Selected Podcast
What is a Fertility Care Center?
My cycles are normal, right? - why tracking your periods isn't enough. Physicians explain why the practice of tracking your periods (utilizing a monthly calendar or one of the many apps) does not gather all the relevant information needed to determine if a cycle is healthy.
Featuring:
Learn more about George Kane, MD
George Kane, MD | Michael Padilla, DO
George Kane, MD is a FertilityCare Medical Consultant for Franciscan FertilityCare Center.Learn more about George Kane, MD
Dr. Michael Padilla co-founded the Franciscan FertilityCare Center along with Registered Nurse, Marilyn Haywood. The Center is part of the Franciscan Health Network in Indianapolis and is one of the only fewer than 25 hospital-based Creighton fertility FertilityCare clinics Centers in the country. He works as a physician at South 31 Family Care in Indianapolis while also serves serving as a medical consultant for the Center. By Using the Creighton Method of Natural Family Planning and NaproTechnology, Padilla works with any woman experiencing abnormalities with her menstrual cycle as well as couples who are struggling with infertility. and This method provides alternatives to artificial birth control and in vitro fertilization, giving hope to couples, as well as respecting God’s design for fertility and creating life. Padilla most recently received the Archbishop Edward T. O’Meara Respect Life Award from Archbishop Charles C. Thompson. Padilla, his wife and two children, are members of St. John the Evangelist Parish in Indianapolis. He serves as the medical director for the Gabriel Project’s mobile ultrasound unit and also serves as president for the Catholic Medical Association’s St. Raphael Guild of Indianapolis.
Transcription:
Scott Webb: Today, we have Dr. Michael Padilla and Dr. George Kane, who are both family care physicians at South 31 Family Care in Indianapolis. They're both trained medical consultants for the Franciscan Fertility Care Center. In this capacity, they provide specialized care for any woman during her reproductive years from puberty to premenopause who are experiencing reproductive or gynecologic abnormalities.
This is the Franciscan Health Doc Pod. I'm Scott Webb. So, I want to thank you both for joining me. We were having some laughs here before we got going, but it's time to get down to business, get a little more serious about things. So, Dr. Padilla, what is a fertility care clinic? Like what does that mean exactly?
Dr. Michael Padilla: So, a fertility care center is actually a trademarked term that refers to places that provide fertility care, which is another trademarked term that comes from the Saint Paul VI Institute out in Omaha, Nebraska. And back in the '70s, they developed a method for tracking women's cycles that could be used not only to help women achieve pregnancy or avoid pregnancy, but also to provide medical care on the day-to-day changes in a woman's cycle. So, the fast and short of it is that using the method that they developed at the St. Paul VI Institute, they can track changes in a woman's body that correlate quite well in a dose-dependent ratio to a woman's estrogen and progesterone in her body. If you know the relative levels of estrogen, progesterone in a woman's body, you can actually determine very closely when her ovulation is.
Anyways, so what is a fertility care center? So, a fertility care center is a place that teaches women to do that. And oftentimes, a fertility care center is associated with doctors' offices. So that if the tracking of a woman's cycle shows, "Hey, ovulation is happening at kind of a funny time" or "Your estrogen is doing weird things in the beginning of your cycle" or "Your progesterone phase is looking kind of short," they can send that person, that woman, to a doctor. And that's where Dr. Kane and I come in, is we take care of women who have tracked their cycles through education from a fertility care center and use that information to help them achieve their goals for their lives, for their fertility, whether that's avoiding pregnancy, whether that's achieving pregnancy or just trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their cycles so that they can live their lives.
Scott Webb: Yeah. And Dr. Kane, from your perspective, you know, when you think about what you do and where you work and how you help folks, how would you sort of explain it to folks?
Dr. George Kane: I would say a fertility care center is primarily a center for education. And women go there to meet with trained nurses who are able to teach them a very specific method of natural family planning called the Creighton model. And over the last couple of years, more and more women have been wanting to be able to understand and kind of take control of their fertility without using hormonal, contraceptives, things like that. And they've been turning to these sorts of natural family planning options. And a lot of times, a lot of confusion reins as people are trying to figure out, you know, what are the signs that my body is trying to tell me about where I'm at at my cycle? So if you go to a fertility care center, you meet with trained professionals who can help you understand those signs.
And then the next step, like Dr. Padilla was saying, was if in the course of that education, as you're watching the signs of your body, you notice something's not quite right, the fertility care center always has a connection to a physician who's been trained in this method, this Creighton model, who can look at the information the women have been tracking and say, "Okay, I think this problem is present and we can treat it that way."
Scott Webb: Yeah. And certainly, it's great to have a couple of experts on, because I am not an expert. But I thought, Dr. Kane, that, you know, if a woman had regular periods, let's say every 28 to 30 days, that everything was cool. But I'm learning through the research and listening to you guys that that may or may not be the case. Maybe you can explain that to us.
Dr. George Kane: It is true that lots of times things are normal if a woman's having a period that often. But a lot of women from the get-go had very painful or very heavy. Periods and they don't know what's normal and what's abnormal. They just know the experience of their body and the quantity of blood, how heavy the days are, other symptoms that they're having throughout the cycle, not just on the days that they're bleeding with like bloating, breast tenderness, other kinds of vaginal discharge. Those can all indicate that maybe some other disease processes, often endometriosis, are present, and that it's actually really not normal and that woman really would benefit from medical care despite what appears to be a normal rhythm to her cycle.
Dr. Michael Padilla: I think one of the things that for women, there's not really a strong culture of in Western society is talking about what is normal or what is problematic. I think a lot of women, you know, they've had their cycles for a long time. And if they've had it for a long time and it's worked a certain way for a long time, the assumption is everything's fine.
I tell my patients all the time, being a woman should not be a disability. You know, "Oh, you have cycles that cause bleeding that cause you to slow down, that you have to go to the bathroom frequently to change pads or tampons or pain so bad maybe not every cycle, but a lot of cycles. You don't like to do anything. If you can, if you really force yourself, but you know, in the same kind of vein, you shouldn't have to force yourself to "overcome" being a woman. Like that's not how it should be.
So, what tracking cycles does, it actually gives us more information. The period and how far apart periods are is only one piece of information. And really, it's probably the lesser of the pieces of information. The period and how far apart the periods are, the periods are a time of refreshing and restarting. Everything that was built up this past month gets shed off. We start new, we start fresh. But the main point, the main event of the cycle is ovulation, which is somewhere in the middle, which for most women is hidden, is a mystery. So, this method, the Creighton model and other types of NFP as well, but specifically the Creighton method, the Creighton model is designed to clearly identify that day for people so that they can see what their bodies are doing around, before and during ovulation.
Scott Webb: Yeah. So obviously, we've mentioned Creighton here quite a bit and maybe, Dr. Padilla, you can just give a little more detail. Like what does the Creighton model or method offer that other tracking cycles don't?
Dr. Michael Padilla: There are several different things to track during the course of a woman's cycle. There's body temperature changes a little bit after ovulation. There's urinary hormone strips that lots of people check to check to see when they're ovulating. But one of the factors in a woman's physiology that changes actually is her cervical mucus. A lot of the guys I see who come with their partners for learning about this kind of try to do the opposite of perking their ears up to, you know, try to close their ears whenever we talk about cervical mucus. But it's a true fact that women develop this over the course of their cycles. You know, I think a lot of the reason why we're here today is because there's a lot that goes on with women that is not talked about. So, it's a great opportunity to talk about the things that are normal for women and actually go ahead and normalize them.
So, we track cervical mucus with the Creighton method, the Creighton model. The Creighton model, of the different methods, was the first that was designed to be used for medical use. There are other methods that use other factors to track in a woman's cycle, but those were mostly used to identify a woman's fertile window. A woman is only fertile for three to six days of the month. An egg only lives for 12 to 24 hours and sperm can only live for three to five days. So, that's three to six days of fertility a month. So, other methods are there to determine when that window is, when that fertile window is, so that a woman and a couple can decide whether or not they're going to have intercourse to achieve pregnancy or try to avoid pregnancy. And the Creighton method uses a single factor that really gives us a lot of information.
Scott Webb: I think it's just a natural human thing that people, perhaps women more than men, we tend to suffer with things, from things, that we don't have to, and that there is help out there in the form of a fertility care clinic, right? Like we're talking about today in the Creighton method or model. So, maybe just kind of, you know, put your selling shoes on here a little bit and really encourage women to reach out to call, to stop in if they're having trouble, if it's too hard to do this stuff on their own. There's help out there, right?
Dr. Michael Padilla: That's exactly right. I think one of the things that we too often do, I think in general medicine unfortunately, but definitely in the broader society, is those things that happen in a woman's life, ugh, wouldn't it be better if they would just all go away? Wouldn't it be better if we just made it all stop? Wouldn't it be better if we just made it all shut up, just turn it off? And I think that's so sad. Like, the things that make a woman a woman should be things that give her life, give her joy, give her meaning if she should choose it, you know--
Scott Webb: sort of empower them, right?
Dr. Michael Padilla: Right. Exactly right. It shouldn't be the thing that gives her migraine. It shouldn't be the things that gives her acne. It shouldn't be the things that gives her pain, bleeding, anemia. These are things that you shouldn't have to deal with. And if you have questions about it, you deserve to be heard. I had a friend just talking to me actually yesterday at dinner that they got some information from one of their providers that made them feel just not heard. And I think this is true for any area in medicine, whether it's women's health or otherwise, that if you don't feel like you've been heard about a medical problem, you deserve another opinion. You deserve to be heard. You deserve to have your provider care about your concerns as much or more than you. So, if you're listening to this and you've ever had any questions about your menstrual cycle or other things related to your hormone health in terms of the menstrual cycle, I would highly recommend reaching out to the Franciscan Fertility Care Center and scheduling an appointment to learn more about what is actually going on in your body and what we can do about it.
Scott Webb: Well, that's perfect. I want to thank you both for joining me. I love learning from these things, you know. And I thought, you know, fertility care clinic, that should be pretty obvious what that is, but it's not as obvious. And I'm glad we did this, and I'm glad we're getting the word out there. So, thank you both and you both stay well.
Dr. Michael Padilla: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Dr. George Kane: Thank you.
Scott Webb: Call 317-528-7071 for more information or to make an appointment or go to franciscanhealth.org and search fertility care center. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. And be sure to check out the full podcast library for additional topics of interest. This is the Franciscan Health Doc Pod. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well, and we'll talk again next time.
Scott Webb: Today, we have Dr. Michael Padilla and Dr. George Kane, who are both family care physicians at South 31 Family Care in Indianapolis. They're both trained medical consultants for the Franciscan Fertility Care Center. In this capacity, they provide specialized care for any woman during her reproductive years from puberty to premenopause who are experiencing reproductive or gynecologic abnormalities.
This is the Franciscan Health Doc Pod. I'm Scott Webb. So, I want to thank you both for joining me. We were having some laughs here before we got going, but it's time to get down to business, get a little more serious about things. So, Dr. Padilla, what is a fertility care clinic? Like what does that mean exactly?
Dr. Michael Padilla: So, a fertility care center is actually a trademarked term that refers to places that provide fertility care, which is another trademarked term that comes from the Saint Paul VI Institute out in Omaha, Nebraska. And back in the '70s, they developed a method for tracking women's cycles that could be used not only to help women achieve pregnancy or avoid pregnancy, but also to provide medical care on the day-to-day changes in a woman's cycle. So, the fast and short of it is that using the method that they developed at the St. Paul VI Institute, they can track changes in a woman's body that correlate quite well in a dose-dependent ratio to a woman's estrogen and progesterone in her body. If you know the relative levels of estrogen, progesterone in a woman's body, you can actually determine very closely when her ovulation is.
Anyways, so what is a fertility care center? So, a fertility care center is a place that teaches women to do that. And oftentimes, a fertility care center is associated with doctors' offices. So that if the tracking of a woman's cycle shows, "Hey, ovulation is happening at kind of a funny time" or "Your estrogen is doing weird things in the beginning of your cycle" or "Your progesterone phase is looking kind of short," they can send that person, that woman, to a doctor. And that's where Dr. Kane and I come in, is we take care of women who have tracked their cycles through education from a fertility care center and use that information to help them achieve their goals for their lives, for their fertility, whether that's avoiding pregnancy, whether that's achieving pregnancy or just trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their cycles so that they can live their lives.
Scott Webb: Yeah. And Dr. Kane, from your perspective, you know, when you think about what you do and where you work and how you help folks, how would you sort of explain it to folks?
Dr. George Kane: I would say a fertility care center is primarily a center for education. And women go there to meet with trained nurses who are able to teach them a very specific method of natural family planning called the Creighton model. And over the last couple of years, more and more women have been wanting to be able to understand and kind of take control of their fertility without using hormonal, contraceptives, things like that. And they've been turning to these sorts of natural family planning options. And a lot of times, a lot of confusion reins as people are trying to figure out, you know, what are the signs that my body is trying to tell me about where I'm at at my cycle? So if you go to a fertility care center, you meet with trained professionals who can help you understand those signs.
And then the next step, like Dr. Padilla was saying, was if in the course of that education, as you're watching the signs of your body, you notice something's not quite right, the fertility care center always has a connection to a physician who's been trained in this method, this Creighton model, who can look at the information the women have been tracking and say, "Okay, I think this problem is present and we can treat it that way."
Scott Webb: Yeah. And certainly, it's great to have a couple of experts on, because I am not an expert. But I thought, Dr. Kane, that, you know, if a woman had regular periods, let's say every 28 to 30 days, that everything was cool. But I'm learning through the research and listening to you guys that that may or may not be the case. Maybe you can explain that to us.
Dr. George Kane: It is true that lots of times things are normal if a woman's having a period that often. But a lot of women from the get-go had very painful or very heavy. Periods and they don't know what's normal and what's abnormal. They just know the experience of their body and the quantity of blood, how heavy the days are, other symptoms that they're having throughout the cycle, not just on the days that they're bleeding with like bloating, breast tenderness, other kinds of vaginal discharge. Those can all indicate that maybe some other disease processes, often endometriosis, are present, and that it's actually really not normal and that woman really would benefit from medical care despite what appears to be a normal rhythm to her cycle.
Dr. Michael Padilla: I think one of the things that for women, there's not really a strong culture of in Western society is talking about what is normal or what is problematic. I think a lot of women, you know, they've had their cycles for a long time. And if they've had it for a long time and it's worked a certain way for a long time, the assumption is everything's fine.
I tell my patients all the time, being a woman should not be a disability. You know, "Oh, you have cycles that cause bleeding that cause you to slow down, that you have to go to the bathroom frequently to change pads or tampons or pain so bad maybe not every cycle, but a lot of cycles. You don't like to do anything. If you can, if you really force yourself, but you know, in the same kind of vein, you shouldn't have to force yourself to "overcome" being a woman. Like that's not how it should be.
So, what tracking cycles does, it actually gives us more information. The period and how far apart periods are is only one piece of information. And really, it's probably the lesser of the pieces of information. The period and how far apart the periods are, the periods are a time of refreshing and restarting. Everything that was built up this past month gets shed off. We start new, we start fresh. But the main point, the main event of the cycle is ovulation, which is somewhere in the middle, which for most women is hidden, is a mystery. So, this method, the Creighton model and other types of NFP as well, but specifically the Creighton method, the Creighton model is designed to clearly identify that day for people so that they can see what their bodies are doing around, before and during ovulation.
Scott Webb: Yeah. So obviously, we've mentioned Creighton here quite a bit and maybe, Dr. Padilla, you can just give a little more detail. Like what does the Creighton model or method offer that other tracking cycles don't?
Dr. Michael Padilla: There are several different things to track during the course of a woman's cycle. There's body temperature changes a little bit after ovulation. There's urinary hormone strips that lots of people check to check to see when they're ovulating. But one of the factors in a woman's physiology that changes actually is her cervical mucus. A lot of the guys I see who come with their partners for learning about this kind of try to do the opposite of perking their ears up to, you know, try to close their ears whenever we talk about cervical mucus. But it's a true fact that women develop this over the course of their cycles. You know, I think a lot of the reason why we're here today is because there's a lot that goes on with women that is not talked about. So, it's a great opportunity to talk about the things that are normal for women and actually go ahead and normalize them.
So, we track cervical mucus with the Creighton method, the Creighton model. The Creighton model, of the different methods, was the first that was designed to be used for medical use. There are other methods that use other factors to track in a woman's cycle, but those were mostly used to identify a woman's fertile window. A woman is only fertile for three to six days of the month. An egg only lives for 12 to 24 hours and sperm can only live for three to five days. So, that's three to six days of fertility a month. So, other methods are there to determine when that window is, when that fertile window is, so that a woman and a couple can decide whether or not they're going to have intercourse to achieve pregnancy or try to avoid pregnancy. And the Creighton method uses a single factor that really gives us a lot of information.
Scott Webb: I think it's just a natural human thing that people, perhaps women more than men, we tend to suffer with things, from things, that we don't have to, and that there is help out there in the form of a fertility care clinic, right? Like we're talking about today in the Creighton method or model. So, maybe just kind of, you know, put your selling shoes on here a little bit and really encourage women to reach out to call, to stop in if they're having trouble, if it's too hard to do this stuff on their own. There's help out there, right?
Dr. Michael Padilla: That's exactly right. I think one of the things that we too often do, I think in general medicine unfortunately, but definitely in the broader society, is those things that happen in a woman's life, ugh, wouldn't it be better if they would just all go away? Wouldn't it be better if we just made it all stop? Wouldn't it be better if we just made it all shut up, just turn it off? And I think that's so sad. Like, the things that make a woman a woman should be things that give her life, give her joy, give her meaning if she should choose it, you know--
Scott Webb: sort of empower them, right?
Dr. Michael Padilla: Right. Exactly right. It shouldn't be the thing that gives her migraine. It shouldn't be the things that gives her acne. It shouldn't be the things that gives her pain, bleeding, anemia. These are things that you shouldn't have to deal with. And if you have questions about it, you deserve to be heard. I had a friend just talking to me actually yesterday at dinner that they got some information from one of their providers that made them feel just not heard. And I think this is true for any area in medicine, whether it's women's health or otherwise, that if you don't feel like you've been heard about a medical problem, you deserve another opinion. You deserve to be heard. You deserve to have your provider care about your concerns as much or more than you. So, if you're listening to this and you've ever had any questions about your menstrual cycle or other things related to your hormone health in terms of the menstrual cycle, I would highly recommend reaching out to the Franciscan Fertility Care Center and scheduling an appointment to learn more about what is actually going on in your body and what we can do about it.
Scott Webb: Well, that's perfect. I want to thank you both for joining me. I love learning from these things, you know. And I thought, you know, fertility care clinic, that should be pretty obvious what that is, but it's not as obvious. And I'm glad we did this, and I'm glad we're getting the word out there. So, thank you both and you both stay well.
Dr. Michael Padilla: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Dr. George Kane: Thank you.
Scott Webb: Call 317-528-7071 for more information or to make an appointment or go to franciscanhealth.org and search fertility care center. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels. And be sure to check out the full podcast library for additional topics of interest. This is the Franciscan Health Doc Pod. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well, and we'll talk again next time.