Is the Hormonal Matrix the Missing Link for Your Patients?

The Root Cause Medicine Podcast

Kate Kresge

Health & Fitness, Alternative Health, 810564, Medicine

4.8 • 581 Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if the real problem with hormones isn’t what’s broken… but what’s being missed? In this conversation, Dr. Cheryl Burdette invites us to rethink everything we’ve been taught about hormonal health. Instead of chasing isolated lab values or treating systems in silos, she introduces a more useful question: what if hormones only make sense when you look at how they talk to each other? We explore the concept of the hormonal matrix—a lens that connects thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive hormones into one dynamic, interdependent network. Because in the body, nothing operates alone. Signals overlap. Pathways intersect. And small imbalances can ripple across systems in ways we don’t always measure. This systems-based perspective isn’t just philosophical—it’s increasingly supported by emerging research on the cross-talk between the HPTA axis, the gut, and broader metabolic and immune signaling. When you zoom out, patterns start to appear. And when you see the pattern, your clinical decisions can change. This episode is about shifting from fragments to frameworks—and why that shift may open up entirely new possibilities for understanding and supporting hormonal health.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, hello there and welcome back to the root cause medicine podcast.
0:03.0	I'm your host for today, Dr. Kate Kreske, and let me start with a clinical scenario that might feel familiar.
0:08.0	A patient walks into your clinic exhausted.
0:11.0	Brain fog, poor sleep, hormone symptoms that don't cleanly fit into one category.
0:16.0	You run the labs, their thyroid looks normal, estrogen's in range, cortisol isn't alarming, and yet the patient
0:21.7	clearly isn't well. So here's the question that might change how you look at hormone labs.
0:26.5	What if the labs you're already ordering could give you x-ray vision into the entire HPTA
0:30.9	axis? Not by adding dozens of expensive tests, but by pairing the hormone labs you already run
0:36.4	with a few inexpensive biomarkers
0:38.4	that reveal how the thyroid, atrinals, and reproductive hormones are influencing each other
0:42.8	behind the scenes.
0:44.6	In today's episode, I'm joined by a clinician, researcher, and educator, Dr. Cheryl
0:49.0	Verdette, who teaches a powerful framework called the Hormonal Matrix.
0:53.2	It's now a course on FullScript Academy,
0:55.1	and today you're going to hear about some of the amazing things she teaches in that course.
0:59.1	We'll talk about how gut microbes can influence thyroid hormone activation. Why cortisol
1:03.5	patterns matter more than just a single number, and how subtle shifts in familiar labs can reveal
1:08.1	much more about a patient's physiology than we were ever taught
1:11.0	in school. If you've ever looked at a hormone panel and thought, something's off here, but I can't
1:15.0	quite see it yet. This conversation will give you a brand new lens. Let's dive in. Before we get
1:20.5	started, though, I've got a special question for the practitioners in the audience. Practitioners,
1:24.9	what if your supplement dispensing patient education and treatment planning all lived
	...

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