March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month and Endometriosis Awareness Month. Both point to the same underlying truth: gut and inflammatory health influences almost every other system in a woman’s body, and the standard workup barely scratches the surface of what can be assessed.
This session covers gut and inflammatory health as a foundational conversation. We’ll walk through colorectal cancer screening (which has genuinely changed in the past decade), the inflammatory markers that reveal what’s happening beyond a single CRP number, and the emerging science on the gut microbiome as a determinant of hormone metabolism, immune function, and cognitive health. If you’ve been dismissed with “your labs look normal” while experiencing persistent symptoms, this session gives you the vocabulary to push for a deeper assessment.
Standard of care markers we’ll cover include colonoscopy screening intervals, fecal immunochemical testing (FIT), CRP for general inflammation, ESR, and basic hormone panels. Emerging markers include high-sensitivity CRP, stool-based microbiome testing (Genova GI-Effects, GI-MAP), calprotectin for gut inflammation, zonulin for intestinal permeability, comprehensive stool analysis for pathogens and dysbiosis, and endometriosis-specific markers where relevant.
You’ll leave with an understanding of gut health as the foundation of most other systems, the specific tests to request when standard workups come back “normal” but you don’t feel right, and the framework for advocating for more sophisticated inflammatory assessment.
