The Future of Medicine with Melanie Dorion

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here, and welcome back to another episode of my Unhealthy Podcast, where we dive into some uncharted territories of health and fitness. And today we are joined by, I'm going to go ahead and call her an extraordinary guest. Melanie Dorian embodies the perfect blend of medical expertise and personal resilience.

You'll understand in just a little bit. She is the founder and medical director at Bee Health Vital Center.

[Melanie Dorion]
Bee Vital.

[Uncle Marv]
Bee Vital. That's what I said, right?

[Melanie Dorion]
You said it the other way around. We're doing great.

[Uncle Marv]
Great start. And she has started a movement called 21st Century Medicine. And we have a great story for you today, folks.

Melanie, thank you for the show. Sorry I butchered that introduction.

[Melanie Dorion]
It's OK. Great opportunity to discuss it further. Thank you for having me.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let's start at the end and then we'll go back and start at the beginning. Because I think reading your bio the way that I did, people are going to first say, OK, what is 21st Century Medicine?

So let's start by explaining that. And then we'll talk about how we got here.

[Melanie Dorion]
Of course. Thank you. So 21st Century Medicine is really an approach and a philosophy to what truly health care should be.

And it encompasses really four dimensions. And everything is rooted in diet and lifestyle. That's the foundation of 21st Century Medicine.

And the other four dimensions that you cannot separate to bring any human to healthy, thriving health, mind, body, spirit, and then a social aspect. So really, those are dimensions that we take into account in 21st Century Medicine. Providers who practice 21st Century Medicine, we always take diet and lifestyle into account.

That's the foundation of our approach for whatever the concern, whether someone comes to us and they're healthy and thriving and they want to maintain that, or they have advanced chronic disease and they want to regain their health and optimal health. We are going to start with diet and lifestyle. And then we're going to look at all four dimensions that really bring a human to optimal, thriving health.

So again, it's mind, body, spirit, social with a foundation of diet and lifestyle. And that's really how I approach everyone at my medical practice, which is Be Vital Health Center. And then I use the bits and pieces.

I've studied many different medical philosophies, including naturopathic medicine, which is a very, very, it's called nature cure in other realms, and very much rooted in also diet and lifestyle, but also in nature. They are medical herbalists. We are medical herbalists, people who practice naturopathic medicine, and we use very natural approaches to healing.

And I studied the conventional medicine realm through nursing and becoming a nurse practitioner. And so I've studied functional medicine as well, which is another approach. So I've studied multiple different medical philosophies, and I've come up with really, like, let's have a simplified version of all these different integrative and all these different holistic approaches.

And what should we be practicing? 21st century medicine. And 21st century medicine, also, we're early adopters of evidence-based medicine.

So what's happening right now in the current state of healthcare is, on average, it's going to take 15 to 20 years to change a recommendation or a guideline. Well, when you think about that, Marv, like, during those 15 to 20 years, people are not being delivered the most up-to-date information, and some people are, frankly, just being harmed by recommendations that are outdated. So in 21st century medicine, we use science, updated science.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, are you talking about just even, like, a standard practice? Like, if I go to a hospital and I'm sick, the regimen that they use, I mean, I'm sure they have their, you know, checklist of things to go down. Are you saying that those types of things, that checklist doesn't change in that 15 to 20 years?

[Melanie Dorion]
Absolutely. There is the absolute potential that a medical recommendation has not been updated in 10, 15, 20 years. Yes.

Okay, well, that's interesting.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, okay. So, of course, my first thought now goes to the year of our COVID, when we were dealing with a brand new thing, and they made it sound like they were coming up with all these things on the fly, when I'll be honest, I heard rumors. I heard conspiracy theories that a lot of the things that we were coming up with had already been in the works, or they were just simply mutations of things we were already working with.

And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole too far, but in a situation like that, where we have a pandemic, I have to imagine that they probably made some exceptions for that, or was it just business as normal?

[Melanie Dorion]
Oh, absolutely not. Well, and don't get me wrong, some of how we get to medical recommendations is through very thorough due diligence. I have no problem with establishing on current science a recommendation, but it's when there's new science and you don't reevaluate those recommendations for multiple years, and then you don't include most recent research, that may contradict.

That's where I have an issue with recommendations that have not been updated on the most. And dietary recommendations is one of the best examples that I can give about that. Can we talk about the food pyramid?

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to just say the food pyramid.

[Melanie Dorion]
That was a complete disaster that actually directly contributed, this is not a conspiracy theory, the food pyramid directly contributed to push the epidemic of obesity and metabolic diseases that we're in right now in insulin resistance. The food pyramid was not based on any good science, and to change those recommendations took years, and it took a crisis, and it took people getting very, very upset to push for those recommendations to be changed. And the recommendations were very much purchased by Big Pharma and the big food industry.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It's all established in the literature. So this is part of the issue is that it's so difficult right now to update recommendations, especially when they were established with lots of influences from Big Food or Big Pharma, and then recommendations are not the most up-to-date.

Women's health, that's another great one. Right now, the hormone recommendations that are still daily, we're in 2025 right now, still women are being told, I know because I do this daily in my practice, hormone health is foundational to what we do in 21st century medicine, hormonal recommendations for women. What's being regurgitated is science that is based on bad science from over 20 years ago.

So during this time, women are not being given up-to-date science about what is safe, what is not safe, or what should be done to support women, especially during, for example, peri and post-menopausal. Some women are literally being told that they should just suffer in silence and take an antidepressant, which is established to not work for women, yet that's still a recommendation. So women's health is one of the most medically abandoned field of healthcare and nutritional science.

From my professional experience, two of the most medically abandoned field in healthcare because the recommendations are really archaic and are not actually founded on solid science.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Well, that's a lot of what I'm learning here on the Unhealthy Podcast as I speak to people like you who have found another way because what we've been told in the past wasn't working, and even in stuff that I'm doing, which is not much, I'll be honest. I don't have any chronic illnesses or anything like that, but in just trying to live healthy, looking at all the things that we've been taught over the years, I mean, it's just not right, you know, how we shop for our food, you know, it's just horrible.

[Melanie Dorion]
Correct. And right now, yeah, go ahead.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to say, let me go back real quick before I forget. You had mentioned the four dimensions and you said mind, body, spirit, and social, right? Yes.

So I've just always talked about mind, body, spirit, which is what I've always heard. Where does social come into that?

[Melanie Dorion]
Well, social is the foundation of who we are as humans, right? We exist in tribes and villages and in synergy with others. I'm also a Christian and I'm a firm believer that in the body of Christ, like we are not going to be separated from one another.

We thrive when we live in community, when we work in community, when we exist. Just for example, as a family, a family to be in synergy, everyone has to use their superpowers, meaning what are they best at? And that's going to vary a lot.

And a social aspect, and there's so many great studies and the Blue Zone study also, which is a massive study of who are the healthiest older adults in the world. We have learned so much from that and some of the healthiest older adults who have lived the longest without established or advanced chronic diseases, right? They were thriving older adults in the 80s, 90s, and early 100s.

Some of them were people who had meaning in their social life. They were included in social aspects of their daily lives. So there's social aspects, you know, this culture, this burnout culture that we are in right now, that you're in a silo, that you should like raise your family by yourself.

Like what a foolish approach. This is pushing women into massive burnout, which is destroying families, which is pushing men to work even harder. Like this whole thing is completely bonkers.

We have lost the villages. So I'm all about 21st century medicine is about bringing back the village, you know, recreating the communities that we are so good at doing, that other cultures are still really, really good at doing. And full disclosure, I'm not American.

I'm Canadian and I'm French-Canadian. So it's a subculture. So I'm a foreigner to this country and I can say with great certainty that the American culture is a very lonely culture.

It's a very competitive, hard culture, very siloed, and a culture very oriented towards burnout, you know, to do things by yourself. And that overdoing and FOMO or fear of missing out are great things. You know, the more you do, the more you have on your schedule is seen as a great thing.

I'm like, where have relationships gone? What was happening?

[Uncle Marv]
It's all about how busy you are and how many things you have.

[Melanie Dorion]
It's how foolish. I treat mostly women in my practice and I focus my entire career, which is over a decade, on advanced chronic diseases. So I've seen the sickest of the sick my entire career.

And the number one cause, it's not hormonal imbalances. Of course, diet contributes to that, but that's not what it is. One of the number one causes that is a recurrent theme for women is burnout.

They're overworked, under-supported. They have burnt themselves out in every aspect of their lives, thinking that they can raise kids full-time, work full-time, and then exercise and ideally be pretty and look good. Really?

That's interesting because that's not doable. That's not manageable for any human, especially not for women who biologically, we are so beautifully designed to have periods of high production and periods of mandatory required rest per our hormone cycle. And that's not being honored at all.

Some cultures honor that beautifully, but not in the American culture. You have to just push through, operate like a man 24-7. You're on all the time.

And how dare you need rest? For me, that's the burnout culture. Bringing a social aspect, 21st century medicine honors that, mind, body, spirit, and social.

And I ask this all the time to people. I'm like, how are you spending time with your relationships? How are your relationships?

What are you doing for fun? What feeds your spirit? What feeds your soul?

And then I write prescriptions for that all the time. Prescriptions for fun, prescription for social time. I write prescriptions for that because people need reminders and they need an official prescription.

Some, not all. But in my population, keep in mind my population, advanced chronic disease, right? Mostly women, 75% are women.

And they almost all have burnout as a really foundational trigger to, and then you start seeing advanced immune issues and digestive issues and mood issues and hormone issues stems from not honoring what your body really needs. And that's what we want to do with the 21st century medicine approach is with diet and lifestyle. What can we do to really set the stage to honor the beautiful bodies that we are?

And the social aspect is huge to that.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. I'm so ready to start talking about all the things we're doing wrong to fix those. But I'm going to go back because I did not mention in the beginning and I did it for a very good, actually, it worked out really nice.

You've mentioned a couple of times chronic disease. So I should let the listeners know that you are a chronic disease survivor. You've overcome chronic fatigue and you've overcome Lyme disease.

[Melanie Dorion]
Oh, yes, more than that. Correct. Do you want me to jump into my story?

[Uncle Marv]
Now I want to go back and hear how we got started.

[Melanie Dorion]
Yeah. Thank you. How I got so passionate about this is I became very, very sick at one point.

And so really the main, in terms of my timeline, what really changed things is in 2000 and I was on the Canadian national team. I was a professional cyclist traveling the world paid by sponsors and my country to represent my country Canada around the world, you know, riding my bike and I was tied on the last spot for the Canadian Olympic team in 2000 for mountain biking and I was in the mountains of Spain practicing for the competition, the Olympic qualifying event and then I crashed and in mountain biking you crash. It's just how it is.

But that time I had I hit my head yet again and I had what was probably my fifth concussion and I never recovered. It started a very fast and actually long rapid and long decline of my health. I tried to compete three days later and it went horrible horribly.

It was just one of the worst experiences. I finished the race, but very, very far behind. So needless to say I didn't qualify and a little bit over a year later.

I was in a Montreal hospital and I was spiking a hundred and two fever. I couldn't breathe. I was extremely ill and the physician who came in he was holding my chest x-ray and he asked me he's like how many packs per day do you smoke?

And I said, excuse me. He said how many packs per day do you smoke? I said doc.

I don't smoke. I've never smoked. I'm actually a professional athlete.

He's like well your lungs look like smokers lungs. They're black everywhere. You have severe pneumonia and you're probably going to have scarring for life in your lungs.

He gave me a prescription and he left. That's it. So I knew at that moment that was extremely sick that it wasn't just I had pneumonia.

I knew my system was really out of balance and I knew something drastic had to change. So March of 2002, I actually decided to retire from professional sports. Stop pushing my body and entered it into a one year of just healing and figuring out what was going on and resting and getting some answers.

And I packed my four-door blue Chevy Cavalier and I left my country. I left Canada. I drove south 12 hours and I arrived in the beautiful mountains of Virginia near Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge Mountains and I stayed here in the hopes of getting enough rest and healing and getting some answers for what was going on.

So I started seeing all these practitioners from holistic, natural, conventional. I was going to see whoever was going to give me some answers as to why I was so sick. And at this point, so understand in 2000, I was trying to qualify for the Olympics and now March of 2002, I can barely ride my bike.

I'm debilitated. I have mass and brain fog. I have migrating pain in my body.

Exercise intolerance.

[Uncle Marv]
I'm a hot mess and let me ask this because that is a very huge swing. Yeah, I mean you go from being you were the Canadian national champion, right?

[Melanie Dorion]
And at one point I was yes, sir.

[Uncle Marv]
So you're qualifying for the Olympics. You go through this and I guess what I want to get to is the moment that you decided I'm going to retire. I'm going to move.

I mean, where were where was your state of mind at that point?

[Melanie Dorion]
I was broken as absolutely broken. So retiring from a career in professional sports or in any field when you're not ready for it. I was super passionate.

I loved my career. I love my sport. I still love my sport.

I love I was young. Absolutely. I was in my 20s peak of my professional athletic career and I was absolutely broken.

It was a I left in shame. I was being shamed in the media like, oh, I was never that good. Oh, look, she's she was never that good and she's burnt out and anyway, it was not pretty how that was handled and in professional sports, right?

When you're injured or something is happening. There's going to be multiple people potentially behind you. They don't really care.

So I was on a receiving and all that lose all my income very quickly. All my sponsorship everything and then being shamed in the media for I was never that good, you know, and so I left completely broken mind body spirit. My body was not functioning.

I'd become debilitated at that point and emotionally and spiritually. I did not have the maturity or the capacity or the tools to handle that. So I left I came to the US.

I didn't even use my name my real name for a year. I gave myself all I was a nanny for a family in the interim and they gave me a nickname and that's what I went by didn't even introduce myself. I didn't want anybody to know me if I was going to go on a bike ride with any other cyclist.

They would have very easily identified who I was and I didn't I didn't want to do that. So I went by my nickname and I was absolutely broken yet. I knew I had the confidence in my spirit that I knew I was sick.

I wasn't actually burnt out. I wasn't crazy. It wasn't all in my head and I wasn't imagining any of my experience.

So I knew that truth inside of me. I just needed someone to believe me and to actually do proper testing and I couldn't find that in Canada. So I came to in part to the US to try and get more answers and to get away because it's really hard to recover when you're in a constant environment right in Canada.

I would go to the grocery store and like, oh Melanie, when are you racing again? We haven't seen you in the media or the journal in the newspaper. Like oh, when's your next race?

Are you going to try the Olympics again? Like I was not I did not feel that I could heal in that environment. So I just disappeared reinvented myself became a stranger and anonymous which was actually really helpful and just rebuilt myself from the ground up and then entered into this really fearless search of I'm going to get answers and someone's going to believe me.

I'm going to find someone who's going to believe me and they're going to actually figure out what's wrong with me and after a year of really diligently searching and trying to get answers and doing some of course some research on my own. I was actually getting sicker despite doing everything they were telling me to do and I realized at that point I'm not going to get better. I'm actually getting sicker from especially conventional medicine and I'm I have to get answers myself.

I'm going to have to get my own answers. So I actually put myself through medical school while I was sick so I could actually get some answers and I did so while I was sick.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, that sounds like another point in time of So you had just left Canada to come to the US thinking we had answers for you. Obviously we didn't a year of searching conventional medicine.

[Melanie Dorion]
What was it that said I've got to go to medical school myself when I was getting sicker and I reached the point where I had seen 10 people between conventional medicine and holistic practitioners. I saw anybody who could maybe get me some answers and no one could I realize well, okay, I'm going to have to figure out the answers and I'm getting sicker and I've seen 10 people and I'm really fed up. I'm really fed up and the system is not helping me but helping me pushing me further into disease and like the time where someone a provider like slipped a prescription for an antidepressant, you know, like saying it's in my head and when I know the truth in my body that I'm sick and I'm not feeling well, this is not in my head.

I snapped. I was like, this is BS.

[Uncle Marv]
But you had x-rays showing black lungs. I mean that can't be in your head.

[Melanie Dorion]
Well, no, but that was recovered, right?

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Melanie Dorion]
Why would two years later do I still have breathing issues and fatigue issues and you name it, right? It was a combination of so many things that they weren't testing for weren't looking for and it's so much simpler and easier especially to tell a woman who's now chronically sick. Well, it's probably in your head, you know, you got to learn stress management, go see a therapist and here's an antidepressant and I slipped that prescription back to them and I'm like, don't you dare put that in my chart and I politely declined this because this is not what's happening.

I'm actually not depressed. I am actually sick and I just left and I'm like, that's it. I snap.

I'm like, this is crazy. This system is crazy. It's pushing me further into disease, ignoring all these symptoms, right?

But I was in a healthcare provider so I didn't know how to put these pieces together. So that's when I entered into the journey of doing pre-med and to be on my way to medical school. So that was, you know, four-year journey to do pre-med and then but I went to medical school.

I went to naturopathic medical school, which is a very beautiful medical philosophy where you study traditional medicine, but you also study holistic medicine like herbalism, homeopathy, physical medicine. You study a lot of other things in the healing realm and second year of medical school. And I remember this is such an incredible moment for me.

I was taking, I took over like an entire table in the medical library and I had a librarian. I was asking her to bring me journals and textbooks on certain things based on my symptoms. I was determined.

I had my big binder full at this point of testing and all this stuff. I'm like, I'm going to put this together for myself. Second year of med school, you can do a lot as a medical student.

So I could read my lab results and I could interpret stuff. So I put at least half of the puzzle together that day and then I reached out to an author of a medical textbook in endocrinology, so hormones and I reached out because I was textbook, literally textbook symptomatic of this very rare adrenal disorder and I reached out to the author. I'm like, I'm going to go to the top person in this country and he emailed me back.

He's like, well, I'm in Maryland. So you're in Seattle. That's not going to work, but he's like, I've trained someone and here's her name and she practices in Seattle.

Well, well, well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. She was six minutes down the road from me and literally had an opening in like 10 days.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice.

[Melanie Dorion]
So I saw this person. She did them, once she believed me, you know, I showed up, fired up at that first visit, ready to feel dismissed and gas lit again and she had to say at one point, she said, you understand I'm on your team, right? And I believe you and I just started crying.

I'm like, no, I don't actually. So I'm going to show up fierce right now and this is the testing I want. She's like, you're getting all of that plus some and it was this beautiful healing moment of someone validating my experience and being on my team and I'm like, that's where healing started for me.

That is true healing right there when you have a provider and you start feeling that they hear you, they believe you and they're on your team. They're there for you to serve you. That's a beautiful moment.

And then I got some answers. I was actually extremely sick. I remember the first consult where we were reviewing lab results.

She slid a prescription and she's like, you see the pharmacy across the street right there? I'm like, yeah. She's like, you walk out of here and you go there and get that prescription.

You do not spend one more day without this. And I was like, oh, oh, oh, and she explained to me that the adrenal disorder that I was diagnosed with had some life-threatening episodes that probably some of the episodes I had in my life, I should have been hospitalized and I wasn't. Oh, but I was told that I was crazy, was in my head and I should take an antidepressant, right?

So what I received in terms of the dysfunction and what I experienced from the conventional insurance-based medicine goes pretty deep in terms of my understanding of how beautifully incredible it can be because I was a professional athlete. I broke bones. I love orthopedics, right?

But then how dysfunctional it can be and when people have chronic complex issues, there's a huge gap. That is the conventional insurance-based medicine is not serving people with chronic illnesses. We know this.

Look at the stats. Every year we have an increase in chronic complex illnesses in this country, you know, so that's what I unfortunately I got stuck in that gap and that's what 21st century medicine does is we fill that gap where we actually understand science. We use advanced testing.

We never forget the foundations of diet and lifestyle and that's what the approach that was done and she wasn't enough. I was too complicated just for her. So I had to put a team of three providers together.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, I was going to ask because I was going to ask you said that was in your second year and you saw some light. So you still went, you know, through the rest of that year and two more years.

[Melanie Dorion]
Oh, it was a decade of recovery after that. Yeah, it took a decade for me to really regain fully my health because no one was doing this. No one was doing chronic complex illnesses.

I was too complicated. Some of the stuff she could handle but she's like, but I don't do this other stuff. So you have to find someone else.

Oh, well, golly. Okay, fine. So I put a team of people at one point I had three practitioners helping me but it worked and I learned what a comprehensive approach for chronic disease was through my own very hard experience.

It was very expensive very demanding. It was emotionally and mentally exhausting because I had to put all these pieces together. No one was coordinating my care.

It was a complete disaster, but at least I was getting health and answers and I was getting better. I was getting better.

[Uncle Marv]
So how much of that happened during your time at Seattle and then you said an additional, you know, they're 10 years total. So how much were you able to put yourself in that situation there and then how much of it after I heal the great amount while I was in Seattle.

[Melanie Dorion]
I was in Seattle for six years because I did medical school there and then I did my nurse practitioner degree also while I was there. So I was in Seattle for a total of six years and I got most of my health back during that time which Seattle and the Pacific Northwest is a beautiful area for innovation in medicine. I mean I had access to all of like the coolest biohacking stuff IV therapy you name it you have access to all of that in Pacific Northwest right medical innovation is booming out there.

It's amazing. And then after it my school came back to Virginia to the Dark Ages. I could not find an IV therapist.

I could not find an infrared sauna. I could not find a hyperbaric chamber. I mean it was this is now I came back in 2013.

So in 2025, but yeah, we've improved a little bit in the Charlottesville area, but Virginia as a whole is you know, at least 15 20 years behind what I experience in the Pacific Northwest for medical innovation. So I was mostly better that it was really hard to continue healing here without having access to the tools that I knew I needed. So I feel like I was a little bit set back and I could have probably healed fully completely a little bit faster if I was if I stayed in the Pacific Northwest, but for life reasons, I came back to Virginia and then I continue while the healing journey, especially from chronic diseases is an ongoing lifelong journey.

So there's multiple layers, right? I addressed very hardcore the body piece when I was in Seattle and early on in Virginia, but then I really started diving into the narratives that I had around my body and disease, right? So the mind piece and then the spiritual piece is I was spiritually bankrupt on and off in my life because you know, I lost my way and just you have to be pretty diligent at as a believer to like really be solidly grounded and you know, find my way again to a community and to faith and I'm a foreigner here.

So it was I don't have family in the in the US understanding the importance of the social aspect. I lifted losing that was very hard for me. So rebuilding the social my social network here and working on all those aspects yet overall it took over a decade to get my health back to where I could say and this is years ago.

I've been fully recovered for years. I am thriving. I'm competing again.

I'm really having fun. I'm running a business and I'm engaged in life and I feel very good most days, but I also tell people I live with chronic diseases. So I'm a super healthy high-need person and I have to be very careful about the baselines of how I take care of myself because I've recovered and there was chronic Lyme disease.

It was I had many toxins that had to be removed out of my body including mold and heavy metals and I had multiple autoimmune diseases including an adrenal autoimmune disease. I had and celiac disease that went undiagnosed. So I had to be very strict for a long period of time for my food.

I was severely nutritionally and hormonally deficient. So it took over a decade to correct all of that. But what I see now is when a practitioner like me doing 21st century medicine train in chronic disease management what took 10 years for me to achieve for my own journey.

I can do in one to three years because I have a deep understanding of multiple different medical philosophies. I don't forget the foundations of 21st century medicine and I do a really comprehensive approach. So I see people recover from advanced chronic disease all the time in one to three years, which is a beautiful thing.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. So let's take another step back and I want to ask were you able to find out through all of that some of the root causes or maybe the origin of when that started for you? I mean, I mean, I don't want to think that the crash alone is what did it.

So were you able to identify any of those?

[Melanie Dorion]
Absolutely. I could identify and diet and lifestyle were key. I mentioned the burnout culture earlier.

Well, it's challenging as an athlete because you're pushed all the time. But also I wasn't being guided properly for the actual amount of rest that I needed for me as a woman. I'm not I'm not women are not little men.

So woman in medicine and health care have been women have been treated like little men since the beginning of when prescription started pretty much where woman need as a whole or hormones are made differently from different organs and we need a lot more rest. So I was in constant state of overtraining and under rested in my professional career. But also at the foundations of diet because I had celiac disease that went undiagnosed since childhood.

I was constantly in a state of inflammation. My digestive tract was totally out of whack and I was nutritionally deficient. So here I was operating as a professional athlete nutritionally deficient based on testing and they were just like, well, that's just your normal now.

I know what I know. I'm like, no, it's absolutely not normal for any human who eats the proper foods to be this nutritionally deficient and yet I was trying to exist as a professional athlete performing at Olympic levels with nutritional deficiencies and severe hormonal deficiencies and then because of like some, you know, menstrual irregularities and some PMS and menstrual cramps that were not ideal for any woman, especially not as an athlete.

I was put on oral contraceptive at 15. And oral contraceptives, please, to all the female listeners is a prescription toxin. Look at the studies.

It's synthetic high dose of synthetic hormones that are actually really damaging long-term wise and were never meant to be used like that. So I was put on things that shut down my entire endocrine system. Synthetic hormones don't just especially oral contraceptives or any birth control.

It's a synthetic hormone. It's a toxin. It doesn't work in synergy with your body.

So it shut down parts of my hormonal system that shocker, you know, 10 years of that actually led to disease. So it's a combination of many things. It's never just one thing, a diet that wasn't optimal for me and lifestyle that really did not allow for enough rest for me as a woman and I was constantly being bombarded by hormonal imbalances because of prescriptions synthetic hormones and no one had explained that or to my parents and no one still talks about it.

Hey, like and I'm not against prescriptions. Please understand to all your listeners. I prescribe almost every day in my medical practice, but they're a bridge and they need to be highly respected and understood and there's needs to be education.

If someone would have sat down with my mom and I and explain what synthetic hormones actually are and how they work and how this, you know, oral contraception that is was going to provide so much relief from all my issues, which didn't really by the way and what it was actually going to potentially do long-term wise never, never would we would my mom have agreed to that or would I have agreed to that, you know, if someone would explain the actual impact on my hormones. Hey girl, you're going to lose your superpowers from your hormones because it's going to shut down all of it.

Did you know that twice a month? You have these beautiful spike in your hormones that allow you to have hormone levers like testosterone levels that can exceed men's testosterone and like that's when you should train the hardest. If someone would explain that simple physiology, which is in physiology textbook of how my hormones worked and what this prescription contraceptive oral contraceptive would have done, I never would have said yes, that no one explained that.

So those really three things, right? Like being under arrested, overtrained, overworked and having a pretty significant disease that went ignored and undiagnosed despite actually childhood testing that should have triggered that, you know, I had an autoimmune disease that progressed and toxins. My body was constantly fighting and in and out of inflammation and that fifth concussion that was how and I how I explain this to people is we all have a health bucket and healthy drains, healthy lifestyle, healthy diet, you know, create healthy drains that we can handle stressors.

What fills the bucket is going to be unhealthy thoughts, unhealthy spiritual beliefs, unhealthy lifestyle and healthy diet toxins, all of that disease medications that fills up your bucket. Well, my bucket was full. Let me tell you my bucket was full and my body was just trying so hard to keep it together and that concussion which is a pretty massive incident for anybody, but it made the bucket overflow and be completely dysfunctional and poked holes in the bucket and like my bucket needed to be understood and that's what that's part of why it took so long because no one was looking at things the way we are in 21st century medicine of like let's look at things really holistically and let's do actually proper testing that is comprehensive that's going to look at all the different pillars and facets of that are you know, that's more detail for our next episode, but what really truly leaning into what 21st century medicine looks at as like we have the dimensions, but the dimensions need to be supported with pillars of health of how do you actually approach someone with or without health concerns, right? You're healthy.

You want to stay healthy. How do we do that? What do we actually look at in the body?

And those are pillars that we use in 21st century medicine that I use all the time. I'd be vital and none of that was being looked at for me. And so but I knowing what I know now it has to be looked at so it took over a decade for all that testing to finally be done for all those pieces to be put together for my body to come back to balance.

And what I experience is the beauty and the resiliency of the human body and the human spirit is when you remove obstacles the body's going to thrive and I say this all the time my job as a health care provider. I'm just a facilitator of healing. I remove obstacles and I get out of the way.

I let the body do its thing, you know, our body's wisdom is incredible. It knows what to do and it wants to do it. It's excited to do it.

It's excited to detox. It's excited to fight infections. And when it's not my job in 21st century medicine as a 21st century medicine provider is to remove the obstacles identify them and remove them and then I get out of the way.

I just let the body do its thing and it does the body loves to do what it wants to do.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well Melanie, thank you very much for sharing your story. And I think this would be a natural place to go ahead and do that break and end off this episode and then we can come back and explore more about the 21st century medicine.

But your story is one that I think most people don't identify with because most of us aren't professional athletes.

[Melanie Dorion]
Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, I feel like I know and I'll circle back to that because it is it is not as relatable when I speak in different, you know, I have multiple different ways of talking about my story. But like when I just present my story start to finish it's about 8 to 10 minutes and it has you know, a different a different lens to it and I let's make sure I circle back to that.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, we'll do that. Yeah, so I probably jumped in with some questions that took you off course, but that's okay.

[Melanie Dorion]
That's where that's where having a part two is a beautiful thing is like, you know, hey the hardest thing about my journey So that people can relate to it because my story is incredibly relatable, you know, I'm a human who lost lots of things in my life and everybody have lost things, you know, I lost the ability to be a social and to be present and I had lots of shame and guilt and you know, all the things that are completely relatable regardless of where you are.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, we will circle back and then we will come through on the other side. So folks, thank you for listening and stay tuned for part two of my interview with Melanie Dorian and in the meantime, live healthy and be happy.