Back in my General Internal Medicine training, we put every postmenopausal woman on hormone therapy. We put them on one pill and never checked hormone levels – BHRT never came up as an option. Then the Woman’s Health Initiative (WHI) study came out telling us that hormones were evil and we were killing women. Then, a decade later, they told us to use hormone replacement for relief of severe symptoms and for as short of a duration as possible.
After opening Strong Weight Loss, people asked me about Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy (BHRT). Trained as a mainstream doctor I knew nothing about it and thought it was a bunch of bull… I read the medical literature and all the official societies confirmed my initial assessment.
But people kept asking about BHRT
I skeptically signed up to go to the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) conference on Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy.
I started my own Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy four days after getting home from that conference.
How Will Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Make Me Better?
It’s more than just hot flashes and libido. The reasons to consider BHRT: Relief of symptoms, prevention of memory loss, heart health, and bone production. There is an extensive list of the symptoms of hormone imbalance in both women and men, but the highlights are: Hot flashes, anxiety, mood swings, irritability, insomnia, depression, lower back pain, bloating, hair loss, weight gain, panic attacks, and migraine headaches. And getting the hormones in balance can reduce or eliminate many of these symptoms.
Interestingly, I sat next to a psychiatrist one day during the A4M conference. She uses Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy on patients with difficult to control depression and anxiety. While she doesn’t get everyone off psychiatric medications, she can usually get their disease under control with fewer medications. These are the ones that have tried and failed multiple treatments. She feels balancing hormones will get a lot of people off anxiety and antidepressant medications.
Hormones are good…and bad.
One of the presenters at the conference said, and I’m paraphrasing here, the only thing worse than not treating a woman with hormone replacement is treating her incorrectly. They – the mainstream medical educators – taught us – the general medical trainees –to treat women incorrectly. They taught us to put women on a pill and not worry about checking what was going on. When checking lab tests (and not always the right tests), they taught us to use the lowest dose to get them into the “normal” range – which is not necessarily the optimal range.
They taught us to put people on hormones that acted differently in the body than what we made. Estrogens from PREgnant MARe urINe are more likely to convert to a bad estrogen. These bad estrogens can damage the DNA and enhance cancer development. The liver changes estrogens to dangerous compounds. These compounds increase blood clotting, blood pressure, triglycerides, estrone (which increases breast cancer risk), C-reactive protein (a pro-inflammatory protein that increases heart disease and stroke risk) and carbohydrate craving. They can also cause gallstone formation and liver inflammation. Medroxyprogesterone (the active ingredient in Provera) acts differently than our own progesterone and can cause Coronary artery spasm, increase in breast cell replication and growth which increases risk of breast cancer and the spread of breast cancer, decrease in the protective effects estrogen has on the heart, increase in LDL (“bad” cholesterol), and decrease in HDL (“good” cholesterol)
The Difference Between Medicine and Rat Poison
Warfarin treats blood clots and, back in the day, was a pretty good rat poison (the rats bleed to death). The difference between therapeutic and death is dosage. Like I said, they taught us to put people on a pill and call it a day. The enlightened now know proper dosing of estrogen and progesterone is important to health and wellbeing . We know that giving a person too much testosterone can lead to conversion into estrogen and dihydrotestosterone. This can lead to man boobs and hair loss. We check the hormones we replace AND the hormones affected by them and get the right dose.
Get on the Road to Better Health – TODAY!
Fortunately, all but four commercial health insurance companies will cover most of the initial testing (ironically, mine does not). Which may include both blood and saliva testing. We then come up with an individualized plan optimizing your hormonal health. We then adjust doses based on symptoms and follow up lab tests– the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll see results – So call now!
