What Every Woman Should Know About Hormones, part 3 of 4

There’s more you have to know about hormones.

Being estrogen dominant causes stroke, heart attack, cancer (especially of the reproductive organs), and osteoporosis, to name a few.

We need estrogen dominance in the first week of our 28-day cycle. Estrogen prepares a woman for conception, and it promotes rapid cell growth. It has its function, but when it’s excessive all month long, you can imagine how it fuels cancer growth. It also activates a cancer-stimulating gene called Bcl-2. (Progesterone, though, down-regulates that same gene).

Then progesterone should become dominant during the last two weeks of our cycle, to protect pregnancy. When we don’t have enough progesterone, we get PMS symptoms. Women who balance their estrogen appropriately with bioidentical creams find that their PMS symptoms abate.

Mine completely, totally disappeared years ago, and I used to have moderate to severe symptoms: big mood swings, a lot of crying and general hatefulness towards people I actually love, cramps that required drugs. All gone for many years now.

Women who have too much estrogen are often prescribed synthetic hormones. And that’s the vast majority of women over 40 these days, who are estrogen dominant. A significant percentage of women under 40 are, too. (Birth control hormone virtually guarantees estrogen dominance!)

They think they are balancing their hormones, with drugs. They’re not. You cannot balance your hormones with drugs.

Fact is, the hormones are SIMILAR to the natural hormone produced in the body, but not the same.  Testosterone andprogesterone, molecularly, are very, very similar. You know they’re very different in their function, don’t you? You’d have to stare at a picture of both of them, to ascertain the tiny difference in the oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms. My point is, a small molecular difference is a very big deal!

And Provera, the synthetic “progesterone”-like drug prescribed to bring progesterone into balance? It’s far more dissimilar, molecularly, from natural progesterone than natural testosterone is!

For 20 years, doctors prescribed women synthetic estrogen for menopause symptoms—with no progesterone for the “check and balance”—and then discovered massive rates of endometrial cancer. Women with low progesterone have a 540 percent higher incidence of cancer than women with normal progesterone levels, according to a Johns Hopkins study in the 1980’s.

The Women’s Health Initiative studied 16,000 women receiving Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT, or synthetic, hormone-similar drugs) from 1997 to 2005. However, in 2002 the study was stopped, because the women were experiencing so many life-threatening side effects.

No bioidentical hormones were used in the study. Only Premarin, an estrogen so named because it is made from PREgnant MAres’ uRINe, and the highly dangerous Provera, a progestin, or drug that is similar to, but different than, natural progesterone.

Another huge study published in JAMA in 2000, followed 46,000 women prescribed Premarin and Provera and discovered that if they use HRT for five years, their breast cancer rate was 40 percent higher than women not using HRT!

At this point, in my opinion, prescribing these drugs equates to malpractice. But have they been taken off the market? Of course not. They are still the most common form of HRT prescribed today, in combination!

It’s easy and inexpensive to use natural “bioidentical” hormone, which simply means that it is molecularly identical to the hormone produced in the body.

So why don’t more people use it?

Because who would profit by promoting it? Suzanne Somers does, and brave pioneering M.D.’s like Jonathan Wright and John R. Lee do. They are more interested in the truth than in blindly furthering drug companies’ agenda. (Only altered molecules can be patented. Only patented substances can earn billions of dollars. Bioidentical substances are inexpensive and since they are natural, unpatentable. So if you’re Big Pharma—which do you market to doctors?)

And a number of docs and practitioners who sponsor my lectures “get it.” More docs know the research. Still, most don’t.

Posted in: Health Concerns, Supplements