I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause (17 page)

BOOK: I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause

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According to Dr. Jonathan Wright, who pioneered the use of bioidentical hormone treatment in this country: “There are two key points in this warning: first taking Premarin for more than a year increases the risk of cancer of the endometrium as much as 14 percent. Well-controlled studies have shown that the risk of endometrial cancer is cumulative, rising at a rate of four to five cases per one thousand Premarin users with each year of use. By the fifth year of Premarin use, a woman might be facing a 2 percent risk and by her tenth year, her risk might be as high as 4 percent or 5 percent. Second: other forms of ‘synthetic’ estrogen carry about the same risk.”

What a dilemma. Synthetic hormones can
give
women cancer, yet today doctors still prescribe them. Not only are these synthetic drugs still prescribed, but they are often even used for frivolous purposes like treating acne (as well as to control breakthrough bleeding).

But what could a woman do? Most threw away their hormones and decided to go cold turkey. Women were suffering and feeling awful, but they were afraid of what these synthetic hormones
could do to them and their health, and rightly so. That fear has likely carried over to you.

But around this time something great was also happening within medicine in this country. Western doctors were starting to learn about another approach to HRT: bioidenticals, or BHRT.

BIOIDENTICAL HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY (BHRT)

The information was out; synthetic hormones
are
dangerous, but enter bioidentical hormones! As you can imagine the drug companies were not happy about bioidenticals; synthetic hormones had been a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year business.

Natural bioidentical hormones are what our bodies make or once made. Hormones, as you know from earlier chapters, are essential to feeling good during this passage. So it makes sense to put back what is missing!

You may now be wondering: What makes bioidenticals different and safer than the horse urine pills?

The estrogen in conventional HRT is horse estrogen, not human estrogen. And progestin (medroxyprogesterone acetate) is not progesterone. This is a very important distinction. For example, bioidentical progesterone is made from a precursor compound found in wild yams or soy. They are then biochemically converted to molecules
identical
to human hormones. In short, they are
biologically identical
in their molecular structure to the human hormone, and as such are an exact chemical fit to what your body makes or once made.

That women still don’t know about the benefits of these hormones is a travesty. It’s due to a lack of doctor education, starting in our medical schools. Most medical schools receive funding
from pharmaceutical companies to teach “allopathic medicine only,” so the schools have a vested interest in training our new young doctors in the “pharmaceuticals are always best” school of thought, lest they lose their revenue stream. Sadly and unfortunately, when it comes to HRT, our students are taught a dangerous allopathic protocol, prescribing “one size fits all” doses of (what I call, fake) nonbioidentical hormones. This is where the bad rap and the confusion come in, making women wary of hormone replacement. How do you go against your doctor and his or her training? Clearly it is only with knowledge—that is the only thing that gives us the power to effect change.

Properly and artfully restored natural BHRT allows women (and men) to live a quality, healthy life (provided you take good diet and exercise seriously; there is no free lunch when it comes to your health and longevity).

How BHRT Began

The very first doctor in the United States to prescribe a full course of BHRT was the brilliant maverick, the fearless Dr. Jonathan Wright. He found that by putting back what nature had once made, but in their purest forms, women were not only getting relief from menopausal (and perimenopausal) symptoms but they were enjoying better health overall. A new way was born.

Women started flocking to his practice, at the Tahoma Clinic, outside of Seattle, and Dr. Wright began teaching and training other doctors in the “art” of hormonal replacement. (He is one of the training doctors for
ForeverHealth.com
.)

The results were astounding: the use of bioidentical hormones produced an immediate decline in breast cancer rates of about 9 percent in his patients. I asked him to discuss how he came to this work, and how he discovered bioidentical hormones. Read what he had to say.

BIOIDENTICAL TREATMENT: A PEEK UNDER THE HOOD

JW:
To be accurate, I wasn’t the first to discover them. It was Dr. John Lee who pioneered the use of bioidentical progesterone in the late 1970s. What I did, though, was to expand that use to a comprehensive program including estrogen, progesterone, DHEA, testosterone, thyroid, and even melatonin when needed.
From the time a female first enters puberty until the end of her last period all women are keenly aware of the constant hormonal changes going on inside their bodies. Except during the months of pregnancy, she will experience the complex ebbing and flowing of a twenty-eight-day cycle until she reaches her late forties or early fifties (and in some cases much earlier due to stress and toxicity). It’s a natural and inevitable transition from one stage of life to another. Puberty marks the beginning of reproductive life, and menopause marks the end of it.
Even in the year 1050, bioidentical hormone replacement was being done very extensively in China, very similar to what we are doing today.
SS:
Were they using soy and wild yams to make them?
JW:
No, they were using human hormones extracted from the urine of young people who, of course, have the most hormones between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. For the squeamish, urine has been used in medicine for years. Look at the drug Premarin, which is made from horse urine.
SS:
Way back then they knew replacing hormones was beneficial?
JW:
They were known as youth essence. The Chinese were also replacing hormones for the men, but it was limited to the emperor and his court. The “common people” did not get theirs. The physicians of the court were in charge of collecting, concentrating, and preparing the hormones from the urine, although at that time they didn’t know they were
collecting hormones; they just thought they were essences of youthful life.
SS:
This was medication for the elite …
JW:
Yes, for the elite in China. This went on from 1050 until the mid-1900s.
SS:
Why did they stop using them? At present, hormones are a new concept in China. In fact, my book
The Sexy Years
only recently hit the book stands there and is selling quite vigorously.
JW:
I don’t have an explanation. Possibly, it’s because the emperors had less and less power in the mid-1900s.
SS:
How did you have the courage to begin prescribing them?
JW:
Twenty-five years ago, one of my patients questioned the sanity of taking horse urine hormones. She didn’t want them and gave me a challenge to find a way to make her feel better naturally. I knew at that time nutrition, good diet, vitamins and minerals, and some botanicals were crucially important, so I went to the textbooks and began at the beginning: What are estrogens in the body? What about progesterone? Then I started calling some of the very few compounding pharmacists that existed in North America in the early 1980s. I finally found a pharmacist, Ed Thorpe from Vancouver, British Columbia, who told me he thought he could source the molecular pattern. It took him about six weeks. And we started from there all because a patient came into my office and insisted that there had to be a better way, telling me she wasn’t a horse!
SS:
Good for her. How long did it take for her to start feeling well, and what did you give her?
JW:
I’ve always believed in copying nature. I figured out what nature does and tried to use the exact same molecules in the exact same proportions and quantities that belong in the body. Plus, I tried to mimic the timing the body uses. The hormones I gave her at the time were the three classical estrogen hormones: estrone, estradiol, and estriol.
I did follow-up testing to make sure of its safety. I realized then that estrone wasn’t essential in the formula, because estradiol turns into estrone on its own. I also made sure there was estriol in the formula because it is the anticarcinogenic component of the three estrogens. Estriol is very important in the makeup, but most doctors ignore or overlook this fact. Estriol is needed and here is why: it appears from a number of studies published over four decades that estriol’s unique and most important role may be to oppose the growth of cancer, including cancer promoted by estradiol and estrone themselves. Animal studies show that when natural estradiol and estrone are “opposed” with estriol in normal physiologic proportions, the risk of cancer due to hormone replacement virtually vanishes.
SS:
I’ve mentioned this in other books, but it was you that discovered my body doesn’t make the estriol component of my estrogens, thus leaving me unprotected from cancer. I’m sure it’s a big part of why I developed breast cancer, the other being a lack of progesterone, making me estrogen dominant. So I was really in trouble, no estriol protecting me as the anticancer component of my estrogens, too much estrogen in general, and no progesterone to oppose the estrogens. How many doctors could have figured this out?
You added estriol to my estrogen formula and I feel comforted that I am protected, and I am grateful for your understanding of the science of our hormonal selves.

In some form or another, natural hormones have been around in this country for about fifty years. But it wasn’t until Dr. Wright had the courage to
prescribe
full BHRT in the United States over twenty-five years ago that women started to fully reap their benefits. He took such flack for his ideas about bioidenticals, yet bioidentical hormones reflect advances in physics and technology that simply were not available a half a century ago.

THE GOOD NEWS: The dangers of synthetic HRT do not apply to state-of-the-art BHRT!

Bioidentical hormone replacement is safe, effective, different from Premarin and Prempro, and proven beyond any reasonable medical and scientific doubt.

These results were published in April 2007 in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
and then again reinforced by similar research published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
the following June.

Why Isn’t BHRT Standard Treatment?

Why hasn’t the drug industry, knowing about synthetics and their dangers, embraced bioidenticals more? Why haven’t so many heard about their safety and efficacy? The answer is that hormones that occur naturally in the human body cannot be patented. A pharmaceutical company cannot own them exclusively. No patent means less money! No patent means no pharmaceutical company can have the exclusive right to manufacture and profit from its product. Tremendous investment goes into developing and studying a pharmaceutical product. It makes good business sense for drug companies to protect their investment with exclusive patented products. As a result, there are also no double-blind studies and minimal marketing of natural hormones.

To sell a drug, a pharmaceutical manufacturer instructs doctors on how and when to prescribe it. Much of what med students are taught after university comes from pharmaceutical companies that have done extensive research in order to justify a product they sell.

When I urge replacement, I do not write about synthetic hormones. I only write about natural bioidentical hormones and BHRT. Bioidentical hormones can be individualized so
you receive the
exact
amount that your body is missing. Non-bioidentical hormones are “a one pill fits all” treatment with dangerous molecules. Why take synthetic hormones when natural hormones are better and safer?

Women have a powerful voice when used. Research and change is often initiated by informed patients like you, who have taken the time to learn, ask questions, and demand safer treatment options. Lately, the insistence of irate women has put pressure on some pharmaceutical companies to begin manufacturing natural hormones, but they are predosed. This means that if you get really lucky, possibly this particular formulation might be exactly what you need. What’s more likely is that you’ll “get close.” In hormone replacement you don’t want to get close. You want to find the perfect amount individualized just for you, to take away
all
your symptoms, not just some of them.

Because women have been so vocal about wanting natural hormones in the past few years, many doctors have started using pharmaceutical BHRT. Generally, they are not achieving the success that doctors who have embraced individualized dosing are having with compounded natural hormones.

Those who still argue the case for non-bioidentical hormones have an agenda, and usually this argument is made by a pharmaceutical rep who has a vested interest in promoting synthetics. They will argue that not enough research has been provided on the safety of natural hormones. Yet non-bioidentical hormones have been unequivocally proven to
give
patients cancer, stroke, and deep vein thrombosis! There is no data indicating that anyone has ever died using natural hormones. Bioidentical hormones do not have harmful side effects, if prescribed in the right dosages by a skilled doctor.

FDA-APPROVED BIOIDENTICAL PRODUCTS