biohacking, women, people, health, eating, called, work, book, fasting, bio hacks, sexual dysfunction, body, practice, therapy, medicine, mdma, improved, life, hormones, blood sugar
Megan Swan, Dr. Molly Maloof
Welcome back to season three of Energetically You I'm your host Megan Swan, a wellness coach and consultant, founder of Megan Swan Wellness and the Sustainable Integrated Wellness approach. Today on the podcast I have a very special guest Dr. Molly Maloof is passionate about extending health span. Through her medical practice personal brand entrepreneurial and educational endeavors. She is passionate about optimizing health through food, technology and psychedelics. She provides personalized medicine to world class entrepreneurs, investors and execs. Since 2012. She has worked as an advisor or consultant for over 50 companies in the digital health, consumer health and biotech industries. She has been an educator since medical school and pioneered a course on healthspan for three years at Stanford University. She is publishing a book out very very soon in 2023 on biohacking for women with Harper wave books, the title is The Spark factor, supercharge your batteries for limitless energy and fitter, stronger and more resilient future. She is the founder of a Adamo Bioscience a company that aims to reveal how the Science of Love can unlock the capacity for healing connection and creation within everyone. We are taking platform approach, she says by creating a variety of products and services that increase and enhance love, within and between individuals. So exciting. I can't wait to ask her all about that. So let's dive in. Welcome, Molly. I'm so excited for this conversation and deeply enjoying reading your book. So let's dive in. How are you this morning?
I am great. I am just juggling a lot and enjoying life and feeling really inspired and motivated and just feeling really fortunate right now. So yeah,
amazing. Well, can you paint the picture a little bit of how you became sort of? Well, let's just say how you became burnout, even in medical school before becoming a doctor and how that made you rethink the system?
Yeah. Well, medical school is really hard. And a lot of people do not totally get it until you get there. And you're just like, this is nonstop firehose of data that you have to absorb. And I found myself halfway through med school, being like, maybe I should quit, I don't know if I can do this, I'm pretty unhappy. So I went to a psychologist and they were like, well, you're not actually depressed or anxious, you're just stressed out and you don't take care of yourself. And I was like, okay, so it's on me. Good to know, more than, you know, I was like, great to know that I thought I was just gonna take, you know, maybe medication. And instead, they said, You need to work on your lifestyle. And so I started studying evidence based lifestyle medicine, and my performance dramatically improved. And my health improved. And my test scores improved. And I went from having really debilitating test anxiety to being really good at test taking. And as a result, I just discovered that, you know, lifestyle changes can really transform, you know, your not only your health, but also how you do how you performance in your life. So I got really interested in evidence based lifestyle medicine. And I've as I designed a course called Physician, heal Thyself evidence based lifestyle. And it was added to the curriculum at my school, and I brought all these lectures and, and I've always been interested in education. And it was really cool to be, you know, a student, actually designing a course on lifestyle, and then it becoming a lecture series. And that ended up becoming the curriculum, and I ended up getting some humanitarian awards for it, which is really neat. But then, you know, I got to residency and it was really, really, really, really challenging, more so than I'd ever anticipated. And I ended up getting my license and getting my GED basically started my own medical practice and not finishing my residency, but really going the functional medicine path, which a lot of doctors are doing today. They're going through like a year of the residency and then they're starting in functional medicine. And I really used my practice as a lab for like figuring out how do you measure an apple by health? And so that was really my main mission is like, how do you do this? And how do we how do we create this? You know, this this type of thing. practice. And the pandemic was actually particularly interesting, because I definitely got pretty darn close to being fully burned out. And apparently 65% of doctors right now are burned out. So you know, the thing about burnout that sucks is that it creeps up on you. And you just think you're doing fine until you aren't. And I had had some challenges on the year during the pandemic, I had a concussion, which threw off my hormones and really kind of did a number on my health. But really, the beauty of what health like really true health is about is the ability to bounce back after getting hit with a major stressor. And so I would definitely say that the last few years have aged me a little bit. But I feel like I still bounce back faster than the average person. And to me, that's a bigger indicator of health than anything else. And I'm really interested in healthspan quality of life for longer, just as much as I'm interested in, in lifespan. So that's really my story. It's like really been about how do we create a life for ourselves that's about human flourishing, and about fun and enjoyment, and also not being obsessed with longevity, but really focusing on quality of life for longer.
I love that, can you sort of unpack for us how you personally balance or sit between sort of two very strong dogmas, if you will, you still are deeply in the medical, and yeah, deeply in science. And at the same time, you're pushing back to some degree and questioning some of the logic.
I just think that medicine is missing the caring piece of it, you know, there's health care, and people are forgetting about the part that's about caring, and turns out that really positive bedside manner and really having a good experience with your practitioner is healing in itself. And it's likely through, people don't realize this, but like the placebo responses actually works for a reason. And Dispenza wrote a great book on it, called the or the placebo. And it's really outlines all of this science behind the placebo. But we don't use it enough. In modern medicine, we don't use it enough in our families in our lives, their friends, and just caring about people helps heal. And I think it's one of those things that's been kind of lost by a system that's just really becoming a sickness, billing industrial complex. And of course, we want the system to produce good smart doctors, we also want it to produce doctors that care about people. So I'm really interested in human connection, and how connection amplifies health and how it helps people survive and thrive in the midst of adversity. Yeah,
I love how you wrote about your book with that. And I do want to dive in that a little bit more. But before Can we talk about biohacking and how you're fine. First off.
I mean, when I first got into biohacking, one of my bosses at the time was like, you don't really want to be known as a biohacker. Because biohackers are people who like have to go around systems to get things done. But actually, you know, getting a lot of labs done. And it does require you to go around the system. Like I have to order things through cache through a website called Alexia diagnostics in order to do lots of labs on my clients. And it costs around 300 to $400 to run my full panel. But if we were to bill insurance, it's a very big question if they were to pay for it. So I'm using the system to gather information about people to optimize their health. And it's about using medical technology to avoid disease, not just diagnose it. And it's not necessarily saying that we're preventing or treating or diagnosing disease by doing by using these lab markers, but it's actually trying to evaluate the functional status of your organ systems. Just to understand how they're doing, how they're functioning, is everything going wrong? And to me that's, that's what that's what I would call scientific biohacking, which is a little bit different than just traditional biohacking, which is like a consumer going out and trying to use different technologies to hack their health. I mean, you really see a lot of biohacking in type one diabetics, they are often hacking, blood sugar monitors and insulin pumps and doing all sorts of stuff that's totally not considered modern mainstream medicine. But you know, I think that biohacking can be part of medicine, I think doctors can play a role in helping their patients use labs to understand their health to optimize the nutrition and to improve their fitness and to reduce their stress and change their, you know, different different different types of habits.
Yeah, similar things are happening in Canada, I'm Canadian, that they've stopped. The system no longer pays for, for example, to get your Vitamin D measured or something, something that's not essential. And I love that example that you talked about that it's such a simple thing. Like why aren't we testing these things before? It's a red flag to understand? You know, the baseline. Yeah. I'm curious is the origin of biohacking athletics, like athletes have probably been doing? Oh, sure. Yeah, performance enhancement
in athletics has been a thing for a long time. And I guess you could call it biohacking. I mean, they basically have teams of people who manage their nutrition and as their fitness manage their stress Minister sleep. And so there's quite a lot of people who work with athletes in order to tune their performance, so their bodies function optimally. My clientele tend to be the corporate athletes, the executives and investors who want optimal health and they just want to get into great shape. My practice is really all about, you know, basically trying to help people get the best out of their bodies and their minds. And I definitely work with a lot of knowledge workers, so people want brain health. Some of the things that I'm working on right now are things like neurofeedback, I'm taking high dose Lion's Mane three grams a day, it's pretty amazing. I'm doing lion's mane is a mushroom mushroom extract that I get from a company called Malama mushrooms. And I'm just a big, big fan of, you know, using, you know, my using different technologies to fix things that are not working properly for me. So my memory has been a little bit like I pulled my Instagram recently, and 75% of my followers said that their memory was impaired. So we were somewhere between 70 and 75%. And I noticed myself and it turns out that a lot of social isolation impairs memory. So I've been really working on hacking my memory with things like CDP choline and lion's mane and, and just different technologies like Neurofeedback and fitness, just to really improve my brain function, because I'm a knowledge worker at the end of the day. I love how you
divide out performance in terms of brain health, and then physical performance as well. Yeah, give us some specifics. For women on energy, and what maybe you're doing or what you're recommending to clients.
Well, I think it's really important for women to understand their cycles to understand that there's no, it's normal to have shifts and energy throughout the month. So you might start at the beginning of the month, feeling really energized and really powerful. And then you hit your ovulation, you're like, Well, I can tell I'm ovulating. And then you start hitting your luteal phase, and you just start noticing that you're more inwardly oriented. And then when you hit your period, you're just like, Okay, I just want to chill for a couple days. And, and then by the end of your period, typically your energy starts coming back, you start getting more active. And this is just this natural cycle that we go through. And in fact, now natural cycles and ordering, have a FDA approved birth control, which is non hormonal, which is pretty cool. And I'm gonna start, I'm actually gonna start using natural cycles and sort of clue because I'm really stoked about their, their approval process. But basically, women need to understand that like, we have a biological imperative to reproduce, whether we have kids or not, like, our bodies want us to do that. And so we have this hormonal system that's designed to get us pregnant, right. So whether we're getting pregnant or not, we have this system that's operating in this manner. So when women get really stressed out, we also have this imperative to keep the tribe alive. I mean, like women were responsible for keeping the communities fed and alive. And men were does, you know, basically designed to help protect primitive communities and go off and find food for the communities. And so I think it's really interesting that women and men when they biohack, you know, if you if you add too much intensity to your exercise, combined with too much ketosis combined with too much fasting, women will just shut down and their hormones will become completely disordered, their thyroid will go will get too low, their their estrogen will go too low, their their bodies will just start prioritizing survival over reproduction. And men on the other hand, they start doing keto and fasting and exercise and they just get ripped, ripped and lean. And really do they end up with I've only seen it in one case, and one bodybuilder who was doing too much low carb eating and doing too much weightlifting. And he ended up messing up testosterone, but most of the time, men do really well with a lot of these intense bio hacks. And it's like, I saw it in my practice where women were not getting the same results. And they were getting issue they were having issues with their, with their, with their bodies, and their hormones. And I think it's because we're designed differently, you know, like we have a different biological imperative. And men, you know, it's as much as I want to believe that we're the same we're not like we definitely have a lot we can definitely achieve more than we realize as women, but we actually do have to be Careful about her energy levels and about burnout. And I've had to learn this the hard way multiple times in my life. So I'm just, I mean, brothers remember this book because I was like, gosh, like, here I am trying to be a female biohacker. And I'm not getting the same results as guys. And I had to be more gentle with my body. And so the women, other women, like I, I have, I was doing a lot of intense weightlifting in the morning, and I got my I got my cortisol test back, because I was noticing I was waking up feeling a little bit on edge. And so I ran my Dutch test, and I saw my cortisol was high in the morning. And I was like, All right, time for yoga time. For more restorative exercise time. For more, you know, low low intensity cardio more or less, less heavy lifting for a little while, you know, I lifted a lot of heavy weights for a few months, I was under a lot of stress. And now I'm like going back into lighter weights, more restorative exercise, more stretching or yoga, just giving my body a few months to recover. And doing more sauna and cold plunge, if I wanted a little bit of cold plunge maybe a minute instead of three minutes. And just looking at my body as a as an opportunity to adapt to the demands and recognizing that data helps drive better decisions. So um, you know, I'm wearing, I'm wearing a heart rate, heart rate variability monitor, I'm looking at my heart rate variability in real time. I'm like asking myself, are you breathing deep? Are you using your belly to breathe, and I'm just like, really becoming more in tune with my body as I monitor things because I have put myself under an enormous amount of stress this year of trying to write a book and launch a company and see patients in a lot. And and you have to be aware that there are limitations to your physiology. And at the same time, I have a lot of cool bio hacks. Some of them didn't make it into the book, because they were experimental. And I wanted to wait until I had full feedback. But I recently did NAD plus IVs and IV and nutritional like, like niacin pushes for a week. And I did like five IVs and five nice and magnesium pushes. And I'm not kidding you, I feel so much more energy, I feel so much more youthful. I'm so excited about this new like discovery. And it was very it was I discovered it after I wrote the book. So I didn't want to put in the book. But I'm like telling every podcast I'm on like this is so awesome. Because it's like you know, I COVID Few weeks ago, and COVID really and viral infections can really affect your your blood sugar metabolism, because they actually throw off your homeostasis. And this was a not a fun bout of COVID for me. So I am now starting a peptide therapy called ozempic. Just because of the improvements it has on blood sugar I've seen a few of my patients go through as epic treatment. And it's and they've they've basically seen their blood sugar's remarkably improved. So like there's things like this that are kind of more medical grade bio hacks that are more in the regenerative medicine space. But I'm slowly but surely getting really interested in regenerative medicine because I think there's so much exciting stuff coming out of it. And in a lot of ways regenerative medicine is biohacking. And I go to experts. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself a regenerative medicine expert yet, but I'm definitely I definitely go to experts to learn. And then and then I implement what I learned into my practice.
So many threads I want to pull in there. One I completely agree with you and I have personally found over the last year and a half that doing less is actually more effective. Like I think there's certain amount of discipline and intensity that may be required before you're at some sort of baseline of health and wellness. But then those of us that are already in a really good place. If we maintain that intensity. It just is overwhelming. Yeah. I was curious. Everything. Well, maybe not everything. But let's the last one that you mentioned that you're excited about. That's something that you would do like under medical supervision you would do for a certain amount of time, because I feel like a lot of people, you know, start, get latched on to an biohacking idea. And then do that till like for the rest of time. And I'm guessing most of these things have a very specific strategy. It's not like something you're supposed to be taking for the rest of your life. That it's very once Yeah,
I mean, I think that yeah, I mean, I'm only doing those epic for two months. And I'm going to be monitoring my blood sugar with an Abbott FreeStyle Libre that I got from levels health. I'm an advisor there. I'm, I mean, I've been really obsessed with blood sugar for a long time. But it's one of those things where even I take the thing off for a few months and I stopped caring I'm just like, oh, yeah, got my I've got I've got a handle on this. And then you slowly start eating things, you know your that are not good for you. Like, oh, I'll just have one Tostada no big deal. Meanwhile, it's a fried sick piece. corn in my body does not tolerate corn. And I see this massive blood sugar spike, and I'm like, Okay, now I know, corn is not my friend and I start tracking the things that I know are not optimal for me. And it takes practice and iterative practice to remember. And to like really solidify, like, this is not the right food for me, you know, and it just takes takes lots of practice, you know, but like, yeah, some of these things need to be consistent, some of these things you put on here and there, and you just start getting reminders. And then some of these things are in, in, in full on for recovery. You know, I used ozone therapy, during COVID. And I think it did make a difference, because immediately my body aches went away, by fatigue was still there, but my body aches certainly certainly improved, which was awesome. So I bought some ozone, and I'm gonna start doing, you know, rectal and vaginal ozone, just because I'm a believer now, like, I felt an immediate shift in my body. And I want to implement these things that can help me maintain a healthier body that are somewhat experimental, but like, I want to have access to that if I get sick again, you know. And it's really about again, adapting and self managing the face of adversity and COVID is adversity. So there aren't a lot of good mainstream options. And I had some clients who were using these antivirals that were approved by the FDA, and they were they had all sorts of side effects from them. And so I, you know, I think you have to figure out what works for you and also figure out what are you willing to experiment with? I'm far more experimental than the average doctor. It does, you know, make some people. Some people are like, oh, you know, Dr. Molly, like, I'm not sure if she's always scientifically backed. But the truth is, is a lot of stuff I'm doing is very cutting edge. And it's just new science. And so there isn't as much of it as, you know, drug development science, because there's not as much money going into a lot of these more obscure bio hacks. But I have friends that I consider to be world class biohackers that come to that teach me what they do. And I'm always trying on new things, seeing if it fits. And I think it's really the way you should approach biohacking is like, where are you in your lifespan? Where are you in? How comfortable? Are you with new science? How comfortable are you with experimenting with your body? Well, how safe is it? Like it's it's always on safe? Pretty darn safe? I mean, it's been used for a long time. Is our peptide safe? I mean, they're pretty new. So if you're really nervous, like I would maybe wait a few years before because because these things are pretty just recently approved by the FDA. But like hyperbaric oxygen that's been around for a long time, that is not new fasting, very, very old. Yet, you need to understand if it's right for your body, and like for example, in the book, I outline all these reasons why you wouldn't fast. Before even talking about fasting. We talked about all the reasons why fasting might not be right for you. Lots of women have eating disorders. If you have an active eating disorder, I definitely would not be recommending fasting. If you've had multiple bouts of an eating disorder and you feel like it might set it off. Gotta be careful. If you're Orthorexic fasting might induce more orthorexia. On the other hand, if you're going through perimenopause, you're finding you're gaining weight, fasting mimicking diet might really help you. In some of my female clients, it's been game changing for them maintaining their weight. And, you know, if I wouldn't have started fasting, I don't think it would have fixed my insulin resistance. So I don't have to do as much fasting anymore. But I still like to fast at least 12 to 14 hours on average, 12 hours minimum, almost every night, because you need to give yourself a break from from food. So yeah, it really like if you're young and healthy and your 20s if budge, great blood sugar metabolism, you don't need to fast. And if you're pregnant or nursing definitely not recommended. So thinking about where you are in your life and not just adopting health practices, because someone online tells you it's great, but really looking into is it right for me in this age, in this in my state of health, somebody who has polycystic ovarian disorder, it's going to do a lot better with you with carbohydrate restriction than someone who has already healthy healthy metabolism like one of my girlfriends who is super lean, and she thrives on carbs, and like cutting carbs and her health doesn't make any sense. Because she's just constantly bouncing off the walls with energy. Me on the other hand, I do better with more of an ancestral diet. And I love eating low carb and it's what works for me.
I really love that you point all that out because part of my philosophy that there is no one size fits all wellness. And I think that that's something that really people need to understand that it requires a little bit of trial and error to figure out what exactly works for you. I wanted to circle back and ask you a little bit about infertility. You'd mentioned fasting probably not ideal when you're trying to get pregnant and I specifically that you know as well. I mean, we're supposed to have a certain percentage of body fat to be optimally ovulating. Can you comment on that?
Yeah, I have like a very simple way to describe like, it's almost like an overgeneralization. But like if you're under eating and underweight, you're kind of like an unripe banana, you know, you're under ripe fruit. Under a piece of fruit, it's not sweet enough to actually bear to be able to like produce. The reason why fruits ripen is that carbohydrate feeds the growing seed. And so you actually need enough nutrition in order to grow baby. And so if you're underweight and undernourished, your body is being sent the signals that there's not enough nutrition to feed a child, and that will put you into a state of less likely to produce a child less likely to be fertile. On the other hand, if you're overfed, if your insulin resistance, there's too much sugar in your body, like in Polycystic Ovarian disorder, it's like you literally have overripe involved follicles and you have too many follicles that are over ripened. So in that situation, you want to peel back the carbohydrate, you want to like give yourself a break from as many carbs you want to eat, you want to cut almost like I look at fasting and ketosis is like it literally can aid you in reverse. If you have glucose regulation problems. So like, two biggest levers for people with really hard, like really bad blood sugar metabolism, is just cutting out the refined carbohydrates and sugar, and cutting out the extra refined vegetable oils, and hydrogenated oils, trans fats, and just cutting out the things that we know are contributing the most to metabolic dysfunction. And doing some time restricted eating and, and like kind of reversing that ripening, you know, reducing that blood sugar. So I look at the two ends, you kind of want to be somewhere in the middle of these. You don't want to be underwriting Don't worry over if you want to be just right. So it's it's like the person who's who's like got, you know, too little eggs, they're under eating, they're too skinny, they're not done a body fat, they need more carbohydrates, they need to gain weight, that's the way to gain weight is eat more carbs. So it's really simple. I mean, it really is a simple way to approach the problem. But a lot of women I mean, there's also a lot more infertility than just nutrition. There's a lates in our diet in our life. I just haven't I just had my my blood checked for flights and I have failed aids in my blood. And I'm like shit, maybe it's because I've been getting my nails done. Like I started getting my nails done. I haven't been getting my nails done in years. And I'm like, pretty sure this is why I feel it's in my in my skin like I'm gonna have stopped getting my nails done, which is fine. I'm gonna go back to gluons which is totally cool. And they work they do they destroy everything destroys your nails anyway, so like, I'm like in the process of trying to figure out oh, man, what's the best press on that I can find instead of going to the going to get these now. I mean, I really liked getting them done but like they are, you know, you feel like you're ready to toxins. So, you know,
article in The Guardian about find that they found microplastics now and breast milk for the first time. Oh geez.
Yeah, it's everywhere. I mean, you know, if you're eating packaged processed foods and belt and bottled water regularly, you're getting a lot of microplastics in your food. Also, there's a really cool company called auric salt o ry X. And they have the salt shakers that are made of ceramic. Because turns out that plastic salt shakers are also cutting microplastics into your food. Who do so? Yeah. Great to know that now.
I got every lesson, like if I just use like a teaspoon out of the bag, but it's a whole it's a whole other thing salts in its trendiness and how I understand it's really not all that different. The pink versus all the things? Yeah. So I wanted to circle back to I love the way everybody was in your introduction that you talked about, essentially women having this biological need to create things. Yeah, you're not having babies. So maybe we can talk about that for a little bit and loop back to you know, how you're working about with love specifically in your company on and I think it's it's well interesting mission that
I want to make. Yeah, sure. I want to make two things clear first for one is that I'm not even sure I'm gonna have children or not like there's a there's a chance that I will, but I'm totally good with or without kids. Like, I will not die and unhappy woman if I don't have children. But I also like making companies right so like I some women, your birthing things, they birth, creative projects, they birth paintings, they birth buildings, they're like architects are and they're like entrepreneurs. I think women just have this deep desire to create. And I do believe that maternity is so valuable and so wonderful that I wouldn't be the woman I am wasn't for my mother. Like I have the most amazing mom and it was her job to be intimate but to be a mom and being a mom is one of the most important and valuable jobs in the world. So I really don't want to discount motherhood at all. But I also don't want all the women who are reading my book, thinking I'm writing a book that's like, having kids is like the ultimate, you know, manifestation of your of your purpose, I really think that we're just meant to create, like, we all have energy of Creation within us. And we have this incredible capacity to create life. And we have these rhythms of existence through hormones that connect us to nature, that makes us really in tune with the world around us if we listen. And that's really what the book is about. It's about using your natural intuition, and your natural, like internal compass, to live in more in harmony with your energy. And, and ideally to like, create a movement where women don't have to live like men do, where we can actually follow our cycles. I now really look at my, my periods, and I try not to schedule too many things around them, because I need to make sure that my body is in alignment with my highest health. And so it's taken me a year of like really reading reading this book, and practicing all this, to really hit home that like I sometimes over schedule myself, you know, in ways that are not healthy for my for me.
Yeah, so tell us about the company that you're birthing.
Sure. My name, my name is Dr. Molly. And it's funny, because started a company that is actually studying psychedelic assisted therapy for sexual dysfunction. That's trauma informed. And the reason why I started this company was that 10 years ago, I was with a partner using MDMA in a sexual context. And I didn't realize it until after the fact, but it accidentally heal three different sexual dysfunctions that I had, that were due to trauma. So I had poor lubrication, hypoactive arousal, as a result of my body being in a state of threat. And then I wouldn't have good sex because it was very painful. So I had what would be called this hernia. And then I wouldn't orgasm with a man because I was in so much pain, and it was cause swelling. And so as a result, I really had bad sex throughout most of my 20s. And then I use MDMA with a partner in a sexual context. And it basically eliminated these problems. And I was like, What the heck happened? And years later, I didn't really think about this for a lot for a long time. I just was like, wow, that was a miracle. But then, years later, the psychedelic revolution started happening, the map, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies started. And they started commercializing MDMA, for sexual dysfunction or for on PTSD. So I looked up the definition of PTSD, and I said, Oh, shit, did I have PTSD. And I didn't have PTSD, I had sexual dysfunction. So I started doing research trying to figure out what happened. And I realized that, first of all, sexual trauma is the leading cause of PTSD. But only 30% of women with sexual trauma develop PTSD, 60 to 80% of them develop sexual dysfunction. So I realized there was major problems face that didn't have any good solutions, as I've talked therapy. And in particular, what I've discovered in my research is that cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness based therapies are really good therapies for setting hypoactive desire, because they lower section, they lower distress associated with sexual dysfunction, give you mind blowing zone, just average, like they breed, they return you back to baseline of what normal people have. And on top of that, these therapies are not really great for sexual pain disorders. And so I was looking at what Maps was doing with PTSD. And I'm looking at Central pain. And I'm like, wow, this is a big population. This is somewhere between eight and 20% of women. And it turns out that if you ask women like, what constitutes good sex, most of the time, what they'll tell you is it doesn't hurt, like good sex just doesn't hurt. So I really think that sexual pain is a really, really unfortunate condition that nobody should have to go through. Having gone through it myself. It really just, it really just made sex particularly not fun to have. And I really think that sex is a beautiful experience of life. And really, it should be seen as making love. And so part of what my company is doing is literally designing protocols to teach people how to make love and to how to heal from trauma that impact sexual function, using a therapeutic paradigm that basically combines trauma therapy with relationship therapy with sex therapy, and then a psychedelic therapy session with a partner which is not observed, which is you and your partner go through a sexual experience under the influence of a psychedelic that helps reprogram the sexual memory essay If instead of unsafe, and then integration through the frameworks of attachment and internal family systems, so it's a really comprehensive therapy or designing. It's really, ideally for people who struggle with the biggest drivers of sexual dysfunction, which is relationship problems, mood disorders, and sexual trauma. And these are, there's also organic causes of sexual dysfunction. But we're really targeting the ones that are more psychological and psychogenic in nature. Because they just don't have you know, some of them just some of them just don't have good solutions.
Wow. So I feel like I know the subject of your next book, because, yeah, very briefly in this one touch on on the subject, and I appreciated how you mentioned that, you know, it's often more important or very important to understand your own body personally first, before you're trying to better your, your sexual relationships with with a partner. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's very exciting, everything you're talking about here. Thank you.
I mean, it's gonna take a while for this to be ready for primetime. But we're going to start running a study, and we're going to start evaluating different medicines, probably starting with ketamine, and then eventually, hopefully, MDMA. And I think there's gonna be different medicines for different individuals, depending on what their core, you know, needs are. Psilocybin is a great medicine for neuroticism, which is a big problem for people who are raised in Christian and religious, highly religious upbringings. It can actually, it's associated with increased lasting openness and personality shifts. So I think that there's an opportunity to examine different medicines for different conditions. We've patented a medicine that we believe is a great alternative to MDMA. But it's going to be difficult to commercialize in America. But it is a it is a great, great tool in the toolbox. So we're just going to be starting the research and, and writing new studies.
Not so exciting. Everything that you do is so inspiring. And it's been such a pleasure getting to know you better. And so yeah, we'll definitely share all the links, all the things in the show notes. Is there any sort of like, last thought you want to leave us off with Molly?
I mean, definitely preorder or purchase my book. If you're listening to this. Find me on Instagram at Dr. brawley.co. Find My website is ww.drmolly.co. And, you know, I'd love to keep in touch with anyone. And if anyone wants to learn more about my company, we'll be launching our new website soon. It's Adam Bioscience ad amo b i o sei e n ce. And that's where we go.
Well, thank you again, and I so appreciate everything you're doing.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you and I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. I would be really appreciative if you feel so called to support the show by either subscribing to the show on your favorite podcast platform, leaving us a review and passing this episode or another favorite episode on to a friend. I hope you have a beautiful week wherever you are in the world, sending you my love's