 50 percent of people who cannot get pregnant have something to do with a clotting disorder. If you take a baby aspirin, you get 17 percent chance. But I didn't learn that until doctor number four. Instead, we got told, take your medicine. And we did. We bought our Clomid. Which is actually why I'm a pharmacist. You see, we went to the local pharmacy. And at the time, I was making$7.10 an hour, which is crazy to think that I was making$7.10 an hour now, considering how much everything cost. And we paid$87 for 5 pills, which I found out was approximately$70 too much, which was the first time I ever thought, maybe these guys are more worried about making money than they are getting us better. But we wanted a kid, so we paid whatever price we needed to. In fact, for the next nine months, we kept taking Clomid and feeling empty. It's the rollercoaster that absolutely knocks you down every month. Maybe, maybe, maybe, and then no baby, baby, baby. Ever. Because Clomid's really hard. Clomid increases the amount of FSH you have, which then will help you create more eggs, but it doesn't tell you the quality of the eggs, the size of the eggs, or their motility. Instead, it's just a here take this and leave, and we would show up every month, pay our co pays every month, and never get pregnant, which shouldn't have been a surprise. After nine months, we decided that maybe there was something more, so we got aggressive. Dr. Richards, what else can we do? And he said, well, maybe you have endometriosis. He used to say it that way. Still rings through your ears. I thought, well, that's it. We found our solution that's gonna fix our problem, and, uh, it didn't. And instead what it did is cost me$800. You see, he wanted to do exploratory laparoscopy, which basically means he's going to cut her open, put a tube in there, put a camera in there, see if he can see anything. The chances of him finding anything were so low at this point, I would love to wring his neck, but I didn't know better. So just like the rest of you with whatever health care problem you have, I did what I needed because I trusted the individuals. But see, in office procedures pay way better. And so, you have to be leery of in office procedures, especially with infertility. Well, he looked and he found nothing, which was actually quite crushing, which moved us to the next stage. The next stage is what they call IUIs. So inner uterine inseminations. So I take a big cup, way too big for what you need. I don't understand it. I think it's to emasculate it. I know it's a little thing, so I never brought it up, because my wife had to go through so much stuff. But they always gave this big cup, and they put you in this room. it's not an enjoyable process. Again, what my wife had to do was, like, crazy, harder than I am. So I never complained, but I always couldn't figure out why it was such a big cup. But, I put the semen inside the cup, and then he takes a little turkey baster, And he sucks it up and it's just this little plastic pipette. And he puts it right where he needs to at the exact right moment. They're expensive, but see, the IUI doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you if there's a blockade in the fallopian tubes. It doesn't actually say if my motility is a problem. It doesn't tell you if she's really ovulating. All it does is makes a procedure that you can be part of. The key to having any good sponsorship is having a product that you believe in. The product in this case is creatine and protein from Sports Research. And the reason why I trust it is because they've been around forever. They've made a good product. For so long, you know, you're what you're going to get every single time. And as you get older, or when you're trying to really push on that exercising, you want to make sure the product you're getting actually works because, well, you don't want to put that effort in for nothing. So sportsresearch.com put in the code PHIL20, you get extra percentage. And here's the best part. It really works. And it's been working for so long. It was an easy sponsorship. sportsresearch.com PHIL20. And I think after the third IUI. It was about the time I lost my temper. But fortunately at that point, we got pregnant. Which was huge. Jonas came nine months later and everything was bliss until he was about the age of three. And then he still wasn't speaking and we couldn't potty train him and everybody kept on saying that they thought he was autistic because he wasn't speaking but he didn't have any signs of autism. Realizing now, since then. He's now 23, that there's the whole spectrum of autism and he's probably on it. What we did find out is that he had cerebral scarring. And what we should have found out from Dr. Richards, in about month 3 or 4, is that Andrea's ANA,... which is a marker of her immune system, was through the roof. And what we would find out, a few years later, was, Andrea was continually getting pregnant, but her immune system was attacking the embryos every time they implanted, causing clots that would cause a miscarriage at a very early stage because it was her immune system. And no number of Clomid or IUIs or really even artificial insemination would fix it if we didn't fix the immune problem. But remember, there's no procedure that they can get paid for to fix the immune system. So no one was motivated. Stage 2. So we decided it was time for us to get back on the game. Jonas was now four and we wanted another child. We already knew that we had a huge uphill in front of us, so we didn't even start with the Clomid. Nothing doing. In fact, we wanted to jump right to in vitro fertilization because the game was so hard over all those years trying to get Jonas here. But we were told no. In fact, we were told by two clinics. that we had to do IUIs for five rounds before they'd even look at doing in vitro fertilization. This has changed over the years and now there are a lot of people who will go to in vitro fertilization faster. We had no concept of what we were doing. but I had been a pharmacist for a long time and I knew how to read studies. And I knew that there was a different problem going on. Regardless of all of that, the first thing we did was IUIs, and they didn't take. In fact, we ended up doing five IUIs this time around. It's funny though, because if someone would have looked at the fact that our boy had had cerebral scarring in utero, they would have started thinking, do we have an immune problem here, and which would have led to questions like, are you chronically dry? Do you have any other symptoms such as thyroid issues? They would have maybe pulled some lab values, but there's no money in it. Instead, we did in vitro. Now, with in vitro, I got into this new world of crazy expensive drugs that you can't believe. In fact, they tell you to go elsewhere outside of the country to buy them. We bought our first medications, even though I own my own pharmacy, from the UK. Prices for infertility drugs were ten times higher inside the United States for me to buy. So I was buying them from outside the country. And then I thought, well, I don't even know where these are coming from. Which moved to the point where I started to do sterile compounding so I could make infertility drugs for other women. Which then led to a lot of studies. Lots and lots and lots of hours of studying. Including starting to talk to then our doctor, Dr. Richard's brother, Dr. Richard, who was an infertility specialist. And he led us to Dr. Beers in California. Now, Dr. Beers was a little different. See, he worked in a great big huge infertility clinic. And inside this clinic, His job was to look at people who had idiopathic, which means they don't know, which is 50 percent of infertility, who had failed with in vitro fertilization, especially those that have had miscarriages. And the first thing he did was check to see where her homocysteine level is. See, if you have the MTHFR reductase gene mutation, which, by the way, is not like a genetic bad thing, It's just a mutation. It just means that you can't take what we give to people as folic acid and make it utilized. You have to give someone L methylfolate instead of folic acid because you have to put a little methyl group on it. And this comes from history of a time where we used to eat kelp and brussels sprouts and all the other gross stuff. Because that part of the population, which ends up making about 30 to 50 percent, didn't need to make their own L methylfolate because they could get it from their diet. They just got rid of that gene. Our bodies don't like to do anything that takes extra energy. Nothing. At all. And so if it doesn't have to do it, then it gave them a little bit of an evolutionary upgrade compared to the competitors, because they're not using that energy, to put the methyl group on the folic acid, which then once we take that L methylfolate, well, that turns into serotonin, it turns into dopamine, it's involved in making B12, and it's involved in the cycle that helps us get rid of homocysteine. And if we have high levels of homocysteine, well, it leads to clotting disorders. And if you have that clotting disorder, not only does it make it hard to be pregnant and makes your chances for miscarriages substantially higher, it also could lead to deep vein thrombosis and all sorts of other problems. We had been in the system and by this point I calculated we probably spent somewhere close to$30,000 and not one person had tested my wife to see if she was MTHFR gene positive. And she was. Once we found that out, we automatically put her on an L methylfolate and a baby aspirin, which she's been on since. Because her homocysteine levels were so high, she's at a greater risk. That started to change things. The next round of in vitro fertilization took, but it did end up in a miscarriage. And this time, we went in with another surgery and we saw that there were multiple miscarriages along the uterine wall from where this has happened multiple times. The next round of in vitro fertilization that we did, we utilized IVIG. Now IVIG will help block the immune system from deciding to kill the invader that's seen as the baby. Outside of the baby's cells. It has an immune system marker. And on that immune system marker, well, half of them come from me and half of them come from her. When the body sees my immune markers on the outside, you're supposed to have this little thing called a J protein. And the J protein is supposed to shut off the natural killer cells. And the natural killer cells are the first line of defense to make sure nothing grows in that uterus. And Andrea's J proteins wouldn't shut off her natural killer cells, so it kept killing all of the little teeny embryos. Once we put IVIG in there, it helped settle down that whole immune system, and that's how we got Eli. And, that's my story. See, my story is about how, through that whole system, we probably didn't need to do any IUIs. We didn't have to do any in vitro. Quite honestly, what we needed, was to fix her folic acid issue because she needed L methylfolate. We needed to have something to help her stop clotting which was the baby aspirin and we needed to have a way to slow the immune system down so then the natural killer cells and the antibodies won't take out the baby. Instead, we suffered through 8 years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and if I hadn't decided to start making in vitro drugs. And put the time and effort into it, I wouldn't know that. So for those of you out there who are struggling with infertility, first of all, I want to tell you that it sucks terribly bad. Throughout all of our marriage, every trial that we've had, I'm going to tell you it was worse than the miscarriages, because with at least the miscarriages, there was hope that maybe something could happen. It was the nothing for four or five years in a row that was just destructive to us mentally. You've got to take things in your own hands because procedurally, it's not the most effective way to get better from infertility. You've got to know so many other pieces of data. You should know what your motility is. You should know your sperm count. You should know whether the fallopian tubes are releasing it. You should know if you're producing eggs and what quality. You should know if there's scar tissue on the inside of your uterus. You should know all of these things. None of those will make a lot of money. In fact, the billboards will tell you you can just do IVF and away you go. And the doctors will tell you that this information is not useful. But it is useful. You see, you can whittle down what's wrong because there's a core problem to everything that we have. If you have high blood pressure, it's not just you have high blood pressure. There's something wrong with your kidneys or your veins. If you have infertility, there's a reason for it and it can be fixed. Do you have PCOS? Do you have a thick uterus? Do you have scarring? And once you find that out, well, that gives you hope because you have control. So, advice for all of you. I wish we would have pulled more labs. And I wish I would have been able to turn back time and told young Philip and Andrea that when they tell you that it's just stress, that's ridiculous. That's actually just another sign of MTHFR gene mutation. Because your cortisol level's all out. And just because stress and infertility go hand in hand does not actually mean stress causes the infertility, but rather they should have seen the stress. They should have seen the scarring on Jonas's brain. They should have seen the whole thing and said, Oh, this is an immune problem. And now I know that. And now you know it. And this is why we need Take Your Medicine. So next week, we're going to bring somebody else's story in it. So you can learn from their journey. So you don't have to start at scratch. Because there are ways to use the medical system the way they are, and there are ways to get better. My name's Philip Cowley, I'm a pharmacist, and thank you for listening to Take Your Medicine.