From Hot Flashes to Healthspan: The FxMed Guide to Hormones & Longevity

From Hot Flashes to Healthspan: The FxMed Guide to Hormones & Longevity

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Few guests bring the kind of insight and energy that Dr. Carrie Jones does. She’s a dear friend, a brilliant colleague, and truly deserves her title of Queen of Hormones. With more than twenty years in women’s health and endocrinology, she has helped shape how we think about hormone testing and education in functional medicine. In this conversation, we dive into women’s hormones across the lifespan, with an extra focus on perimenopause, and how it ties back to mitochondrial health. Carrie brings humor and clarity to even the most complex topics, dropping clinical pearls along the way. It’s a fascinating and genuinely hopeful discussion you won’t want to miss. ~DrKF

The Future of Longevity Medicine Starts Here

The Future of Longevity Medicine Starts Here

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What stayed with me across these conversations was just how much the lens of longevity medicine is expanding. We explored exciting new science, emerging technologies, and powerful clinical insights, but we also found ourselves asking deeper questions about what it means to be human, how we want to live, and what truly supports a long and well-lived life. I think you’ll appreciate the breadth of perspectives in this episode—and the reminder that the future of longevity medicine can be both scientifically rigorous and deeply human. ~DrKF

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald blog graphic titled “FSH Testing in Perimenopause: Why One Test Isn’t Enough,” with hormone trend lines and a brain illustration.

FSH Testing in Perimenopause: Why One Test Isn’t Enough

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FSH is having a quiet moment in longevity medicine — though most of us have not noticed yet. Follicle-stimulating hormone is still treated, in most practices, as a simple yes-or-no test: ordered once, or at most twice, to confirm menopause (or evaluate fertility), then set aside. But a growing body of research is reframing FSH as something more interesting: a longitudinal signal that may track how a woman’s bone, muscle, brain, and metabolism are aging. These are the very tissues we now think of as longevity organs. If that reframe holds, then the way most of us use FSH is leaving a great deal of information on the table.

Why Chronic Disease May Begin Before Birth

Why Chronic Disease May Begin Before Birth

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As functional medicine clinicians, we often spend our careers helping patients reverse years, sometimes decades, of accumulated dysfunction. But what if some of the most powerful opportunities to influence lifelong health occur long before symptoms ever appear? What if they begin before pregnancy, or even before conception? That’s what makes this conversation so exciting. I sat down with Emily Crouch, Leslie Stone, and Dr. Kalea Wattles to explore the rapidly evolving science connecting preconception health, epigenetics, precision nutrition, and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Together, we discuss why fertility is about so much more than achieving pregnancy. It’s a unique biological window with the potential to influence metabolic health, immune function, neurodevelopment, and chronic disease risk across generations. This conversation also challenged me to think differently about prevention. Functional medicine has always emphasized identifying root causes before disease develops. Preconception care may represent one of the earliest and most impactful opportunities to do exactly that. Whether you work in reproductive health or simply want to better understand where lifelong health truly begins, I think you’ll find this discussion both thought-provoking and clinically inspiring. ~DrKF

How Medicine Got Menopause Wrong | Dr. Kelly Casperson

How Medicine Got Menopause Wrong | Dr. Kelly Casperson

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Menopause is one of the most significant biological transitions a woman will experience, yet the way we’ve defined and managed it has changed remarkably little over the last century. For many women, the conversation still revolves around hot flashes and the absence of menstrual cycles rather than the profound endocrine shift occurring beneath the surface. But if we instead think of menopause as the onset of physiologic hypogonadism, the entire clinical conversation changes. In this episode, Kelly Casperson, MD, challenges long-held assumptions about hormone therapy, menopause, and women’s health. Together, we explore why outdated interpretations of the Women’s Health Initiative continue to shape medical practice decades later, how the recent removal of the boxed warning on vaginal estrogen represents a turning point in women’s health, and why testosterone deserves a much larger role in the conversation. Kelly also makes a compelling case for reframing menopause through the lens of healthspan medicine, emphasizing patient autonomy, individualized care, and the importance of treating the underlying physiology rather than simply managing symptoms. I think this conversation will fundamentally change the way many clinicians think about menopause, hormone therapy, and aging. Check out the show notes at www.drkarafitzgerald.com/fxmed-podcast/ for all the relevant links and resources. ~DrKF

The Infection Driving Chronic Illness | Dr. Richard Horowitz

The Infection Driving Chronic Illness | Dr. Richard Horowitz

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This was a conversation our team had been looking forward to for a while. We came in with a lot of questions, especially around those chronic, persistent cases that don’t respond the way we expect. Dr. Richard Horowitz, one of the most recognized experts in chronic Lyme disease and complex chronic illness worldwide, did not disappoint. He’s spent decades working with exactly these patients. In this episode, we dig into emerging research around persistent infection and neuroinflammation, including findings that roughly half of his Lyme patients tested positive for biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s, and what that might mean clinically. He also shares how his MSIDS model connects many of the chronic conditions we see in practice to the same underlying drivers, offering a more systems-based way to approach these cases.

A woman looking out a sunlit window surrounded by imagery representing fertility, mitochondria, and reproductive health, illustrating a holistic approach to fertility preservation beyond egg freezing.

Fertility Preservation Beyond Egg Freezing

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A 31-year-old patient sits across from me and says, “My friends are all freezing their eggs. Should I be doing that too?” It is a question I hear constantly. And while oocyte cryopreservation is a legitimate tool for specific situations, the way it is being marketed has created a damaging assumption: that fertility is a fixed, steadily declining resource that technology must eventually rescue.

Why Bone Loss Accelerates With Aging: The Gut–Bone Connection

Why Bone Loss Accelerates With Aging: The Gut–Bone Connection

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I just had a really fascinating conversation with the scientists at Sōlaria biō—Mark Charbonneau and Alicia Ballok—about a line of research that genuinely made me stop and rethink how we approach bone health. We talked about their journey from isolating microbes living inside edible plants, to identifying synergistic microbial interactions, to building out the preclinical work and then taking it all the way into human clinical research. It’s a rare and thoughtful progression, and the science is compelling. Their first clinical focus has been bone loss, and the results they’ve seen so far are striking. In an early clinical study, they reported a substantial reduction in bone loss—up to 80% in certain groups—along with meaningful reductions in CTX, one of the key markers we use to assess bone turnover. They’re now recruiting for a follow-up study in postmenopausal women in collaboration with Harvard, and we’ll share details in the show notes for anyone who may be eligible. This is a rich, science-forward conversation, and I think you’ll find it as interesting as I did. ~DrKF

Urolithin A for mitochondria and immune health

Human Clinical Evidence Supporting High-Dose Urolithin A for Mitochondrial and Immune Function

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Age-related declines in muscle function, immune resilience, and cellular energy are closely linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, making mitochondrial-targeted interventions a key focus of aging research. In this context, recent placebo-controlled human trials show that a Urolithin A dose of 1000 mg produces broader and more pronounced effects on mitochondrial gene expression, muscle performance, and immune markers than lower doses.