Brittany Estrada 00:00:00 Hey everyone, we have such a treat for you in this episode today we have our guest, Doctor Kelsey Dexter, who is an endocrinologist and herbalist who combines modern medical science with vitals and principles to enhance hormonal and overall health. She uses a circadian rhythm and metabolic wellness framework to address the root causes of health issues, and she practices both in Jackson, Tennessee and in Nashville. And I am super lucky to get to work very closely with her. Doctor Dexter has more than nine years of experience in managing conditions such as diabetes, reproductive disorders and metabolic health issues, and she really integrates both endocrinology and herbal medicine, which has been inspired by her own health journey. So we are so lucky to have this conversation both today and in the next episode. This is a two parter, and so we hope that you enjoy.

Erica Boland 00:01:25 Hey, loves, I'm Erica.

Brittany Estrada 00:01:26 And I'm Brit.

Erica Boland 00:01:27 She's a chiropractor and midwife and she's a nurse practitioner and womb healer. Together we are bridging the sacred and the scientific to help you step into deeper alignment with the incredible wisdom of your body.

Brittany Estrada 00:01:40 We are mothers, soul sisters, and women who are deeply devoted to serving the feminine collective. There is no topic we aren't open to exploring, and we are so looking forward to navigating this journey with you and our amazing guests.

Erica Boland 00:01:54 So settle in, preferably with a great cup of coffee. Put one hand on your heart and breathe as we dive in.

Brittany Estrada 00:02:01 Welcome to our community. I'm so honored that you are joining us today. And we're going to start out, as we always do, by just connecting to our body and to our breath. So if you are not driving and you're able, go ahead and close your eyes or just sort of soften your gaze, feel the backs of your eyeballs, relax and just check in with your jaw. I've really been noticing so much tension in my jaw lately, so maybe open and close your mouth, lick your lips, and just see if you can bring some softness to your jaw, and just notice how that carries down your neck and into your shoulders.

Brittany Estrada 00:02:46 And then really use your breath to blossom. Open your chest and allow yourself to just land right here. If you're anything like me, you're really into the habit stacking, so maybe you're trying to get some exercise in while you're listening or you're folding laundry. So just for this moment, I'm just going to invite you to put everything else down and be right here with your body, with your breath, and seeing if you can get your breath to move all the way down to the very tip of your tailbone, really connecting to the entire core, seeing if you can feel into the movement of your pubic bone away from your sacrum as you inhale all the way down. And as you exhale, just let it be soft. No sucking in, no pulling, no forcing. And then just take a moment to really allow yourself to feel into the gratitude that you have for your amazing body, for all the things that your body allows you to do for how she carries you through the world. And just one more breath here.

Brittany Estrada 00:04:10 And when you're ready, come and meet us for today's conversation. I am super excited to welcome Doctor Kelsey Dexter, who I am incredibly spoiled because I had the honor of meeting Kelsey last year and then basically begged her to become my overseeing physician in Tennessee. In order for nurse practitioners to practice, we have to connect with a MD, which is great if you have a good relationship and it can be a negative thing. And I'm just like incredibly blessed to have found Kelsey because we're so in alignment. And I know that I, you know, can ask her questions and really actually get help. And so that is just has been such a great thing for me. And so I'm super excited to get to share her with all of you because she is just a wealth of knowledge. So welcome, Kelsey. Thanks, Britt. That's really, really sweet.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:05:05 And, you know, I really feel like the lucky one because you have allowed me into this huge base of connection with like minded individuals in your community.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:05:15 And it's been a big blessing for me in my practice.

Brittany Estrada 00:05:18 Well, thank you for saying that. And I do think to your point, it's so important for us to find each other and it can feel a little nebulous, especially when you're just you're stuck in your, you know, conventional practice and you're just doing your day in and day out duties like it's hard to even be able to pull yourself out of that. So I've been really excited because there are so many people who are just dying for your wisdom and I yeah, I just am really looking forward to seeing how this continues to grow. And I would really love if you wouldn't mind, just if you would share a little bit of your background and maybe what kind of led you to more of this functional, holistic viewpoint that you now carry while also being in a pretty conventional practice.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:06:03 Yeah, so I've known from the time I was a really young girl that I wanted to be a healer. And in our most common framework that looks like a practitioner, right, a doctor.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:06:15 And I think, you know, my family was always really supportive and empowering of me and told me that I could do this from a young age. And so I remember being five years old and saying, I'm going to go to Vanderbilt, you know, and we're in a little Vanderbilt sweatshirt. And I did it when I was 18, but I always had this path where I knew that I wanted to be a doctor, and I don't think I really knew what that meant. So and a lot of practitioners don't. But the path to obtaining an MD, that degree is very stressful, a very arduous and punishing in a way. And I think that the culture of medicine in general doesn't value health and mortality because we strip it from the practitioners as they're learning about health. Right? but yeah, I got into medical school, I went to University of Tennessee, and I had a great experience there overall, you know, but it wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be. And when I got into the real like made of medicine, of the actual practice and doing rotations, I recognized that we were providing sick care.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:07:26 Like Western medicine works great for people who are in acute distress, who need some kind of intervention. But when you look at chronic disease management, we were patching holes all the time, and that never felt right to me. And I remember in medical school we had one day where we were introduced as a group to they called it alternative medicine. Yep. Alternative medicine. So we met a chiropractor. We met a Reiki practitioner and nutritionist and acupuncturist. Chinese medicine doctor. Yeah, and I remember the general vibe of the room, and my classmates largely thought it was a joke. Right. And they treated the practitioners like that. And I was horrified at the time. But anyway, and it's a little deeper part of the story about my son of origin, which may come out later because of my current focus and circadian health. But I went into medical school thinking I was going to be a dermatologist. That was my goal. I worked in aesthetics, actually, at the Green Hills Mall. I did facials.

Brittany Estrada 00:08:35 Amazing. I love it.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:08:37 Okay, so that I was kind of like always thinking I wanted to focus on skin. And when I got more into I had experience with all these different specialties. I thought, well, that's kind of narrow for how I want to address health. And I was planning on being a family practice doctor and then I had this great rotation at Saint Thomas Midtown, which was Baptist at the time, and they had an internal medicine residency program. And the program director at the time was like, we really just want you to come here. So what is it you like about family medicine that you couldn't do an internal medicine? I said, well, really, it's women's health. That's. Yeah, the part that I'm interested in. So they told me they would just build me a women's health curriculum to get me to come there, which was great.

Brittany Estrada 00:09:19 Amazing.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:09:20 Okay, so I trained in Nashville, and then when I started getting into internal medicine and women's health, I realized I didn't really like that either, because, again, we weren't addressing the root of any kind of disease.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:09:35 And I started sort of reaching out to other practitioners in Nashville when I was a resident. And I'm pretty sure I was the first resident to ever rotate through the Osher Center and Vandy.

Brittany Estrada 00:09:45 Yeah.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:09:46 Because when I reached out, they said, we've never had anybody before, but yeah, you can come. So I got a taste of integrative medicine then. But you know, this was more than 15 years ago. It was a long time ago and at the time it's due to functional medicine didn't exist, right. And there were no training pathways to actually get certification in integrative or functional medicine, except for Doctor Andrew Wiles program in Arizona, which was a $30,000 program which, you know, like residents barely make enough money to survive. And I was in a huge debt hole and there was no way that I could do that training. So I thought, you know, what is it that I like? What specialty can kind of get me into the broad scope of health? And I wanted to look at metabolic health primarily because I could see that being the big issue that the country was facing, and that was underlying a lot of our chronic disease.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:10:38 And so I decided to go into endocrinology, which endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism is the full name of the certification. Right. So I ended up at University of Colorado and I had wonderful teachers and mentors. They're very open minded and got to do a lot of gender affirming care there, and just things that people in other programs didn't get exposure to. But it's probably the most well known thyroid institute in the country. And we had my program director was the one who wrote the guidelines on thyroid nodules. So I got the best of the science there. And even in fellowship, which is so funny. I was supposed to be the research fellow. So we had two clinical fellows and one research fellow, and they're like, what do you want to do your research in? And I was like, public health, you know, like, here are all these bench research opportunities. Like, what do you want to do with that? I can't do that. I'm sorry. So I ended up working with Doctor Gillett in the School of Public Health on this project where we were.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:11:37 It was a pilot project for the American Cancer Society Association. So I was getting messed up. But anyway, we were looking at community gardening as a health intervention. So basically we had these people who had never gardened in their life, and we partnered with Denver Urban Gardeners. They had a plot for the season, and we started out measuring just basic health parameters height and weight and blood pressure and ANC and cholesterol and activity level. We had, accelerometers on them. And so we would just track that before and after intervention. And it was really fun. But I ended up leaving a little bit early. Endocrinology fellowship is two years. The research fellowship was three years, and I decided that wasn't really what I wanted to do. And I see myself in academics and I wanted to actually be hands on with patients. And so yeah, then I ended up moving to North Carolina, and I worked in Asheville at a beautiful little private practice there for a couple of years, and then got married and had a baby and realized I wanted to be closer to family.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:12:38 So that took me back to Tennessee. And I've been at my current practice in West Tennessee now for seven years, which I can't believe that. But in that time, I also recognize that when I'm meeting people and hearing their stories. Usually medicine is not what they need, right? So in the past, it's been ten years. I've done a lot of other types of trainings to sort of broaden my skillset because I'm interested in more functional care and holistic health, and actually eliminating disease when we can and letting the body heal instead of just having these patients that come back every 3 to 6 months to get their medicines refilled and still don't feel whole and vital. And so at this point, I've had well, this was our connection, right? We both did. Leah LaBelle's went folk herbalism school. Yes, yes, that was my first foray into herbalism. And then I did the two year Trusova program out of Marshall, North Carolina, which I finished last year, Advanced Community Herbalism Course, and I am now an attuned Reiki practitioner.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:13:53 I've done mediumship training. Right now I'm doing the gateway experience. Have you ever heard that?

Brittany Estrada 00:13:59 I have not tell me about that.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:14:00 Well, I don't know all the details I probably should know, but I think it originated as a government program to effectively make people psychic. So okay, it's based on binaural beats and these different frequencies that change your brainwave. And then sort of this hypnosis that you go through progressively. It's really hard for me to find the time to do it because it takes about 40 minutes chunks and I have to do it with my kids or asleep, and I get really sleepy. But it's been really cool. And part of that is kind of opening your psi abilities and then remote viewing and some other skills. So I love to lean into everything intuitive. I think that's a big part of working with people in general, right? As a practitioner, when we can actually see them on a different level and feel them on a different level with their permission. Then it opens up a wide possibility of options for hailing.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:14:58 Yeah. Yeah, I myself got pretty sick about 3 or 4 years ago, and that was during the height of Covid and there was lots of fear and I was still working, and I had tiny children and just a pretty stressful life. And a lot of times we don't look up and recognize the hot water we're in until we're cooked, you know? Yeah. And I started having all these nervous system issues like numbness and tingling and weird heat sensations in my foot and then pain in my facial nerve. Every time I would touch my face, it would feel like electricity shot across my face. And at one point, and I don't still don't even know what happened to me that day. But my nervous system was just on fire, and every nerve in my body told me I was dying, just shooting around when I was at work. And so I ran right upstairs to my primary care doctor. Does it? Please help me. I don't know what's going on. I've tried to figure this out, and I told him about all my list of symptoms, and he said, well, you know, you're about 35 and female and these kind of nerve problems generally we see with miss.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:16:07 And he said maybe that it may not be, but do you want me to send you for an MRI so we can prove it? If so. And I was like, no thank you. I was not going to associate with that diagnosis in any way on my chart or in my life. And I just rejected it, basically. But then I started studying everything about Ms.. And I found this paper that demonstrated how effectively people at the equator don't get much. Ms.. Right. And the further away you get from the equator, as you, you know, move latitude, the higher the incidence goes. And I was thinking back to this history, I have like from the time I was a young kid, being so aware of sun exposure and being frightened of the sun. Where does that come from? I don't know, I have no idea why, but I was known for it in my family and friend base that I was wearing SPF 100 by the time I was 13.

Brittany Estrada 00:17:03 And you wanted to be a dermatologist like, so there's clearly like some real pull to that.

Brittany Estrada 00:17:08 Okay.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:17:08 Yes. And so I had never been tan, except maybe when I was a tiny child, I was the palest person in the room everywhere I went on purpose. And couple that with years of horrible sleep habits, right. In medical school. And I was the last group of residents that were subject to the 36 hour work day. And that was when I was an intern, the hardest year of residency. So I remember, like, dreaming at stoplights, right? Like I was so disrupted that my brain would catch these little micro slips wherever possible. And then it just continues through fellowship, where you have this pager and you're covering three hospitals. And then as soon as that was over, I had a baby, which we all know.

Brittany Estrada 00:17:56 Really messes with your sleep. This is worse than residency.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:18:01 Well, it can be. I think there are ways to make that better. Lots of ways. But I didn't know those at the time, so I hadn't really slept in decades. Two decades probably.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:18:13 And then coupled with no sun exposure. And these things started to click right in my head and I said, okay, well, these fundamental health principles rest and sunlight you have not ever really had. And so how can the body heal if it's not getting deep sleep and not getting restorative time? And then there's clearly some association with lack of sun and mis, and it's well documented in the literature. So how can we heal ourselves. Right. And so I got really, really interested in sunlight, Really interested in circadian health, which those two things go hand in hand.

Brittany Estrada 00:18:54 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:18:56 I thought I was the most sun sensitive person in the entire world, and I probably was at the time. I mean, I if I went outside and high UV index, I would start to feel like I was burning in minutes. But I never acclimated to the sun like my skin had never seen it. And I think about this all the time in the context of the standard American life where we work inside, you know, 93% of the time Americans are indoors.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:19:22 And every glass that we interface with, whether sunglasses or prescription lenses or modern windows, all filter UV, right? So even if we think we're getting natural light when we sit inside, we're missing key wavelengths that help our body acclimate over time. And when you have a plant that you plant as a seed, and you grow that little seedling in a greenhouse that has shade, and then you take that tiny plant and in the middle of July. You plan it out in the field in full sun. It burns, right? Yeah. It dies. And plants. We know that they get their energy from sunlight, but we can see in real time that if any organism is not acclimated to receive sun, it can damage tissue. Right. So that's what Western medicine focuses on is the damage. But no one is acclimated to the sun unless they are intentional about their exposure, because it's just that our modern lives don't allow us to actually get the natural light that we need, right? So I started focusing on that in earnest, and I downloaded this app called De Minder that helps you put in your Fitzpatrick skin type.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:20:33 So that's how easily you, you know, freckle tan burn and your location so it knows your UV index and the angle of the sun. And when UVB is out. And I focused on making natural vitamin D. And so I use that app as a guideline because it'll tell you you have ten minutes before you burn or whatever. It gives you an estimation. And I started sitting outside. I was living with my mom at the time post divorce, and she has a beautiful private deck, and so I would sit out there on my days off and just get sort of early or morning light whenever you've came into the atmosphere, just little tiny doses. And I think it took I try to remember I should have been keeping notes in a journal, but it took about 3 to 4 weeks and my nerve symptoms were gone.

Brittany Estrada 00:21:19 Like, wow, completely gone.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:21:21 And I started to crave the sun, right? Like, look forward to that time. And oh my gosh, my family. They would think I'm crazy because the clouds would be out and if the sun would start to peak, I would just like start stripping off clothes and run outside, try to catch five minutes, you know, whatever I could get that day.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:21:43 But people think, well, the modern average person thinks that the sun is good for vitamin D production, but they think we can get vitamin D from a pill and it will do the same thing. But the sun does so much more to our physiology. It's such a stronger signal than just vitamin D that if you really dive in to all the benefits, it's very clear that humans can't be optimally healthy without it. And then we have this huge Western medical establishment telling people that there's no such thing as a safe tan to avoid UVA. I over four right to not be out to.

Brittany Estrada 00:22:23 Slather yourself with so much sunscreen.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:22:26 Yeah, and it's full of all kinds of hormone disruptors and preservatives and things that we soak in, right? Whenever we're baking in the sun. Because and it's just mind boggling to me. But, you know, my mission at this point has been to educate people about how good the sun is for you when it's used in the right context, when we don't overdo it, when we respect it.

Dr. Kelsey Dexter 00:22:52 So that's how I ended up here. But I have to say, I'm almost 41 now, and I am the strongest and healthiest and most vital version of myself that I've ever been. And you know, I'm also a single mom of two little kids who are five and seven, and I work two jobs effectively. I have an online education platform. I do stuff like this podcast every week, and I make time to prioritize myself. And I think, you know, I hear a lot of excuses all the time, and my life is blessed. I live a charmed life. I have worked for it, to be sure, but we all have these choices. And if my job looked like it used to look where every day I came in and felt like I was having panic attacks, right? I would get out of that job because there's there's no situation that's worth your health, and we all have some kind of choice in the way we spend our days. Yeah. Even when it feels like we're stuck, we have places.

Brittany Estrada 00:23:57 I have so many thoughts. I mean, Eric and I are just grinning from ear to ear because we always talk about how we both felt called to be healers, and the paths that were kind of laid in front of you was like nursing medicine. And just the very roundabout ways that we have kind of found our path to being able to heal and really step into that role. And how many trainings you've taken where like, I think Eric has taken Reiki training, like we've done so many things. So just all the beautiful overlap and to be able to kind of just weave all that together to create something that is so uniquely each of ours, I think, is really it's where the art of healing really comes in. And I think it's such a beautiful illustration of why it's really important for us as individuals to find the healer that resonates with us and how each of us standing in our own medicine is so important because we are going to attract the people that need our unique medicine. So I just wanted to present that first.

Brittany Estrada 00:24:59 But also I just everything you said about the sun and circadian rhythm health so far. I know we can dive in a little bit more. But, you know, one of the things that I've really been looking into for a long time is the seasonal variations. And we are like a week and a half away from the spring equinox. And yes, the light is returning, y'all, and we're almost there. But how important the light specifically on the equinoxes is to programming ourselves, because it is the light that we absorb at the spring equinox that then prepares us for the summer sunlight. So just like you were saying, so actually really making a point of being outdoors as much as you can on the Equinox is super important for that cell programming and for so I mean, so many functions. And one of the things that really got me into this topic a few years ago was reading about how women, in particular, have more genes that respond to the signals of light than men do, which is amazing.

Brittany Estrada 00:26:00 So we literally, you know, we are the original clocks, we are the original timekeeper. So for us, that also means we are more deeply impacted when we are deprived of these light signals, which I think is just so incredible. And I think I shared this with Erica last week, but I was reading a paper recently that was talking about the increased incidence of melanoma in people who are sitting under fluorescent lighting all day long, and how that is not what the mainstream narrative is telling us. It is telling us you cover up, you only go outside when the UV index is low, and especially if you have a family history of melanoma. And that's probably the exact opposite of what these people should be doing. And yet that just continues to be the narrative. And people are really afraid of the sun. So I am super grateful that you are using your voice and your platform to educate because it just doesn't make sense. Like we we evolved on this planet pretty much naked under the sun. Like what? It just doesn't make any sense that we would have to hide from this.

Brittany Estrada 00:27:06 Like, there's just so many things in our biology that are wired for being out in the elements, in nature, connected to the earth, connected to the sun being under the moonlight. That part's just fascinating to me. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode. We are so excited to continue the conversation with Doctor Dexter in the next episode, where we go deeper into circadian health and touch on how to support overall thyroid health, and really dive deep into looking at the root causes of symptoms that are often attributed to the thyroid. So stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Womb Women podcast. We are thrilled you joined us today and hope you found the conversation as inspiring as we did to connect with us further. Follow me, Brit on Instagram at the Brit Estrada and Erika at the Movement Midwife. For more information on how to work with us, check out our websites linked in the show notes. We can't wait to have you join us for the next episode, but until then, we invite you to step into your power and embrace the wisdom of your body.

Brittany Estrada 00:28:17 Bye for now.

Brittany Estrada 00:28:33 Just as a reminder of the information shared here, is for educational purposes only and not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult your health care provider for any medical questions or concerns.