Postpartum Vaginal Steaming Study Results (Episode 317)

Full Transcript: Episode 317

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 317. Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the fertility awareness mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle out hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with us today. I have an important and informative episode for you today. Today I’m bringing two powerhouse women, Keli Garza from Steamy Chick and Kimberly Ann Johnson from Mega Mamas, to talk about their fourth trimester vaginal steam study. I have been talking about vaginal steaming on the podcast since essentially the beginning. If you’re new to the podcast, have a look back to episode 18. That was the first time I talked about vaginal steaming on the show, and that was my first interview with Dr. Rosita Arvigo, who details the whole process of arpeggio therapy, which is not only vaginal steaming, it also entails abdominal pelvic abdominal therapy, combined with vaginal steaming. And so that was the first time I spoke about vaginal steaming on the podcast, which was five plus years ago. And since then, I’ve had a number of different episodes talking about vaginal steaming, which I will link in the show notes page. I invited both Keli Garza and Kimberly Ann Johnson to the show to talk about the results from their fourth trimester vaginal steam study. And it is truly fascinating. For those of you who aren’t that familiar with vaginal steaming, it is a controversial practice, controversial because mainstream medicine does not accept it and typically does not encourage it to be a valid way to support women, which is really interesting. So we get into that a little bit. But what’s interesting is that this is a practice that has been used throughout all different parts of the world. It is fascinating how many countries, how many women in different countries have used this method and traditionally, you know, midwives throughout the world have used it. And what I found was really interesting, particularly in a previous episode with Keli Garza, was the application of vaginal steaming specifically for postpartum care. And so we really get into the the implications of postpartum steaming specifically, their study looked at a number of very specific and interesting variables, some of which you wouldn’t even think to look at. You wouldn’t even think that vaginal steaming could possibly make an impact. And we talk about some of the challenges with doing research like this and and how research can be dismissed. So when you do a small scale study, of course, the sample size is too small to have statistical significance, but what does that mean? Does it mean that we should throw it all out and it’s completely useless? Or does it mean that when we find certain results, it could then be the first initial study that can lead to other studies that could really look at how effective these practices can be. The lack of Research doesn’t mean something doesn’t work. It means it hasn’t been studied yet. So I’ll go ahead and introduce both of my guests. Keli Garza has a master’s degree in international development, graduating cum laude. Garza is the owner of Steamy Chick, the largest distributor of vaginal steam supplies in the United States. To further vaginal steam education, Garza founded a branch of her company called the Perry Steam Hydrotherapy Institute to trained practitioners in the use of vaginal steam for menstrual and reproductive health and to further research on the gynecological benefits reported by hundreds of customer case studies. And Kimberly is a sexological body worker, a somatic experiencing trauma resolution practitioner, birth doula and single mom. She specializes in helping women prepare for birth, recover from birth injuries and birth trauma and heal from sexual trauma. She’s the founder of Megamama.com, an international holistic women’s healthcare resource for expectant and new mothers. She is the co-founder of the Stream School for Pelvic Care where she trained birth professionals, yoga teachers, somatic therapists and body workers to help women prepare for birth and recover from birth. And she’s the author of the bestselling book, The Fourth Trimester. And without further ado, let’s jump right into today’s episode. And I’m really excited today to have two guests on the show, both of whom have been on the podcast before. We have Kimberly Johnson of Mega Mama and Keli Garza, Steamy Chick. And we are here to talk about the fourth trimester vaginal steam study. I heard about the study, I’ve spoken to you about the study. And I just, I love that you did it. I love that you just took it upon yourself to make this happen so that we could really get into this conversation of vaginal steaming. So it’s interesting because I’ve talked about vaginal steaming on the show basically since the start. It was one of my first episodes, episode that I did with Dr. Rosita Arbigo. And it’s interesting to this day that people will get so kind of upset, you know, how can this girl that’s so science-based talk about vaginal steaming without asking the question of like, why don’t we talk about why it’s not been studied? Maybe that’s it instead of just assuming that because we don’t have a thousand research studies, it’s completely invalid. So with that said, I’d love to give each of you an opportunity to introduce yourself and then we can jump into What happened the result so whoever would like to jump in first?

Keli Garza: Okay, so I’m Keli Garza. I’m the owner of a company named Steamy Chick And so I started steaming myself post actually I started steaming because I had a period problem My period was missing and my hormones seem to be like raging out of control And so I found the Korean spa I did a vaginal steam and my period came back the same day So after that I was like, oh steaming is kind of cool and I integrated it into my monthly period care and then I also used it for postpartum and had really what to me seemed like really different results than my friends who were also giving birth with their postpartum recovery experience. So it was after that time that people started asking me if I would make them vaginal steamsanas and herbs and so I started doing that for my friends and then my friends of friends started asking me if they could buy stuff from me and pretty quickly a company was was formed where I was selling vaginal steam supplies. I was really interested in what was happening to people when they steamed. I wasn’t just giving them the products and then not staying in contact with them and so I started to I was interested in what people’s periods were like before they started steaming or what their postpartum state was and then also how that changed once they started steaming. And so I was able to record the observations that I was making with over 700 women. And at some point I realized I’m doing a lot more than just making vaginal steam supplies. I’m also studying it. And so I formed a branch of my company called the Peristeeam Hydrotherapy Institute, which is for the research of vaginal steaming and

Kimberly Ann Johnson: My name is Kimberly Ann Johnson. I am a birth doula a Sexological body worker a somatic experiencing trauma resolution practitioner. I’m also a single mom I wrote a book called the fourth trimester a postpartum guides healing your body balancing your emotions and and restoring your vitality. After I published that book, kind of during and after, I did the kind of intensive period of work where I worked with over 800 women, specifically helping them heal from birth trauma and sexual trauma and injuries from birth. So as a sex logical body worker, I can work with my hands, I can work vaginally and aimily like a pelvic floor physical therapist might do, but I combined that work with somatic experiencing trauma resolution tools. And so I kind of had this sort of de facto intensive experience working with women and hearing all of their gynecological experiences, birth experiences, sexual experiences and working at the intersection of pelvic sexual and gynecological health. And I’m writing a book right now that’s due in a couple weeks for Harper Collins, the feminist branch Harper wave that’s about the bigger steps of healing both our personal nervous systems and our collective nervous systems. And I was introduced to vaginal steaming from Keli. So I met her in person in San Diego, which is my hometown, and went to a steam circle that she was leading and myself in my own cycle. I haven’t been a mom and won’t be again since then, so I won’t have the chance to experiment postpartum, but I was able to bring my period from 22 days interval to 28 days within one cycle of steaming. And since then, Keli and I have become really good friends as well as sort of colleagues in world takeover masterminders of how we’re going to take back women’s health and the fourth trimester vaginal steam study was a part of that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well let’s jump into, I want to talk about why it was necessary you know to just take the reins and do this study and what are some of the challenges of having vaginal steaming looked at as a legitimate way to support women whether it’s postpartum or in general with period related issues?

Keli Garza: I’ll go with that. So one of the things that people always say is like, well, if for example, if I share like my experience with steaming and that I believe that steaming really helped me to recover a lot faster for my postpartum recovery or do a whole recovery where I see that a lot of people never fully recover. People will Google real quick and say, I see an article that says that vaginal steaming is completely ridiculous and that there’s no evidence that supports it. And a doctor said so. And so I think one thing that is really important for everyone to understand is that just because something hasn’t been studied, doesn’t mean that it’s not legitimate. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have benefit. So the things that have been studied are the things that have been prioritized, and the things that have been looked at, the things that the current doctors who are doing medical research have asked questions about, and /or the things that have actually been funded. There’s all kinds of things that people want to study that they can’t get the funding for. So in the United States, for example, the National Institute of Health is the biggest research funder, in fact, in the entire world, and only 1 % of the funds go towards women’s health issues. >> Well, yeah, that’s a >> Like, 1%. >> [LAUGH] >> I don’t think people realize how little scientific, like how little resources and attention has been given to women’s health issues. And it’s particularly reproductive health issues. >> Right, so yeah, it wasn’t even required that when medical studies were done. It wasn’t even required that women participants were included until the 1990s and legislation had to be passed in order for women to be required to be included on all of the studies that are done. So then the other thing that happens with studies is that studies are only as good as the questions being asked. And it’s actually not true that vaginal steaming hasn’t been studied. I myself didn’t know, but throughout the process of having the company Steamy Chick and doing research, I found that there have been some studies done in Korea, China, India, and recently there was a study done in Surinam and this study was really interesting because it was on vaginal steaming. The scientists were asking if vaginal steaming was causing there to be a higher chlamydia rate among enemies, women. And so what they did was they followed or said they got data on over a thousand women who had chlamydia. And what they did was they also wanted to see what vaginal practices these women were doing, and vaginal steaming was part of that because vaginal steaming is commonplace in Suriname. And so what they did was they looked at this data, the women who weren’t steaming versus the women who were steaming to see if there was a higher rate of chlamydia among the women who were doing vaginal steaming. And the entire study, which probably took millions of dollars to do this study, was non-conclusive. There was not a higher rate. That’s what it concluded. There was not a higher rate, and they were like, “So maybe we have to look into what herbs they’re actually using, because they’re trying to prove that vaginal vaginal steaming is gonna cost people to have chlamydia. Well, what’s so interesting to me is that with that same set of data, you could also look to see if there’s a lower rate of chlamydia, but the researchers never thought to do that because they’re biased, you know, a sexual, an infection.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: So I have to give props to Keli ’cause the study was really her idea. The sort of balls to do it or whatever ovaries to do it, whereas it was both of us together like, okay, let’s just do it. Because it’s not really in my nature to think, I mean, I’m just like, that’s going to take too long. And, you know, who cares anyways, we already know it’s working, we have all this qualitative data. And really, our goal with this study was not only to have the results great, but was to really craft these questions, specifically with postpartum because what we’ve realized and continue to realize is we don’t we meaning really the over culture but also mostly we haven’t we don’t have a common definition of what postpartum recovery is so a six-week postpartum visit or your couple mid-wide visits afterwards it’s very vague about well how are we hiding that someone’s recovered. And so Keli was really like, I wanna look at, let’s look at cervical closure. Let’s look at fundal height. Let’s look at how much someone’s bleeding. All of these things that have been really vague. And like, let’s measure those. So in addition to just figuring out, well, we know it’s effective. And we don’t know it’s effective for everything, We know that it’s effective for certain things because people report it to us, Keli’s personal experience. If women all over the world are doing it or doing similar things, right? Maybe they’re doing smoking, not steaming. So there’s the heat element or maybe they’re doing steaming, but not with those herbs. So there’s also something about the steam. So it was really about let’s try to come up with some kind of parameters that define what postpartum healing is and then also let’s look at how steaming impacts it.

Keli Garza: Go ahead Keli. I think of studies all the time like I don’t know that was funny. I can’t really mention you don’t think in study. I think of studies all the time. I’m like well all we need to do is just take a group of women that don’t steam and then take a group of women who steam you know, like this or with these herbs and then we’ll see what the results are. So, so yeah, so that was basically like there was a problem that we had. Kimberly wrote this book on the fourth trimester and on her healing and all of a sudden now everybody is coming to her with all of these, I mean honestly their horror stories of like not getting the attention or the care that they need and different concerns that they have that haven’t been addressed. The Same with me, I’m hearing these from so many people. And so, Kimberly was like, what can we do that’s gonna have the biggest effects, that’s gonna have the biggest impact, the soonest? And she said, look, vaginal steaming, and the cheapest, that’s right. Kimberly was really strategic with this. She said, vaginal steaming can get into everybody’s home. Kimberly knows how to heal people with sexological body work, but there aren’t that many people trained in that. It’s illegal in certain states, right? So she said, “Badgeable steaming is something, “it’s an intervention that can get to a lot of people “very quickly, it’s very efficient. “And we need to do whatever we can “to continue to educate people more about this “and to do some type of a study “that can help to show people “that this is something that has value.” So So I was like, well, that’s easy. Just take– we need a group of women who have steamed. Sorry, we need a group of people who steam postpartum. And we decided to do five days in a row. I was like, and then what we’ll do is we’ll have a midwife do a pelvic exam on them before they do their steaming and a pelvic exam on them after they do their steaming. And we’ll just see what it looks like. And then we’ll have a control group with people who don’t steam. and we’ll see, we’ll look at the data. So what we did was we had a midwife do a pelvic exam on everybody on day four postpartum, and then we had the steam group steam on day four, five, six, seven, and eight, okay? So they steam five days in a row, and we had the midwife actually administer the vaginal steam session so that they were exactly the same for everybody, okay? And then she did, on day eight, after she did their vaginal steam session, she did another exam on them. So we had exams on day four and day eight, and then we went, she went back and she examines everybody at six weeks as well. And then we had a control group that did exams on day four, day eight, and at six weeks without any vaginal steaming.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: And then we helped them afterwards, ’cause we felt really bad for those people that weren’t getting any of the treatment, but we helped them out afterwards.

Keli Garza: Yeah, that was interesting. The steam group, we’re working with steam to help people and it was really interesting what the non-steam group was dealing with compared to the steam group, right? So that was a little bit difficult, but after the six week checkup, we had the midwife. Well, first of all, they were getting checkups from a midwife and she was consulting with them and then she did steams for them at the final visit. But What we did was we looked at the following health indicators. We looked at the blood pressure. We looked at their pulse. We looked at their fundus size, which is the uterus, the top of the uterus. We looked at their waist size, their weight. We looked at the labia, the damage to the labia and its structure. We looked at the lochia, the discharge, the sutures, hemorrhoids, uterine contractions. we looked at preeclampsia, breast pain, milk supply, bowel movements, whether they could their bladder, we looked at their urination, and we looked at incontinence. So these were the indicators that the midwife was looking at at each one of these exams.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well why don’t you take us through, I mean I’ve got lots of questions but I feel like now that you’ve laid it out, first and foremost, what came to mind earlier when you were talking about the research and how it’s so important, the questions that are asked, I’ve encountered that because as you know, when I wrote my book, it was all about the research because it’s what the people want, right? They want facts. And especially when you’re working with a non-traditional modality that’s not exactly accepted by mainstream medicine, it’s like you need all the help you can get. But when you’re reading these research papers, people want to worship science as if it’s actually objective. When these research, who asks the question, like, which research studies are done? What are they studying? What questions are they asking? And what conclusions are they coming to? Because you can read research papers where the question they’re asking is ludicrous. And the conclusion that they’re coming to is based on their bias. And if you were to come to a conclusion, it would be a completely different conclusion. That can’t be overstated. Science is not valuable, first of all, but I do recognize the importance of it. And I love that even in a case like this, where a lot of people would hear vaginal steaming, and of course, because it’s outside of what they’re accustomed to hearing, because it’s not a pill or something like that, it seems like, oh, this is this crazy thing and as if you couldn’t even study it right but you can study it and it’s not that hard so let’s talk about what happened

Kimberly Ann Johnson: yeah I think we should also though on that note we should mention a few things that that because clearly we have a bias we think and we think vaginal steaming works right so that’s our bias also is very difficult to do this study our ideal was to have 20 women in the steaming group and 20 in the control group and what we ended up with was about six and six because working with pregnant people is hard because predicting dates and birth we couldn’t do we couldn’t use cesarean deliveries for the study because with cesareans you need to wait six weeks before you do so this is just a study on vaginal births and there were a lot of other obstacles and and That is part of the reason why a lot of these studies aren’t done, because it’s very controversial to do studies with pregnant women, right? Like Thalidomide being one of the like historical remembrances. So, and the other thing is, we had an incredible midwife, Raquel Lemus, who was administering the visits and I would joke with her like, “How are we going to control for the Raquel effect?” Because she’s got such an incredible presence, she’s a healer. And part of what women need post And we really were hoping that this would be a preliminary study. That’s how studies are done. There’s small studies and then somebody gets interested in the results and picks it up for a larger study. But within the realm of basically what we did was sort of like privately and crowdfunded, these are preliminary results.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, you know, I appreciate that, Kimberly. I really appreciate you sharing that because, I mean, when you are looking at it from a scientific standpoint, it is, it’s not easy to do a study like this. Given that like you can’t, like it is a placebo possible, like it or not placebo, but like is there a control that’s like, you couldn’t administer a steam without a person know it. Like, like if you’re doing a study on a vitamin or something, you can give them a sugar pill, but you can’t do like a sugar steam, it’s just of it. So maybe you could talk about some of the limitations that you’re aware of and how that could impact it and then we could go into the results. Yeah, I mean the main limitation is that we believe that vaginal steaming works and that it was funded by us and crowdsourced by us. So we both put our own money to fund this study. I chose Raquel, you know, as the as the research coordinator and put my own money towards the study and then we also went to our communities and asked our communities to help with the funding of it. And we’re all vaginal steamers. We’re all steamy chicks, right? So that’s the main thing. And even when, you know, again, everybody’s like, well, show me some proof, you know, I’m like, well, here’s our humble trial study that we did, right? They go, oh, well, this doesn’t count because you’re biased. And I’m like, yeah, I am biased, you know? But like, at this point, you can take this trial study. This study was set up, right? We set it up, we showed what you need to do. Completely non-biased people could now do it if they could get the initial funding grant for a study is $5 million. Okay, bring the $5 million. You know, bring the $5 million and have other people do it. But again, in order to be able to do the trial study, in order to be able to conceive of the study, that’s what we were able to do. We conceived of the study and we showed that it had favorable outcomes. So this is the point that, you know, if people really want that research, they can go ahead and do that. Now, anecdotal evidence matters. The stories that people have, my experience with it, the experience that other people who have used it, these experiences matter, but there are certain people who are going to want to look to that scientific evidence, right? And so it’s like, okay, well, I will go ahead and step back and let medical science do the work then, but here’s what you want to be studying. Here’s how you want to set this up. Here’s the factors that you want to look at. I’m sure that they would also have positive incomes, positive outcomes even if it wasn’t done by people who do vaginal steaming.

Keli Garza & Kimberly Ann Johnson: Well see this is the challenge. I feel like one of the big challenges with science as it is currently is that it’s really not, it’s like Religion and so it’s it’s like a belief system if you have a hypothesis and you put it out there and try to study it What I find is that if it goes against someone’s already existing beliefs They’ll always find a reason to tell you that it doesn’t work So if there’s evidence they’ll still say that you know, it’s not good enough If you do a study, well, you don’t have a big enough sample size and etc etc all the reasons to examine it away From my perspective, I think that a it’s amazing to just go out there and just start somewhere. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You have to start somewhere. And what you said is really important. If you do the the groundwork, if you establish that, okay, this is something that can be studied, I can lay a groundwork of how it can be studied. Yes, we have our biases, we can acknowledge all of that when we do the write up, obviously, and talk about the limitations and how it could be better in future studies. But that lays the groundwork and presents the just the option to be able to study it further. So I do feel that there is a place for this ground floor. Just get in there and just do what you can do. And like, let’s get started here basically. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like one of the really interesting effects is that women have tend to have tended women’s voices in medical science have been very hushed, haven’t really been very prevalent. And I don’t know, like, you know, Again, there’s very few women researchers. The amount of funding, the majority of it goes to men. The majority of the studies go to men’s health rather than to women’s health. And so one of the things that I find is that women tend to be bullied when it comes to health. You know, like why so quickly? The second we say vagina, does everybody just roll their eyes and be like, oh please, right? Like there’s just this, there’s something that happens but the second we start talking, oh, yoni egg, oh please, right? Like there’s just something that happens that even for women to try to talk about their health, there’s like this effect that just wants to just, just smash her down. Just smack the woman and tell her to shut up. Like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There’s just something that’s going on in medical science that has that effect. Like women, women be quiet. You don’t know anything. And so this study, this trial study, what I don’t actually want to be a medical scientific researcher, I don’t have the degree for that. I’m not a medical doctor, right? But it is something that has helped us to stand up for ourselves.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Mm-hmm. Well, I’d love to hear what the results were. So you listed before the different things that you measured and I thought it was fascinating because it was such a long list, detailed list makes you wonder why that’s not studied right now already, first of all. But what happened?

Keli Garza: Okay, so there was I want to say six or seven areas where we found really significant differences between the steam group and the non-steam group. So the first was when it came to the blood pressure and the pulse, okay? Both of them, in both of the groups, they started off about equal, okay? And then after five days of steaming, the steam group, their blood pressure and pulse was way lower than the non-steam group, but still within a healthy range, okay? The non-steam group, their blood pressure and pulse on day eight was actually higher. both their blood pressure and their pulse was higher on day eight and the steam group was lower than when they had started. The thing that’s interesting about that is Eclampsia and preeclampsia is measured based on blood pressure. Okay, so to see that the steam groups blood pressure went down and that the non-steam group’s blood pressure went up may be something that is a key to preventing eclampsia. Now within our study everybody was in the healthy range we didn’t have people who were already had preeclampsia and see what the effect may have been on that but that we found that that trend was going to be something is something that’s pretty significant and something to look into further because when it comes to maternal deaths, several of them happen in the postpartum period with the spike in the blood pressure and the eclampsia. So that was interesting. Then Kimberly describes that a little bit differently. At the end of the day, she’s just looking at it like, okay, if the steam group’s blood pressure and pulse were going down, they seemed like they were less stressed, right?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And Kimberly, I don’t know if you wanna, if you wanna share your thoughts about that.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: No, I wanna share my two favorite results. like that’s not a very good rate in terms of birth outcomes, but it is what I see in my practice. So I was also not surprised, but I was just disappointed because an intact perineum should be the rule, not the exception. So that says something about birth practices and perineal health overall. That said, the people who had stitches At day eight of steaming, already we’re having much less itching and discomfort. At day 30, had none, whereas the people who did not steam were having still a lot of discomfort at day 30. So that’s 22 days of no itching and no discomfort, which we know is going to impact everything about how you feel about other discomfort that you might have from breastfeeding, how you feel about intimacy, how you feel about just life in general, right? So these things that could seem like, oh, well, that’s just, oh, just a little itching. It’s like when you’ve had itching stitches, you know, you can’t really think about anything else and you’re wondering the whole time, is it okay? Are they infected? Is there something wrong. And I know this because I have women either asking me to look at them or calling me to ask me about what they’re seeing all the time. So that is just incredible to know that steaming for five days from day four to day eight could take away stitch discomfort and last until 30 days is like amazing. I mean that alone for anyone who’s had stitching to me just makes the practice worth it. But with hemorrhoids, we saw something really interesting, which is that the hemorrhoids for the people who steamed went away completely by day eight, but if they didn’t continue steaming returned, had returned by day 30. So it was actually the presence and sort of the continuity of steaming that helped with the hemorrhoids. And the same thing with hemorrhoids. I mean, if you’ve got hemorrhoids and your butt’s itching or bleeding or you feel like something’s falling out, it’s hard to really feel confident or at home in your body, right? Because many women postpartum, what they say is I feel like I don’t recognize myself, I don’t know what’s going on and contribute to our mental health because those are not separate things. So the traditional mental health checklist that is the American gynecologists, College of Gynecologists like their fourth trimester sort of manifesto is like let’s build the mental health checklist And let’s get women more doctors postpartum visits I’m like right on if that includes steaming and some body work and like some actual Care breathing pelvic floor help, but if that’s just like sitting down with a more extensive checklist Which most of us could probably answer yes to postpartum And I postpartum, I don’t think that it’s helpful. So I was very excited to see just with those two specific things for me was enough to be like, yes. Absolutely.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, Keli or Kimberly, did you wanna share any of the other, ’cause I know I heard you talk about some of, some things that you talked about were really unexpected to me that could even be affected by steaming when you were talking about the results and even what you’ve spoken about so far, you wouldn’t, I wouldn’t necessarily think, I mean, it makes sense, I guess, both from a general perspective, I wouldn’t necessarily think that it would have an impact on blood pressure, you know what I mean? Like, it wouldn’t be the first thing I’d be like, yeah, this is how it’s going to help you. I had no idea about that one.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: Like, you know, again, we did go in with a bias, but I had never even thought about people’s blood pressure or pulse until this study. We had the data and I had no idea what it said until, you know, until we looked at it and we’re like, okay, you know, and still we were looking at it and we didn’t even know what it meant or if it was healthy. But Raquel was like, well, as midwives, as birth care caretakers, we’re looking at blood pressure to make sure that the woman doesn’t have preeclampsia or clampsia, because if she has a clamsia, that’s when that’s when she’s at risk of dying. I’m like, whoa, okay, so that’s good then. Yeah, it was going down. Okay, good. It didn’t go too low. It stayed within healthy range. Okay, good to know, right? Okay, so yeah, um, so labia. So she looked at the labia, meaning that she just, she just looked at their labia to see if it was swollen. As she said, gapping, which is like, if it’s like still falling, if it still showed the trauma of the baby coming through. And what we found was that after five days of steaming, the steam group, their labias looked completely intact. They looked like they were pre-pregnancy labias. There was no evidence that they were swollen or gapping at all. And the entire non-steamer group’s labia was still swollen and gapping. Wow.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: The fundal height was also really interesting because that’s measuring how fast the uterus returns to its size and you can measure that through also the waist measurements. So you know from a popular perspective women might be really attracted to having their waist size go back to normal faster. The way I look at it as a body worker as the faster, and it’s not about like healing faster, it’s about having access to your vitality sooner, so that not so that you get up and walk around and run around and do all the things, but so that you have your vitality and you’re concentrating that vitality. So for me as a body worker, I think, oh, well, if the fundal height is going down, meaning also measured by the waist getting smaller. That means less pressure on the lower back, less pressure in the pelvis, so less likely to feel instability in the pelvis in the lower back, which is what so many women have postpartum, which is like my whole structure is so loose, right? Because all the ligaments are still loose and all the relaxing is happening from breast milk and breastfeeding. So the fact that we could see that seeming was helping to bring tone and location back into the uterus also suggests that the other organs can begin to go back into their proper places. Proper dismeaning optimal in terms of a non-pregnant body because they’re in the right places for a pregnant body, but they take time to time to make that transition after you’re not pregnant, that your psoas starts to go back to the right place, your intestines, your rectum, that all of those things and less pressure also potentially means less incontinence, less hemorrhage because the weight’s not sitting down on your pelvic floor or pushing in different directions in your pelvis. So, that’s how I read that one and also, you know, it’s incentivizing to know, oh, because we also study those hormone transition, but we know over time, because in the Mexican culture, women are taken into the Temescal or into like a sonal like structure, postpartum with the midwife, why? So they can sweat it out. They can sweat out the, this total hormonal switch between all of the adrenaline and cortisol from labor and birth, the huge progesterone drop when the placenta is delivered. And then as that switch happens, the body work and the steaming is what helps the tissues flush. So I believe that the steam is working in the same way. We didn’t study that, but we could make that inference. And again, that’s helping this transition so that we don’t feel so depleted and kind of so out of sorts. And when Keli talks about her own postpartum experience, she really talks about that. And I also just think it’s because we know we have a tool and we have some kind of autonomy and authority over what we’re doing because most women, if they birth in a hospital, they leave the hospital, they might ask the nurse, like, “Is there anything I should know. And the nurse is like, well, take it easy. You’re like, take it easy. Okay. That could mean like, don’t go to the market tomorrow or don’t go to the market for two weeks or, you know, I mean, who knows what that means and or take care of yourself. Okay. Well, that’s kind of impossible, but whatever. And then there just isn’t any standard. So knowing, you know, and it’s, it’s actually, I to be honest, I get really frustrated because like I have two steam chairs. I have three actually. One of them is lent out in California and two of them are lent out here because I women come to me and there’s something going on and I’m like you need to steam and they’re like but I don’t have a chair and it’s like well here’s the setup and da da da and then I’m like okay and I just go buy a chair and send it to them and then I find out they get used it like twice and so right now I’m on quarantine I want my chairs like where’s my steam chair They’re all lent out and it’s like I would actually be using it and everyone in my house would be using it So just having the chair in the herbs doesn’t help. You’ve actually got to do it, but doing it Involves a lot, right? Because just doing it means I’m taking time to care for myself and I’m gonna actually have a positive experience with my vulva after having an experience that was unlike anything I’ve ever had in my life. And it’s something that feels good. It smells good, it feels good. Yeah, I mean, women have to, you have to do it, but at least it’s something you can do. You’re not waiting around wondering, like afraid to look at yourself and then like, okay, well, like, I don’t have any guidance at all.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I mean, so important what you said and I’m glad that you brought it back to like it actually feels good. So for everyone who hears about vaginal steam, I remember the first time I heard about vaginal steaming, I had no idea what it was. And I thought actually my first thought was like, oh great, it’s another cosmetic thing that women are supposed to do. Like I actually was kind of like, are you kidding me? Because it was like, when is Paltrow? And I’m just like, ugh. And then somebody, thank goodness, corrected me and was like, you should check out Dr. Rosita Arvigo and learn about this. And I was like, okay, ’cause obviously I don’t know about this. And I discovered that it absolutely has nothing to do with that. So I think that’s a misconception that people have, that it’s this thing about cleaning the vulva because it’s dirty. So they’re so far off of what it actually is. And the other thing, the myth that is always kind of spewed about is that it’s like painful as if I’m always just like, who’s gonna sit anyways? From a practical standpoint, that to me. you would leave the sauna if it was too hot. So from a very basic level, I love what she said about how your vulva, if you’ve delivered vaginally, has certainly gone through something and is not really getting any care from anywhere else because there’s not really anything that we have. It’s certainly not something doctors are concerned about, but there’s nothing that we really have to just do anything other than a sitz bath and there’s a few things but I just love that I love that I love that it’s something that feels good that’s with a woman and her own body before she even considers intimacy with someone else because there’s this big you know elephant in the room about like what’s it gonna be like when I have sex again and I don’t even know if I want it and you know it’s intimidating to look at at your own for most postpartum, but this is, I also consider it to be like an intermediary baby step of like coming back to your body first, your body without a baby in it, without an expectation of a partner and really having ownership of it so that when you do want to share yourself again, you also have some felt sense experience of what’s happening in your body, right? Of like, what’s, what’s actually going on? I think it’s important to also say that vaginas do smell lots of different ways. We all know that. So that doesn’t mean that there’s something bad or gross about it. It just means that like alkaline fluid smells certain way, acidic fluid smells another way, metallic fluid smells a different way. And those are all things that you, you know, you call it the fifth vital sign. Those are all things that are really giving us incredible information about what’s happening. So having a tool where we could actually be like, huh, this doesn’t really smell like blood. This smells like endometrial tissue or this smells like something else. I mean, for me, I would smell differently post-hardim and I couldn’t figure out what was going on and my midwife kept telling me, no, everything looks fine, but I asked my mom to look because I’m like, I just don’t think everything’s fine, not just because of the smell just because of how I felt and when my mom looked she was like yeah everything’s not fine which was a little scary but it was also affirming because at least it was someone being straight with me about what actually like because I’m just like I don’t know what’s going on you know I just don’t know I’m so it’s definitely not a practice because because we think that when people are like vagina positive A lot of times they want to say vaginas don’t smell but vaginas do smell sometimes Yeah, my I wish I had it like because I should memorize it because I use this example a lot But the vagina monologues has a monologue about that and and I’m not gonna do a justice But basically it’s like well if you go to the restaurant order fish You don’t expect it for it to come back smelling like I don’t know like perfume. It smells like fish So if you’re ordering pussy, I believe the line was it’s gonna smell like pussy. And I just, I mean, I’m being crass and whatever, but at the same time, it is what it is, what I find in my work, because of course, here I am, not even just looking at it, we’re going in there, we’re feeling the cervical fluid, we’re touching it. I’ve had a number of women come to me and ask me, right, because we’re always talking about it. You know, I’ve noticed that I have a more pronounced smell as I approach ovulation, and It actually makes me really nervous and I have to kind of take them to the other end of the deep end of that Well, some women actually will put that fluid on there like in the places where you would put Like cologne or whatever like on your neck. I’m touching my neck here behind your ankles But anyways, so some women will actually purposely put that on their bodies so they can attract Whoever men women whoever so to try to flip it on its head because a lot of women are so ashamed of their vulvas and so scared that it might smell, that it’s never occurred to them that there are people who really like the smell. And around the time of ovulation, it’s more pronounced for a reason. And it’s all part of this interesting pheromone situation where I think for a lot of women, it’s never occurred to them that their partner might like it around that time. And since we’re talking about it, and I’m going on about it, another interesting thing about it is that when you’re approaching ovulation, that tends to be when your fluid is sweeter because it’s not as acidic around that time. And then it’s actually outside of that time that it would actually be more bitter. So TMI, whatever day this is, but I think it’s so important to have these conversations and stop being so shamed of It’s like, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly normal. And yes, they have a smell and they’re supposed to.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: And same with ejaculatory fluid. You know, if we just approximate ourselves to factual fluids and not so helpful for birth and for postpartum that are so quote unquote messy, right? So I like to help women learn how to ejaculate pre-birth because birth And orgasmic birth is so much like that downward ejaculatory energy rather than like a clitoral orgasm. So I 100 % agree. And any of these practices is really about, you know, we live in such a neurocentric culture. We think that the rational, the verbal, and the intellectual are more reliable, primal, or the physical. The truth is, Bobby has all the wisdom in it, and as women, it’s male culture that needs rights, distinct rights of passage. As women, we already have the rights of passage. That is the blood rights. So if we turn it in and respect these processes as such, then we have the inbuilt knowledge that we need. We just have to remember it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Mm-hmm. You know it occurs to me so for a lot of women charting learning about their cycle is one way for them to connect with what’s actually happening in their body because So many women feel disconnected. It’s just how and how could you how could we not in this culture? I won’t go into all of that but esteeming is another way to connect with your body to connect with that part of your body and to do something nice for it that is not sexual And so And so I suppose that the cherry on top is that there’s also all of these other benefits that we wouldn’t have necessarily thought of. So you were talking about the fundal height and how it helps to, or the STEAM participants had these great results. And I know Keli, I had heard you talking in, when you were talking about the study somewhere, I’m not sure where it was, about how to like the waste and like the kind of weight loss concept and yes of course that’s what people want but at the same time let’s just talk about it and kind of talk about that complexity because it’s like within a culture that tells you you’re supposed to have this pre-pregnancy body in a couple of weeks and to be honest as a Canadian that feels to be because there’s no mat leave so in Canada it’s like yeah of course that’s a thing but like if you’ve got 12 months if you are employed and you have the ability to take that much time. There’s less of a push to be, have this perfect pre-pregnancy body like immediately, if you know what I mean.

Keli Garza: Yeah, yeah, well, interestingly enough, that’s one of the things that does happen when you go to the doctor. They actually weigh people, right? They weigh people throughout the pregnancy and they weigh people postpartum. So that’s actually one of the like tradition, like, you know, like Western medicine indicators that they will look at. So here’s what we found in the study. What we did was, okay, so with the fundal height, just one last thing about it, it was really interesting because Raquel was saying midwives do measure it. They’re looking to see when the fundus, when the uterus goes back down below the pelvic bone and they’ll use it, they’ll do fingers underneath the, to see like how low it’s going. And so our steam group, their uterus went down in size like way quicker. And what she did was she measured the height and the width of the uterus. Again, something that you’ve never seen in a doctor’s office or even that midwives wouldn’t do, but we took real measures. And so our steam group had like a much smaller one, but then she also did their waist size. She measured their waist size and she weighed them. And what we found was that the steam group, they, after five days of steaming, they had all lost weight and lost inches off of their waste. The non-steam group was static. They were, if anything, just a tiny bit heavier and their waste was a little bit larger at the eight days mark. And then at that point, when we went to the six-week mark, the non-steam group, they actually did start to lose weight and lose weight off of their waste, inches off of their waste. And the two groups, once after day A, after the steam group stopped steaming, they lost weight at the same rate, okay? However, the steam group ultimately lost more because the initial weight that they lost and the inches off of their waist, the non-steam group never caught up to that. So the steam group had was two inches, had on average was two inches smaller with the waist size and I think three or four pounds lighter with their weight size. So it was actually pretty interesting to see that the steaming helped to initiate that loss and that without the steaming, the non-steam group actually never caught up to that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and were there any other results that stood out to you or anything that was surprising that you didn’t expect or anything that you did expect and it fully confirmed it.

Keli Garza: So the two other ones, or the three other ones were bowel movements. The steam group had better bowel movements all throughout the entire time, except for starting. Starting everybody was a little bit off, but then by day eight and at the six weeks, the steam group completely had better bowel movements as the non-steam group was more constipated.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Okay, I was gonna ask what do you mean by better, but I think you just answered that.

Keli Garza: Yeah, so the non-steam group was more constipated, and the steam group was more regular with their bowel movements. And then lochia, the discharge that happens post, this is the way the midwives look at it. So there’s your first stage is just like heavier, then your second stage is a little bit lighter and pink, and then your final stage might be yellow. And so our entire steam group moved to stage two of their lochia. They were all at yellow lochia by day eight, whereas the non-steam group was all still at the first stage with the red stuff. And then by six weeks, our steam group didn’t have any lochia, and the non-steam group was still dealing with lochia. So that’s that discharge. They were still having to wear the panty liners. They were still having to wear the pads, but at six weeks where our non-steam group, they were already past having to wear pads. We don’t know what day the lochia stopped entirely because it was somewhere been eight days and six weeks and we don’t know exactly what day, but the steam group was dealing with having to wear panty liners and that discharge a lot fewer days than the non-steam group. And then the last thing is contractions. People have contractions postpartum. You got your baby, you’re nursing them and you feel those contractions. So everybody had, we had them rate their contractions by like mild, medium, more severe. And in fact, our steam group, when we started, they, a lot of them had severe contractions. So they actually started off worse than our non steam group. But by eight days, after the steaming, they all of them, the only ones, there was only like two that still had contractions, and they reported them as light. And by six weeks, there were no contractions. Our non steam group still had medium and heavy contractions. at day eight, and at six weeks, two of them were still dealing with contractions. So those were pretty significant as well. And those are actually out of all the postpartum indicators, those are the ones that I’m the most surprised aren’t looked at or evaluated by doctors more, right? Because that’s like, you know, you know that you’re still recovering when you’re still dealing with pads and when you’re still dealing with contractions. So those were pretty significant findings as well.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, when you said You know, it’s like I was trying to like I know it’s like don’t do this Lisa But I was I think I was trying to walk upstairs because it’s just the way my house is Okay I was trying to walk upstairs and I couldn’t walk up the stairs and I buckled and I had to get my husband to carry me up The stairs because it was just so painful. It was like and I’ve heard I don’t know But I’ve heard that it gets worse every time because now your uterus has already expanded and contracted and expanded and contracted So that would have been very useful. I Anything to make that less, I would have jumped right on that.

Keli Garza & Kimberly Ann Johnson: Wow, yeah, yeah. For sure.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, now that we’ve kind of gone through, I mean, after having done the study, what would you say I feel like, especially there’s times I suppose when I’ve seen really vicious attacks. And I think actually, I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but the one time that I was fully attacked on Twitter and it wouldn’t stop was and it’s so funny because I had these posts like running so the post was already like four years old because I did this interview with Dr. Armigo like so long ago that you know you kind of forget that the posts are running but there was one time the Twitter like lost their mind on me obviously on a smaller scale but for me it felt like it really kind of like hundreds of people like coming in like you know attacking me the one time was because of a vaginal steam post and there’s a particular doctor who I don’t have to name but both of you know exactly who I’m talking about who is super anti-steaming and just goes crazy on everybody about it. Did you want to talk a little bit about what the deal is with certain doctors and why they’re so anti-vacional steaming?

Keli Garza & Kimberly Ann Johnson: Lisa, you got dragged on Twitter? Oh no! Yeah I mean, I don’t know. I think there’s like, you know, there’s some type of a knee-jerk reaction, like that certain people have about vaginal steaming where they hear it and they just think it’s ludicrous. And if they have that degree, then they can completely shame and bully everybody. But Kimberly Johnson actually, so the doctor is Dr. Jen Gunter who has a, sorry, she has a special, you know, She’s an OBGYN. I told you you both knew who I was talking about. She just hates vaginal steaming and thinks it’s really ridiculous, right? And she just won’t give up and she likes to bully people about it. And so Kimberly Johnson, there was another OBGYN who we know that she’s vaginal steaming positive. We know that she’s done it herself. We know that she has heard the stories of the positive impacts people have had. And so her name is Dr. Jennifer Lang and Kimberly interviewed her on her podcast, and it’s a really great interview. But she just came out on Facebook and was just like, enough, I’m also an OBGYN. And if women are finding benefit to this, stop bullying them and have some humility that medical science doesn’t know anything. There was a statistic, something like 40 % of everything that a doctor learns in medical school will come outdated or will be proved wrong, like, you know, within the next 10 years or something. And that’s what medical doctors work with that statistic, knowing that that’s true. So she was just like, have some humility. And then there was another doctor that I talked to about it, who’s also an OBGYN. Her name is Dr. Lorena White. She’s excellent. She actually has a vaginal steam facilitator on her staff in her clinic in Maryland. And what she was saying was, again, who cares if it’s treated by, and this is the doctor, she says, who cares if it’s proven by medical science? We have stuff proven by medical science that ends up getting, what is it, recalled all the time, right? So she’s like, that itself is a measure for whether or not people should consider something valuable or not, or whether or not they should go. I think one thing is somebody considering something invaluable. The other thing is the bullying that happens. Why are women getting bullied? I get dragged too. I get dragged. I can’t imagine. Yeah, and it’s just like, why are they coming? Like, I mean, the things that people say, like the most recent one last week, this woman was going, she called us snakes. She was like, well, you snakes are just trying to say anything you can to sell your products. And I was just like, um, okay, we’re going real far, real quick there, you know, bring it out, bring it out the way it works. ‘Cause obviously there’s like tons of money in steaming because obviously it’s something that women have to continue to come back to you for. And I mean, you know what I mean? Like it’s, this is something that women can learn to do and do on their own. Yes, of course it’s wonderful to have a steam chair, but she could do it leaning over a couch with like a bowl. Like you don’t have to buy anything to do this. That’s the answer to your question is that it gives, it puts power back in women’s hands and makes us less dependent on drugs, on authority, and women who are rooted in their own power and authority have always been seen as dangerous. So it’s interesting because, you know, there’s certain topics like this, right? Vaccines and vaginal steaming that it just seems to be something that people, it’s like the end of the line for them, you know? Like, and then the arguments about it never come out of personal experience they don’t come out of like I tried it and it didn’t work for me or I’ve seen 12 patients who tried to do this I think that what we want to what we want to acknowledge or I want to acknowledge and what I was saying at the beginning of this is does vaginal steam work for everything? No. Will it work for every person? No. Is there a place for obstetrics for certain things? Yes. But is obstetrics and gynecology a field with a very sordid and racist history? Yes. And is it overused, overprescribed, overindicated as yet another way of sublimating voices, especially voices of black and brown women? Yes. So when you’re looking at a movement that Keli’s been a huge part in pioneering, that is primarily black and brown women who are treated worse, the worst by the traditional, and not just treated badly, but killed by the medical system. And those are the women that are practitioners that are bringing it into their communities that are seeing fibroids drop in the toilet and healing cysts and getting rid of BV, why is that so easy to dismiss? Why are those voices considered unimportant? So I think like most things, this happens to be something that just exposes so much bias, so much structural injustice, and just infuriates people, but when people write the reasons the two main reasons it’s that not effective are number one because Steam is moist and isn’t that area moist enough already. So why would you add more humidity there? And then the other one is women burn themselves. So Once we get past those two things. It’s really easy not to burn yourself. You lift a butt cheek It’s like I do it all the time and as far as the moisture is we’re Actually, we don’t. Shelly Boyd and her husband, Mike Phillips, are the hosts of the podcast, and they talk with a lot of the practitioners that were involved in the study and other people who’ve used staining for different reasons. We’re centering different voices, basically, and we’re saying that, yeah, we’re doing this study because let’s have some data and let’s see also, let’s just see, okay, so if you need a preliminary study and that’s what it takes to get bigger funding. Okay, well, now that we ask the questions, is anyone gonna pick it up? Like, what it, like, okay, let’s see. There are some people that are studying vaginal fora. That’s a good step. But do, how much do we really care about women’s postpartum health? And for me, this was about how do we get as many women as possible, the best care possible in the cheapest way. And this is one technology that’s been used all over the world. You can go to Keli’s website, seemechick.com. There’s a map there and every place that she hears a story from somebody or there’s been a study everywhere from Suriname, like she mentioned, to Palau, to all over Europe, Mexico. So this isn’t some new invention that we just came up with ’cause we thought, what the heck, let’s try it. We’re actually resting in ancestral earth-based wisdom and validating it.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: I just, I don’t know, I would love for the world to be able to critically think A and B, just come from a more heart-centered place. Like if you can critically think, then you wouldn’t dismiss women’s actual lived experiences. I had an interview with a doctor yesterday and she said this revolutionary thing. You ready for it? She was like, I listened to my patients, even if the tests are contrary to their symptoms. So how is this revolutionary? This is where we are. So I feel like critical thinking and In the true spirit of science, because honestly the true spirit of science as I learned it is to make hypotheses and to ask questions and to be allowed to do that and to then observe and actually, you know, like the truth is the truth, it just is the truth doesn’t care if you believe it or not. So if women are steaming and they’re seeing results, if women are steaming and they’re getting their periods are getting better. They’re seeing all kinds of different results. This particular study is a tangible example of the results that women see when they steam. It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, because it’s happening. I just love to get past this and actually start listening to women’s experiences and validating that. I think that’s what your podcast is doing. We’re talking about what’s happening maybe in quote unquote the mainstream, but Keli’s got a practitioner as there’s a peri-steam hydrotherapist, peri-steam, is that what it’s called, peri-steam, peri-steam hydrotherapist in almost every state in the US. And this is happening and this will happen. This is not like if it’s going to happen, it is happening. And so, you know, we kind of just, we just let those debates go and we get back to our work about how can we keep getting women information that they need exactly what you’re doing. These people are hungry, it’s actually starving for these conversations. Many women, they don’t need a doctor to validate it. We’re not out here trying to convince anyone. We’re talking to the people who are already in their gut and their womb are like, this makes sense. Yes. Or have tried everything and are at the end of their options. Yeah. Okay. Lisa, you always like it. I’ve shared a couple of books with you before, but are people just so like, you know, why are they dismissing women when they’re saying this helps me? Why are they able to, you know, why, where are they coming from that they think it’s okay to do this? So there’s this book called Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor, and it’s a Chinese doctor, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, in the 1400s who wrote her journal and her notes. And what was so interesting to me about reading this book– I was reading it to see if she was doing vaginal steaming with people, which she was. But what was so interesting to me was she talks about– when she’s writing her medical journal and why she decided to write it down and try to publish it, was she said, for everybody who’s ridiculed me. She was being ridiculed and dismissed left and right. And she said, those women, she’s like the doctors, all the doctors that have turned away from these women, they came to me and I healed their infections and I helped their uterus go back inside, you know, they’re dealing with prolapse and all of the same problems that women are dealing with, she was saying that these women were being ridiculed Doctors and so so she was like so why so why criticize me when you didn’t want to help them? Right, and so she’s got all of these techniques to help these women And yet she’s still dismissed because of it and she was ridiculed like it was like oh and she thinks she’s a doctor, right? Yeah, like remember the doctor that suggested that they should wash their hands from like Dealing dead like corpses and then like delivering babies ’cause all these women were dying. Yeah, he was also really cute. He died like for it alone. Okay, so I don’t know that history, that is crazy. And then another book that recently came out is a really great scholar, her name is Monica Green, and she wrote this book called Making Women’s Medicine Masculine, The Rise of Male Authority in Premodern Gynecology. And this book is incredible. There’s a French doctor a French female doctor in here that they put on trial and they were like you’re a doctor and she’s just like Yeah, they were like you’re a doctor and she’s like yeah, and they were like ha ha ha. She says she’s a doctor Read this and she’s just like I can’t read and they were like see everybody She’s not a doctor and ultimately they killed her like she was guilty of practicing medicine without a license because she wasn’t even literate and couldn’t go to medical school to get a degree and was killed as a result of it and was ridiculed the whole entire time. She was dragged. She was dragged first, you know, her reputation and then literally she was dragged because they were making fun of her, the idea that she could be helping women again with what? Infections, prolapse, like female issues, infertility. Like she was helping women with female issues. So this idea of helping women with female issues from women healers has been ridiculed for a long time. And so this book was interesting because it says that basically all of the European countries passed laws in the like 1400s and 1500s that made it illegal to practice medicine without a license. And that’s what pushed all of the women healers out because a lot of them weren’t literate and weren’t able to get into these medical schools that didn’t allow female admittance and so that’s basically when you had this just this just nullification of women healers and that no matter what if a woman says something you can just discredit her as not a medical doctor not a medical doctor not a medical doctor not a medical doctor but what were the medical doctors studying and what kind of science did they did they develop they developed one around surgery and pharmaceuticals and kind of nothing more and there’s so much to show that, I mean, even the language that they developed, hysterectomies is based on the idea that women are hysterical and so that when you take out their womb that they’re not hysterical anymore. Like there’s so much prejudice that’s in our current modern gynecological system. It’s insane, right? There’s no way that that’s objective. Women are not, it’s not objective that the womb makes a woman hysterical. That’s not objective. And for us to still call it a hysterectomy is just the sign of how much we’re still under a really, really male dominated science that itself was so prejudice that they developed, a lot of the techniques that they’ve even developed, you know, have that inherent prejudice inside of them. So anyways, All of learning all of that helped me to just realize, oh, okay, like I’m just wrong because I’m a woman. Like I’m just wrong because I’m a woman looking at the body and trying to find a way to heal it. Like this has been what has happened with all women. You’re wrong too, Lisa. You’re wrong too, Kimberly. We’re not allowed to talk about female issues and solutions for them. We’re just not allowed to because we’re not medical doctors and we’re not men, right? And even the women who have now become medical doctors are under this, you know, patriarchal system. It’s hard for them even to feel them to be researchers that are getting funding compared to the men or that are able to even ask the questions. Well, and you said something that will stick with me, which from the second book that you held up there, the woman was basically saying, like, here you are, persecuting me and calling me an idiot for helping these women that you don’t even want to help. And then you have nothing for, like A, you don’t even want to help them, and B, you have nothing to help them with. And that’s … That’s the interesting thing about this postpartum study. I’m like, fine. Somebody else go do these exams on women. Somebody else look at their blood pressure. Somebody else look at their lochia. Nobody else is looking at that. Nobody cares. These women are left alone from the moment they leave the hospital, if they at a hospital birth until six weeks. This is a completely, like women are completely left alone, like for it, as far as medical treatment goes during this time. What we’re doing, like why would anybody criticize it? Just leave her alone instead? Like what, why? Nobody cares. Nobody’s doing anything for the woman during that time period. In fact, what’s happening here in New York is that there is money that’s going towards black maternal health outcomes and postpartum outcomes. But what that actually includes is home visits usually from social workers and it’s directed towards low-income folks who don’t want clinical social workers in their house, right? They don’t want to be evaluated. And I’m like, okay, I’m totally with home visits because that’s what women actually need they really don’t need to be going places they you know I cannot believe how many places postpartum women are going and and furthermore pediatric offices need to have mother care in them just period but that’s another solution oriented thing but as far as and you know I’m working on this and if anyone listening has an in with the mayor in New York and can facilitate a conversation there but like I’m all about home visits just give women some care on the home visits don’t ask them questions you don’t need to ask them about if they’re depressed they’re probably depressed and isolated they don’t have any help they don’t have the right food to eat they don’t have any clue about what’s happening so like if they have stitches then steam them So their stitches feel relief. If they’re bleeding too much, try steaming. Make food while you’re there that’s actually nourishing and gonna help them. Make tea that will actually help them. And if you’re talking to them, don’t evaluate them, listen to them. So whether or not this is the thing, it’s like I’m constantly masterminding. Well, how can, because I’m not interested, postpartum doulas, it’s a great profession and all, but how long is it gonna take us? So because– post post post post for for for for. like it’s just we have to take care of each other there’s no way that we can actually have any real power or agency if we’re not even intact physically and that’s what we see we see women who like you do that have polycystic ovarian syndrome or have an autoimmune disorder that started after they had a baby or they have pain in their tailbone that’s never gone away since they had a baby Or you know, I mean it just the list just goes on and on prolapse, you know, I have one on my podcast have one episode that’s Healing prolapse without surgery Another hugely controversial topic Why because pts are trained that they can’t say that you can heal prolapse you can only say you can manage it Because if you say healing then that goes back to insurance companies and that goes back to billing and that goes So women get all these diagnoses just so they can get treatment and then they attach to the diagnosis, I know you can heal prolapses. 100%. I have helped people up to a stage three prolapse, recover completely, not manage symptoms but actually recover. So we know how to do this and there are many people working to do it. So yeah, let’s just keep asking the good questions.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Mm-hmm. Well, ladies, I mean, this has been epic, I have to like we’ve gone far over, we can keep talking, but I want to make sure that I respect your time to kind of bring our conversation to close. We’ve covered so much and it’s so important and I’ll, you know, maybe we’ll have to do this again. But if you could conclude with like, I feel like we, you know, what you said is right on. But is there anything else that you’d want the listener to know about the implications of steaming postpartum.

Keli Garza & Kimberly Ann Johnson: I want people to know that it’s okay, they can do it. And they don’t have to convince their husband or their mom or their sister or their doctor. But if they want to do it, they can.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: All right, well, wonderful words to end on. Thank you so much. You too, our powerhouses. I love that you’re in the world taking it over, supporting women through vaginal steaming which anyone can do and it’s like you said it’s cheap, it’s effective, you can do it on your own, it’s empowering and anytime I can support you to share this message I am here to do it.

Keli Garza: I want to say one more thing so yes anyone can do it but there are people who are trained to help someone so it’s kind of like Chinese herbs like anyone can take herbs but it’s better to have personalized, customized herbs for you. So there are some counter indications, like I mentioned earlier, if you have a cesarean delivery, not a good time to steam until six weeks postpartum. There’s some blood pressure considerations. I actually don’t even know all of the counter indications, but there’s many practitioners. You can go to SteamyChick.com. Raquel, who led this study and conducted it, she’s a certified practitioner. She’s also a midwife. I also want women to know that you can get well woman care. So postpartum or not, you can get most of your female health needs met through midwives. You don’t need to go to the OBGYN and many women don’t know that. They don’t know that like they’re like, well, I thought it had to go. No, you don’t. You can actually go to a midwifery practice and midwives know how to take care of most things. They know how to get blood tests. They know how to do pap smears. They know how to, a lot of them are, you know, have herbal medicine as part of their practice. So I think that’s really important. And I wouldn’t say, you know, Keli has a great test on her site. So if you’re in a, if you’re in the range of normal symptoms, like you’re just trying to work with a long period or a short period, or you have frequent yeast infections or something, that’s pretty straightforward. But if you have something else that’s like, you’ve been trying to get pregnant for five years, or then I really think it is useful to get a consultation, it’s affordable, and to respect yourself and respect the practice, which is a practice. So yes, you can do it on your own. And if you have any questions because you have a special condition than I would consult someone.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you so much for sharing that. And I’d love for both of you just to share where people can go to find you, where they can, your podcast again, if you can mention it. And also your book, Kimberly, all of the things.

Keli Garza: Okay, so I’m available at SteamyChick.com on Instagram. And then, sorry, I’m also @SteamyChick on Instagram and then I have a Facebook group that you can look for at the Steamy Chick vaginal steam forum. And then you’re also going to want to check out the website for trimestervaginalsteamstudy.com.

Kimberly Ann Johnson: You can reach me at magamamas on Instagram, so m-a-g-a-m-a-m-a-s for my website Magamama.com. On the site right now, there’s a series of meditations that’s for healing from a difficult birth. So if you had a birth that you feel like there’s still a lot of lingering things from that, that could be really helpful. My book, I have a book that’s called The Fourth Trimester, which lays out a lot of these practices, including vaginal steaming, as well as a deck of cards called The Fourth Trimester cards, just daily inspiration and wisdom that includes steaming, but also includes poetry and meditations and other kinds of resources that you might not think of postpartum and we have the podcast Hot and Steamy that really focuses on steaming for the people who want to like dive deep and are super turned on by just learning everything about it right now.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: All right well I’ll make sure to link all of those resources. Thank you ladies so much for being here today. Thanks Lisa. Thank you so much Lisa. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at FertilityFriday.com /317. I hope that you enjoyed my interview today with Keli and Kimberly-Ann. I mean, it’s so important to talk about these topics and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to have both of them on the show to talk us through the results of their study. And what really stood out to me was that concept of what intervention could we roll out in the quickest way possible that could have the biggest impact on the largest number of women postpartum that is low-cost and really accessible. And so the implications of this study and the possible benefits to women in the postpartum period for such a low cost, minimally invasive option for those of you who have never engaged in a vaginal steam for whom it sounds kind of strange. The first time I heard a vaginal steam, it also sounds strange to me, but after having had many, it feels similar to either taking a warm bath or going into the sauna or something, of course, in the vulva area, but it’s so minimally invasive that the experience of it, you almost think to yourself, how could something so gentle and peaceful and calming and non-invasive even do anything? Because it’s just such a peaceful, calming, non-invasive, relaxing, enjoyable experience that the results that can happen are kind of mind-blowing because of how minimally invasive that it is. and so the implications are huge for how we can improve postpartum care for women and it’s just a shame that we don’t yet have the scientific evidence research needed to make this a part of the mainstream and hopefully one day we’ll get there. I suppose in the meantime this is the work that we have to do from the ground floor and that is why Keli and Kimberly Anne decided to take this upon themselves to do the study. So I appreciate all of you for tuning into the show, for spending some time with us. If you really did resonate with this episode and you know of someone who would also benefit from hearing it, please do share it. You’ll find the show notes page over at FertilityFriday.com /317. And I just want to thank all of you for tuning into the show. I hope that you have an amazing weekend whenever you’re listening. listening, and of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.