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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Terri DeNeui, founder and chief medical officer of Texas-based Evexias Health Solutions, a medical practice that focuses on preventative health therapies, specifically hormone regimens.
The human body naturally creates hormones, like estrogen and testosterone, which help regulate everything from mood to sleep cycles. But all sorts of things—puberty, menopause, stress, and certain medications among them—can warp hormone production, spurring health problems like obesity, thyroid disease, and diabetes.
DeNeui spoke about her ambitions to promote hormone therapy as a strategy to keep patients healthy through preventative care.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Was there a catalyst for your focus on preventative care?
I was working as a hospitalist at the time. In the emergency room you’re just stabilizing things. I just felt like I was a part of the prescription-writing wheel. And I wasn’t really doing anything to help my patients when I was admitting them and then discharging them home on the usual medications with no conversation around, “How did you get here in the first place? And how can we prevent you from getting back here?”
That’s just kind of the churn of healthcare. It’s really a sick care system. That was really it. On my third night shift in a row in the hospital, I was just like, “What are we doing? There’s got to be a better way, we’ve got to do better. How can I do better?”
I decided to go to—you know, I don’t really like to term—an antiaging conference. And I found myself in the audience of a speaker who was telling stories about several of her patients and just the profound life change they experienced optimizing their hormones. And I just had an “aha!” moment. That [hormones are] a key part of what I like to call “healthy aging.” And the more I learned, the more I got into the hormone space, learning that estrogen and testosterone and progesterone are very preventative for the majority of chronic diseases.
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Since then, I’ve launched two training companies. And there we’ve trained other clinicians all over the country, and now across the globe, in preventive healthcare. I also do quite a bit of research in this space, too. On the other side, I’m a clinician with two clinics and six other practitioners.
How has the world of hormone therapies changed in the last 10 to 15 years?
In men, specifically, low-testosterone centers were popping up all over the country 10, 20 years ago. They started running mainstream commercials about depression and moods and all of these symptoms that plague men, who didn’t even equate them to a testosterone insufficiency.
We’re still very behind, commercially, in the hormone space for women. There’s no FDA-approved drug for testosterone for women, and it’s such a vital hormone. Doctors and laypersons alike don’t understand that women make and need testosterone, and we lose it, this powerful brain hormone. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been educating doctors on the way I treat my patients with natural hormone therapies.
Which of those therapies has the most potential for FDA approval?
Testosterone for women is a big one. The FDA has already approved these hormones for men, so it’s really the females who are missing out. What’s not fully accepted and understood is the fact that women make and need androgens. I already did a study on androgen insufficiency, women, and depression. And it’s published. So the next step is utilizing a lot of the data that we already have to apply for a new drug application with the FDA. I think that will be the biggest focus for us this year.