In this informative video, Susan Bratton and Dr. Donni Wilson discuss the importance of vaginal estrogen in preventing HPV and other related issues. If you’re looking for expert advice on women’s health and wellness, this is the perfect video.
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Vaginal Estrogen and HPV Discussion with Susan Bratton and Dr. Doni Wilson
I’m Susan Bratton, an intimacy expert to millions and with Dr. Donnie Wilson. We’re talking about HPV, human papillomavirus.
You said that vaginal estrogen is an essential part of post-menopausal health for women, so we can clear or potentially even prevent HPV by having a healthy microbiome both vaginally and systemically. How are you prescribing intravaginal estrogen? How does it work, and do your HPVfix participants get access to that with you?
That’s a great question. There are a lot of options when it comes to vaginal estrogen. You can go to your gynecologist and get a prescription form for vaginal estrogen. Usually, it would be an estradiol, a bioidentical estrogen that can be used. As a naturopathic doctor, I tend to use estriol, which is E3, considered a weaker but effective way to address atrophy vaginally.
To replace estrogen vaginally, we can use estriol. Usually, it would be through a compounding pharmacy. There is an over-the-counter form I can order into my office as a naturopathic doctor. Often, we may use the kind I can get through my office, or they would be working with a compounding pharmacy. I have a license in Arizona, California Washington State, where I can prescribe as a naturopathic doctor.
If a patient wants me to prescribe their vaginal estrogen, they must become one of my patients. That would be in addition to the 12-week program, but I would like to differentiate because I mentioned the suppositories we use for HPV in the United States. In other countries, there is a regulation of vaginal suppositories. It can be challenging for a pharmacy to offer vaginal suppositories.
Eight years ago, we could get vaginal suppositories at the health food store. You won’t find that. I found that I wanted women to have access to herbal and nutrient vaginal suppositories I’ve seen effective over the past couple of decades that have been used traditionally for HPV. I have those custom-made vaginal suppositories and those you can offer in the 12-week program when you’re one of my patients.
I can’t provide them to the public. You get access to order these vaginal suppositories used to address HPV.
Can you talk about the things in the suppositories? The vaginal suppositories I have custom-made are herbs and nutrients in a cocoa butter and shea butter base, so they’re entirely natural; no other ingredients. They are going to be a combination of herbs like curcumin calendula. There’s one that’s a green tea and a probiotic vaginal suppository, as we discussed the essential aspects of addressing the microbiome vaginally. A combination of antiviral herbs is in one of those suppositories. I teach you in the 12-week program; we use them sequentially. I teach you to use this one the first week, and so on.
I teach you the exact sequence that has effectively used these vaginal suppositories. That sounds interesting. There’s so much wisdom in plant medicine that can repair and help us fight against these pathogens that get lost in Western Medical and pharmaceutical business.
I’m glad you are creating them yourself and providing them for women. I hope that HPVfix is a massive, scalable success and you continue to reach more women with this program because you are the first person I’ve ever met that had a way to fight back against HPV.
I feel fortunate to have met you and been your colleague. I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about your work and create videos together to help other women. I’d like us to be better at helping men. That will continue to challenge us because they’re 50 of the equation.
I liked what you said in the beginning when you said we feel like it falls on our shoulders to manage it, but it’s also our opportunity to control it. These things go around everything from pandemics to STIs. They will be with us forever, and it’s our job to fight back against them, get them under control, and go negative in our tests.
You’re helping people do it, and I genuinely appreciate your work and the thousands of people you’ve tested your protocol on. How much you care about this gets pushed under the carpet, creating worry, stress, and shame for women. I’d like you to leave us with a concise guided visualization or meditation or some language and conversation about how we can heal ourselves and an invocation for healing to close off this conversation. I love it.
This is an important piece, and I like to start with taking deep breaths because we often breathe automatically but forget that we can intentionally breathe. Bringing your attention back to your breath, you’re doing several things. You’re coming into the present moment. You’re also signaling to your vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system, which is the anti-stress part of our system. You can close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths. You can count if you like. Count to four as you breathe in and four as you breathe out. You can breathe in and out through your nose if you want.
Next, I like to put my hand over my heart or your chest. By doing this, you’re signaling for an oxytocin release. Oxytocin is an anti-stress hormone and is healing to our whole bodies. We’re signaling the parasympathetic nervous system and oxytocin. You’re taking nice deep breaths. As you feel your hand on your heart, think about something you feel grateful for. Maybe it’s someone or something in your life or an experience where you feel yourself, and you feel love and gratitude. You can always come back to this. Maybe it’s at a place you love, at the beach, with your family members, or with your pets.
Already you can feel yourself coming into more of the present moment and a calm state. Also, you’re starting to trust and connect with your body. As you do that, you can even converse with your body, cells, and yourself. You can think and even talk within your mind.
This ability for your body to heal itself, our bodies make new cells every day. We make new cells on our skin like we make new cells in our gut. We create new cells vaginally, on the cervix, so you can remind your body let’s make healthy cells. Remember those excellent round pink healthy cells? Let’s make those. As you’re guiding your body to make these healthy cells, you can imagine a healthy cervix or wherever it is in your body that HPV might be affecting.
You imagine your body making healthy cells in that location and your immune system learning how to protect you from this virus, knowing that almost all of us are exposed to this virus. It’s part of our world and environment.
How do we help your immune system learn to protect you? What does that look like? You can even look at it lovingly. This is a virus that’s present because it can be. Still, once you’re putting yourself in the driver’s seat and protecting your body, and becoming resilient to this virus, you’re creating a protective shield vaginally and everywhere in your body. Even if men are listening, men too can create a protective shield for themselves from this virus, saying this is not the place for it to exist. This is where I can choose a healthy microbiome, immune system, and response. Breathe in that message of knowing you can create this healthy environment even if you get re-exposed to this virus. You can still have your immune system learning how to protect you.
As you take another deep breath, know that you can always return to this message anytime, every day, as you’re healing from this virus. You can return to them to the present moment in the room and open your eyes.
I see your smile. Very nice. We must remind ourselves how much our emotional body and rational mind are also a part of the healing equation. We must believe in our healing and stand for our healing and say, “You HPVS are not wanted here.”
This is the thing I find so much of the time as a woman, and of course, this could be true for men too, but women, a lot of times we’re taught to take care of everyone else and be willing always to have the door open and be flexible and accommodating.
Those are beautiful attributes, and at the same time, they sometimes leave us vulnerable to things to come that we don’t want to go in. Sometimes, women are hard on themselves, like how did this happen to me? How did I get exposed? We can get ourselves tightly woven into a circle of thoughts of blaming things that happened in our lives and the relationships we might have been in.
I want to ask how we set that aside and realize that most of us, the studies show, are exposed to this virus by age 50. This is not a rare occurrence. Many women I talk to have only had one sexual partner their whole life, so this is not about promiscuity. Now it becomes how do we learn how to protect ourselves? Some of that is taking back our bodies physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We need to say, “This is my body. I will take good care of myself. How do I prioritize self-care to be as healthy as possible even if exposed to this virus?”
