About Dr. Tutera with CarolAnn Tutera

ABOUT DR. TUTERA – CAROLANN TUTERA 

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to Qualgen’s podcast where we talk about all things health and wellness related, including hormones, pharmaceuticals, health trends and ways you can help better your life.  

JP: Hi everyone! Thank you for taking time out of your day to listen in. Today I have a very special guest, her name is CarolAnn Tutera and she is the president of Sottopelle, one of the leaders in the hormone pellet industry and was started by her late husband, Dr. Gino Tutera. CarolAnn, Thank you so much for joining me today.  

CT: Hey, thank you for having me on. It's my pleasure. Thank you. 

 JP: I have so many things I want to talk to you about, but let's start with Dr. Tutera. How would you describe who he was and what he did to someone who's never heard of him.  

 CT: He was definitely larger than life. He practiced medicine as he said with common sense, which nobody really did back then or I'm finding even today. He started in bioidentical hormones when he was living in Kansas City, Missouri, working with pregnancies and realized that progesterone was saving babies in the utero. And yeah, if he had just written the book before John Lee, he'd really be very well known today. He always lived life outside the box with his thinking he was always a future forward thinker. You would say he was one who just loved taking care of patients. Absolutely loved it. And they just thought the world of him as well.  

JP: That's rare to find. 

CT: Very rare to find he was personable. You felt like you were the only one in the room he took time with you, even though it was a short amount of time, you'd felt like you'd spent hours with him. Yeah, he was, he was brilliant. Just brilliant.  

JP: That's awesome. And how did he get introduced to hormone pellet therapy?  

CT: We had moved from Kansas City to Rancher Mirage, California where he was asked by Eisenhower Hospital to put in a birthing center because they didn't have one at the time. There was one in Palm Springs. There was one further out in Indio. Rancher Mirage is basically the center of the Palm Springs Coachella Valley area. So while he was developing the birthing center, a physician came up to him and said, hey, would you like to put in a pellet? And he said, “sure, but what's a pellet?” when he observed this physician he realized this was the final missing piece he was looking for when working with bioidentical hormones. Now, this physician was Canadian who would come down to the area and practice a couple of months of the year, see patients who flew in all over the country to see him because this gentleman learned from Dr. Greenblatt out of Atlanta, who truly was the first one to put pellets on the map. Gosh, I think it was back in the forties. So you could say that Dr. Tutera was just two degrees as separation from the originator really who was someone working with pellets. A lot of people don't realize that pellets were developed in 1939 for women who'd had radical hysterectomy. So they've been around a very, very long time.  

JP: I know everyone thinks that it's something new and, you know, that's just beginning. We're like, no, it's, it's been around. 

 CT: And there are quite a few articles written on them too. There's probably well over 1000 articles since ‘39.  

 JP: There's so many advantages to them. How important was it to Dr. Tutera to use a pure hormone pellet?  

 CT: Oh, that was his mission. As I said, he loved working with bioidentical hormones. He wanted something that was physiologically similar to the human body and that's what pellets are. It's too bad people can't see what I'm doing because as he would explain it, he'd always put his hand up, put the second hand on it, they'd match up perfectly and say this is what they look like and how they replicate what the body used to produce. Whereas something that's not a natural or bioidentical hormone, it would be a chain off and he'd move and twist the hand. So they weren't lined up. It was really a perfect visual to see of how they work.  

 JP: I think that's where hormone replacement gets such a bad rep was from all the synthetic hormones used for so long. And I don't think people really understand what the bioidentical means. 

CT: They don't understand because not a lot of compounding pharmacies knew a lot about pellet therapy. There were roughly maybe five in the fifties. They got pushed underground when Premarin came on the scene because those were passed out like Dr. Tutera used to say like candy. Well, the red one didn't help you, let's try the yellow one, the yellow one didn't work, let's try a blue one. So he said they were just pushed to be pushing out candies. There was a large pharmaceutical in the States that used to produce them. The company escapes me because they're no longer around either, but they were used in Europe and Australia years before they even became a known name in the States because pharmacies in London were so different than pharmacies here that there are so many shops on every corner that they used to produce them right there in those little corner shops for everybody.  

 JP: And when did Dr. Tutera start Sottopelle? And what inspired him to do so? 

 CT: As soon as he started working with pellets with this gentleman I swear this is how fate happens. Three months later, the originator physician, Dr. Mcewen played golf, sat down, had his drink at his country club and that was it. So Dr. Tutera inherited this huge practice of patients. I would watch him as I worked in the office. He's in the back there shaving down these pellets because common sense told him, hey, we don't all wear the same size shoe. We don't all wear the same size clothes. So we're all not supposed to get the same size of a hormone. So he started shaving them down and working with them that way. And he came up with the individual dosing in 1993.  

 JP: Wow.  

 CT: And then we found a couple of pharmacies at that time in the mid nineties who'd worked with us well, him in making the individual sizes just for him and the patients. So he just really felt it was extremely important that you have to do lab work and you've got to know what's going on with the person. You just can't take a pellet and insert it just because you took a course. You've got to know how to dose and manage a patient properly. It was all about the science behind pellets.  

 JP: I know, I think so many people think that just because the procedure is easy that that's all it is, but the dosing is what can really mess somebody up or really help them. 

 CT: Right. When he was training physicians, then in the early two thousands, he started working on his patented dosing site. I didn't know if you are aware of that, but he's the originator of a dosing site that now holds several patents and it was easier for him to work with physicians. He could actually give them the information, they could go back and successfully work with their patients a lot easier than it was walking away from a course and not having the help. He said it made them feel like he was actually there in the room with them when they had the dosing site.  

 JP: Absolutely. I can definitely see that. How many doctors has he helped train?  

 CT: Oh my gosh, thousands thousands. Over the years, he's helped trained literally thousands. He had a philosophy that he, the more he trained physicians, the more patients received better treatment. And he was all about again treating the patient and making sure that they had the proper bioidentical hormone to do that.  

 JP: Can you explain a little bit more about Sottopelle and what makes it different?  

 CT: Sottopelle is Italian for under the skin, so I think it's a great -  

 JP: I did not know that - 

CT: It's a great word for us and for pellet therapy. What makes us different is the fact that we started this industry. You can really say that Dr. Tutera is the godfather of the pellet industry. He's the reason pellets are put back on the map. He's the reason that people look for our name because of how he trained physicians properly here. He has so many stories about people who train with other companies and their fees are extremely high. They don't feel like they were trained properly and we end up seeing patients in the medical offices who've even go to, been to other people who've been treated with pellets and they don't feel like they should, you know, they've got to follow the golden rule. It's just real simple. You can't be treated for your thyroid without taking lab work, can't be treated with heart medicine without lab work. Why would you think you'd want pellet therapy without doing lab work?  

 JP: Absolutely. And how important is it, in your opinion, to find a knowledgeable doctor when it comes to BHRT?  

 CT: I think it's extremely important to find that knowledgeable doctor. And that's what we do when we train them through Sottopelle. So we make sure they have the training that not only Dr. Tutera used to do, but we've been adding and modifying it throughout the years. So they're really getting a good dose of it. And ha ha, no pun intended. And now we even have a transgender training for female to male and male to female. Yeah. Yeah, nobody else has.  

 JP: Yeah, that's great. And so you've been around hormone health therapy, obviously a while too. What is your favorite part about it?  

CT: My favorite part is because I feel better. I started in my early forties because I had the insides of a 70-year-old woman. At the time I had osteopenia. I was in bad shape. I would forget where I put things. I was exercising and not losing weight. I was having night sweats really bad. But yet here I am working in the office where this is happening - that's the typical shoemaker's daughter until he said one day you need to get lab work done. And that, that was a real shocker that I was in basically pre menopause menopause. I don't care what you call the pause, but it was horrible. And I'm just thankful that I'm aging gracefully and feeling a lot better now.  

 JP: Absolutely. I mean, just from the amount of time I've worked with Qualgen and it's amazing the people that I talked to that have gotten the pellet therapy and how much they say they feel so much better and their lives are better because of it.  

 CT: It's a, a night and day difference. It truly is. The light bulb goes on. And that's when you realize, wow, I feel completely different. We had a breast cancer surgeon who came into us who told us that she was going to dinner right after she had gotten the pellets from us. She went to dinner that weekend with her sisters, some friends at her next appointment. She was explaining to us how this worked and she said, literally, I sat at the table, my head went forward back and it felt like that light bulb had turned on. I, I could think clearly. I realized who I was again and she had to, take her boards again and was so glad she had that mental clarity in order to think clearly through the board. So they make a huge difference.  

 JP: Yeah, it's amazing. And what would you say the advantages to using hormone pellet therapy opposed to other therapies?  

 CT: I, well, because it's completely bioidentical and matches the physiological change that your body used to produce. There's no way I'd use a patch and still have the roller coaster or cream because I don't know how much I would put on or take a pill. I'm not big in the pill department to begin with. It's the steady stream of hormones that you get when it's placed under this skin that nothing compares to it. In my opinion. 

 JP: I agree. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add? 

 CT: No, I just think pellets are the best way to go. Make sure you find the provider who's been trained by Sottopelle, because literally patients are constantly asking for us. We've expanded outside the country. So it tells you we're doing something right.  

 JP: Absolutely. And I just, I don't think we can stress enough how important it is to find a doctor who knows what they're doing when it comes to hormone pellets or anything in general, but definitely hormone pellets.  

 CT: Right. Exactly so. 

 JP: Well, thank you again for joining me. For more information on Dr. Tutera or Sottopelle. Please visit their website at sottopelletherapy.com and you can find them on Facebook at Sottopelle. Thank you again, CarolAnn!  

 CT: Thank you.  

 JP: Thank you everyone for listening. Please make sure to subscribe and follow us on social media. Stay up to date on Qualgen. Have a great day.