Wheel of Fortune Fascinates Me. What's Wrong?
The onset of menopause can be a difficult and confusing time for a woman. Symptoms can be as vague as weight gain, sleeplessness, memory loss, dry eyes, low libido, depressed mood, or irritability. Or they can be more characteristic like hot flashes, night sweats, and amenorrhea. A profound sense of "loss of self" can be seriously disconcerting. A feeling of being "in a fog" may interfere with your life considerably.
Menopause is a constellation of signs and symptoms associated with decreased production by the ovaries of three variants of estrogen and progesterone. It seems modern menopause tends to be more symptomatic than in the past when women tended to be serially pregnant during their fertile years rather than delaying pregnancy and averaging just over two kids. Complicating matters are big studies that have shown long term hormone replacement therapy with premarin and provera seem to increase the risk of cancer.
Guess what? Premarin is made by big pharma from horse urine. The patented semisynthetic estrogen we know as premarin is not human estrogen at all! And provera is a patented drug as well, it's not progesterone. In fact the cardio protective effects of estrogen are well known to be neutralized with synthetic progestins but not by human progesterone. In fact your body is designed to have many babies over your lifetime and to encounter a veritable flood of natural hormones in a periodic way. I have never heard that having many kids causes cancer, indeed women with no children are at increased risk.
Why pregnant mare urine? It's plentiful and therefore cheaper to produce. Why don't the drug companies just focus on natural human hormones? I don't know all the details but I do know you cannot patent estrogen. Oral hormones also pass first to the liver where they raise the levels of Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG) which is bad. More on that in a later blog.
So many doctors have abandoned HRT altogether, and therefore many women assume that only cancer and death lurk in trying to outfox mother nature. Other physicians myself included agree that synthetic horse urine taken orally may not be a good idea. But BIOIDENTICAL hormones administered in a far more gentle way with some thought to the individual patient not only help treat symptoms of menopause but protect women from heart attacks, bone loss, and premature aging.
Next time I'm going to tell you about the three kinds of human estrogen and why we should use them all, how progesterone balances estrogen, and how testosterone isn't just for "Manopause" anymore.
To your health,
Dr Z
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