Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy in New York

A hot flash? Or a hot mess?

Menopause. Maybe the changes your body is going through dont seem like a big deal. Just a hot flash now and then. Or maybe theyre more troublesome, causing sleeplessness, mood swings and difficulties with memory and concentration. Either way, those small changes start to add upcould they lead to a big disaster? Lets look at what women go through in their 40s and 50s. If this sounds familiar, keep reading for some answers.

Youre getting warmer

Youre minding your own business, at work or at home. Suddenly youre drenched in sweat. The hot flash passes in a few minutes. But you know itll come back again and again. Pretty soon, youre dreading them, even trying to compensate for themdressing in layers that you can strip off, going to bed knowing youll go through at least one sweat-stained garment tonight.

Hot flashes can disrupt your life. And they can go on for years.

Memory? Forget about it!

You may notice that you've been misplacing your keys or your purse, and youve started forgetting things like dentist appointments and peoples names. And have you ever walked into a room to get something, only to and forget what you were going to get? Youre not alone.

Moods that swing up and down.

Do you find that youre snapping at your kids and spouse often, then apologizing afterward? Do you seem to get overwhelmed with sadness for no reason? These are common emotional swings in menopausal women.

Not tonight, dear. Or any night.

When it comes to sex, you no longer enjoy it. You dont have the interest or fantasies you may have had. In fact, you barely think about sex, other than how to avoid it. Its not surprising; sex can become painful during menopause. Thats because vaginal tissue dries out when its not lubricated with the natural estrogen that your body no longer produces. And avoiding sex can cause problems with your relationship.

Youre tired, but you cant sleep.

Youre tired all the time. But when you get into bed, you have trouble falling asleep, or you wake up in the middle of the night. You toss and turn, and keep your spouse awakewhich doesnt help a relationship that may already be strained by mood swings.

The morning after blues.

Heres the irony. Your sleepless night was endless. But morning comes all too fast. You drag yourself to the bathroom, and sigh when you look in the mirror. You look puffy and pale, dry and wrinkled. As you slather on moisturizer, you realize youre not the woman you used to be.

Welcome to your midlife crisis.

The symptoms of menopause can add up to one big dose of misery. You decide its time to look for answers. You visit your primary care physician, maybe even a therapist, but nothing really changes. You wonder

Why they cant get your life back.

Youve probably sat there on the examining table, frustrated as your doctor tells you it's just a normal part of aging. But you know your body, and you know somethings wrong. You press your doctor for help. He or she may suggest hormone replacement therapythe kind made in chemistry labs. But do you really what it?

Since natural substances like hormones cannot be patented (meaning pharma companies couldnt own natural hormones and profit from them), pharmaceutical companies had to come up with an alternative. Instead of offering natural estrogen (the most important womens hormone), they offered modified horse estrogens to produce estrogen for women. And rather than offering the second-most important womens natural hormone 'progesterone', they offered 'progestins'--which sound like natural progesterone, but are actually synthetic.

At first, the world thought these synthetic hormones were a breakthrough; patients said they felt better, it made doctors jobs easier, and pharmaceutical companies were raking in the dough.

And then the Womens Health Initiative (WHI) study was published.

The WHI study found that synthetic or semi-synthetic hormones were linked to many life-threatening conditions, like cancer and blood clots.

These hormones, such as Premarin and Prempro, were blockbuster drugs for pharmaceutical companies. Their sales reached almost 1 billion dollars in 20011(1). However, even the most powerful pharma companies couldn't conceal the damaging conclusions found in the WHI study. But that didnt mean they pulled these successful but dangerous drugs off the market. Not at all.

Pharma logic?

Instead of taking the drugs off the market, pharma companies just added warnings in the packaging. And they only added warnings because the FDA insisted that they do so, and told them to advise women to discuss the drugs with their doctors. Could that be considered passing the buck? Maybe. And even though the FDA issued the warning mandatethey never told the drug companies to stop selling!

An investigation into the real risks.

In 2009, New York Times magazine Reporter Natasha Singer wrote a revealing article about synthetic hormone replacement therapy drugs. After the scandals with Troglitazone (2) or Trovan (3), her discovery isnt surprising. She reported that supposedly independent science writers, who were actually paid by pharmaceutical companies, had written scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy (4). The articles downplayed the risks of HRT.

My reaction to the news.

After reading in depth on the subject, I started to seriously question the use of synthetic hormones by anyone in the medical profession.

If hormones arent the answer, how can I help menopausal women?

I started to wonder if menopausal women need hormones at all. Maybe you can get your life back with diet, or vitamins. Maybe lowering cholesterol would help. Or yoga or meditation could make a difference.

But first, I had to look more closely at both sides of the hormone issue.

How hormones help humans.

A fertile woman's ovaries have plenty of eggs that are released in cycles. To get pregnant, she produces the sex hormone estrogen, which makes the follicles with eggs grow. When the egg is big enough, follicle-stimulating hormones and luteinizing hormones surge, which along with estrogen make the follicle break -- a process called ovulation.

Then ovaries start producing another sex hormone, progesterone. The egg travels to the uterus, which is already prepared by progesterone. If there is sperm there, she becomes pregnant. If not, the egg is released and estrogen and progesterone production ceases, the uterus lining is gone, blood vessels open, and menstrual bleeding starts. Estrogen production starts again, and the uterus lining is restored. The bleeding ends, and a woman is ready for another cycle. These cycles continue, until there are no more eggs in womans ovary. When there are no more eggs, periods stop and menopause begins. It sounds natural. But there is a math problem here: an average woman has about 1 million eggs, yet she uses only about 400.

Why are the rest of her eggs wasted? Instead of using those eggs to make babies, women go into menopause. (And you may not know it, but men go into andropause--the male equivalent of menopause.) If we live long enough, we spend several decades of our lives being infertile!

Why would Mother Nature invest in longevity, but not fertility? Why do older women go through menopause, and older men go through andropause?

Some theories behind our longevity.

Maybe women outlive their reproductive abilities because Mother Nature wants a post-menopausal woman to have time to take care of her daughters children, so the daughter can make more babiesensuring survival of the species. This is called the Grandmothers theory (8).

Maybe its because older males can compete with youngsters to make competition tougher, because older males are more experienced and sophisticated. This is what the Patriarch hypothesis says (9).

It doesnt really matter why nature decided to give us menopause and andropause. The only thing we need to do is to trick our bodies into believing that we are still young hormonally. But how?

Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

Have you ever seen a person who looks half her real age? I remember the first time I saw a stunning woman with beautiful, taut skin and a lean but curvy body. She looked like she was in her early 30s, but she was in fact in her 60s. Her name is Suzanne Somers. Her fountain of youth? Bioidentical hormone replacement therapyBHRT.

What is Suzanne doing right? She has a theory: It isn't your cholesterol, it isn't your blood pressure, it is the decline of hormones that kills you.

Is she onto something big?

At first, I doubted her theory. What about heart attacks, cancer and Alzheimers? People die from them all the time. Then it hit me. Its usually older people who die from them. People who no longer have the hormones they used to have. People who have their full complement of hormones dont usually die of those diseases. Is there a connection? I realized something else: Suzanne Somers is no dumb blonde!

How BHRT began.

You might think hormone replacement is a modern invention, but it was actually discovered back in 1930. Dr. James Collip was the chairman and a professor at McGill University in Canada. He had just co-discovered insulin, and was thinking about how to help women get relief from menopausal symptoms. After a series of experiments and failures, he eventually found the solution. What he did was extract estrogen from the urine of pregnant women and give it as a menopausal remedy. It worked. Giving natural hormones of fertile women to post-menopausal women sent a signal to their bodies that they were still fertile. In other words, it made womens bodies think they were young again!

How hormones make a woman more womanly.

Youve no doubt seen photos of the voluptuous Marilyn Monroe. What you might not realize is that shes the perfect example of a woman with a high level of estrogen: confident, feminine, with a strong desire to have sex, big breasts and a low waist-to-hip ratiothe perfect hourglass figure (10). Thats why estrogen is sometimes called the Marilyn Monroe Hormone.

Originally posted here:
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy in New York