Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (17 page)

That is the goal. When you find hormonal balance individualized just for you, your body sings. You will feel the best you have ever felt. That has been my experience and the experience of millions of my readers.

This balance doesn’t come easily. If there were a way to give you a sneak peek so you could feel what it is like at optimum, you would be more than willing to do the work to get there. A lot of people get impatient and give up too soon. It takes time to lose hormones, so it’s going to take a little while to “tweak” until balance is reached. Your doctor can only approximate the dosage for you the first time based upon talking to you, then after a couple of months having your labwork done. Sometimes doctors get lucky, and the song begins immediately. Sometimes the song is off-key. Even though you are feeling better, you know it’s not exactly right. That’s when you want to start talking to your doctor about how you feel. It is important to be in tune with your symptoms. Remember those seven dwarfs: Itchy, Bitchy, Sweaty, Sleepy, Bloated, Forgetful, and All-Dried-Up.

Having symptoms like the seven dwarfs is an indicator that your system still needs tuning. But oh my, when all these symptoms go away, the result is heavenly. Here’s a list of what to expect: energy, vitality, creativity, brainpower, strong heart, loss of wrinkles (yes, adequate amounts of estrogen plumps up the skin), perky breasts, a vagina that’s moist and ready, renewed sexual desire, and sleeping through the night. Plus, you don’t itch, and you aren’t bitchy. You don’t have hot flashes, so Sweaty says good-bye; and best of all, if you are eating correctly, your excess weight starts to melt away.

For men, your grumpiness dissipates. You get your energy back. Your libido wakes up. You want to go out, have fun, and continue working. That fat around your belly now has a chance of going away, provided you are eating correctly and exercising in moderation. I will go into detail about men’s hormonal needs in
chapter 12
.

Teenagers can also get relief from the mood swings and horrible cramping that accompany weight gain. Of course, they have to watch their carb intake, but many doctors I have talked to, like Dr. Erika Schwartz, believe in bioidentical hormones for teenagers who are heavy bleeders and victims of raging hormones.

Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is a huge antiaging opportunity—the true fountain of youth that can keep your insides young. What a concept!

O
PTIMAL
R
EPLACEMENT

Once you are in the care of a good doctor who has chosen to specialize in bioidentical hormone replacement or a good antiaging doctor (there are referrals at the back of this book), you can get to work optimizing your entire hormonal system. First, your doctor will get rid of the uncomfortable symptoms from major and minor hormone loss. This is no small task. Again, it takes time and patience. The good news is that you will start feeling better almost immediately, but just know that the best is yet to come. Once you get there, you will want to continue with this type of medicine because you will realize just how joyous and vibrant life can be. You will never look longingly at the young people. In fact, my husband and I are often amused at the fact that most people are probably not making love on Saturday afternoons as we often do. Alan and I have completed our child rearing, and as hormonally balanced people, we are “in the mood” more often than not. It’s a beautiful thing, and believe me, with what I know is going on in our home, I don’t ever worry about younger beautiful women. In fact, I love being around them myself! They are having a great time, and so am I. They may have better skin, but I have wisdom. I prefer the trade-off.

When it comes to replacement,
optimal
is the operative word. So often a patient goes to his or her doctor and asks for a hormone panel (through blood work) to be done. When the results come back, he or she is told that everything is normal and there is nothing to worry about. “Normal” for what? “Normal” for a fifty- or sixty- or seventy-year-old person? You don’t want normal for your age. A fifty- or sixty-year-old is in hormonal decline. Yet that is how most doctors treat their patients in this country. They figure if you are “normal” for your age, everything is okay.

Optimal
, on the other hand, describes hormonal balance for a
person who is much younger and at his or her healthiest prime. That’s what you want—not hormones that are declining. The goal of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is for you to enjoy vibrant good health throughout a long lifetime. This means that most of the standard reference ranges must be discarded in favor of optimal ranges. Working with a qualified physician to measure, assess, and correct your medical tests is strongly recommended. Obtaining the best results means working with a doctor who understands the difference between
normal
and
optimal
and is willing to take preemptive action against aging. If your doctor doesn’t understand this, you need to find another doctor for your hormonal needs.

M
ETHODS

If what I have said so far has convinced you that bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is the way to go, if you are convinced that BHRT is the true fountain of youth, then let’s look at your options. You have two choices: static dosing or rhythmic cycling.

STATIC DOSING

With static dosing, your doctor will most likely start you on low-dose bioidenticals according to your symptoms. After a couple of months he or she will order a blood test, approximate your hormone levels, and prescribe a static dose of estradiol every day of the month. On days 18 to 28, your doctor adds in a static dose of progesterone, based upon your labwork. This regimen is designed to match what our bodies once did when we were making a full complement of hormones. It brings about a period at the end of each cycle (at the end of the month). This approach is how it happens in nature and is used by some of the cutting-edge Western doctors (but not all of them) to replicate nature. Based upon the research I have done and information from the dozens of doctors I have interviewed, I will go on record and say that I believe cycling in this fashion is not an option but a necessity if we are trying to mimic normal physiology.

So far, static dosing sounds simple, but here is the complex part. As you will read in
chapter 16
, stress affects and blunts hormone production. So if you are going through a stressful period in your life (and all of us are stressed regularly in this country), it changes your needs. To compensate, you may need to dose up a drop or a fraction of a milligram or dose down. If the stress is severe, you may need to have another blood test to determine where your levels are. This is what I mean by the “art form” I mentioned earlier. It is important that you work closely with your doctor and communicate your symptoms so he or she will adjust your dosages until you get it just right.

RHYTHMIC CYCLING

Rhythmic cycling is a new concept in bioidentical hormone replacement, but one that is based upon the ancient cycles of nature. In fact, it goes all the way back to early man, who was attuned to the planet in a way that is completely inaccessible to us in the modern world.

There were no executives or career women at that time—just people living in tune with the cycles of the moon and the tides, reproducing as often as was possible, and then seeing that each baby occupied a year of a woman’s life, followed by breast-feeding for another couple of years.

It was all so perfect back then. In summertime, early humans ate all the abundant carbohydrates that were available, danced, and made love by the light of the moon. Women menstruated to the cycles of the moon, and we fattened up in the summer with all of the abundant food. Then winter arrived, and darkness came earlier. We had no more carbohydrates, we ate meat, we went to sleep earlier because there was no light, and we could stay warm with one another. As women, our bellies grew with the baby we had made during the summer months. We lived off the fat supplies that we had accumulated by eating all the carbohydrates in the summer, and we slept more. With spring, we gave birth. The sun began to shine, and the process started all over again. Simple.

This was nature working at optimum before
we
got involved and
messed with it. When electricity came, it was declared a miracle, but it also changed our rhythms. Now we could stay up as late as we wanted. Without the proper amount of sleep, the work of all the healing hormones—which normally happened from getting enough sleep each night—was disrupted, so we slept less. Stress became a part of our lives and blunted our hormone production. We stopped cycling to the lunar calendar, we had fewer children, we breast-fed less, and in general we became weaker as a species.

In ancient times, women cycled to the rhythms of the moon. Our bodies would produce estrogen in increments: The first three days was one amount; the next three days another amount (each woman required or made the amount perfect for her); and by the twelfth day, our estrogen would peak, which happened to coincide with the full moon. Then the receptor sites opened to receive progesterone, and the lining would shed. As the estrogen fell, the progesterone would rise until it reached its incremental peak, only to rebuild the lining of the uterus to be ready next month to start this process all over again. According to T. S. Wiley, “That is the beginning of life. Anything else is death.”

Rhythmic cycling exactly mimics our healthiest prime, which would be us when we were our reproductive selves, when our hormones would rise and fall in peaks … a rhythm. Without a rhythm, the body perceives things as “not exactly right for reproduction,” and it is in this imbalanced state that disease cells can begin to go wonky. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy given rhythmically appears to be an important way to avoid cell proliferation and thus keep organs intact. Rhythmic cycling is using the model of early man when our bodies were operating at their prime and we were our healthiest.

Rhythmic cycling is worth looking into. It resonates. It makes sense. We do ebb and flow as human beings with the moon and the tides. It would make sense that our cycles would do the same. As a young woman, when I was cycling naturally, there were days I felt light and free, and there were days I felt heavy and intense. Some days I would be in a perfect mood; other days I was not. These were
my rhythms, or cycles. A few days before my period, I would feel bloated or cranky—signs of chemicals moving around in my body.

To cycle rhythmically, you need to work with a doctor who understands how to do it. (See Resources,
this page
, for the names of doctors who prescribe rhythmic cycling. You can also check out the Wiley Protocol or ask your compounding pharmacist. The Wiley Protocol website and the number for the Professional Compounding Center of America are also in the Resources.)

This protocol must be prescribed by your doctor. It sounds complicated, but really it is as simple as looking at the calendar that accompanies your prescription. You look at the date of the month, and it shows you what amount to take that day. That’s all it is. The thinking has been done for you.

As I said earlier, I felt that it was important to try this protocol on myself so I could report to you my findings. I have been cycling rhythmically for almost two years as of this writing, and I have to say I feel great. I have no bloating, nor have I gained weight. In fact, I am experiencing weight loss, but I am also injecting HGH, which promotes weight loss. My weight is exactly where I want it to be at this age: 127 pounds at five feet five. For the last few years, my weight had been around 137, even 140 at times, although I have always eaten correctly and exercised. A lot of that weight gain I attribute to my radiation treatments for breast cancer. I know that it takes seven years for complete cell turnover, so that weight was most likely induced by hormonal imbalance created by the radiation treatments, even though I have been on bioidenticals.

I am enjoying quality of life cycling rhythmically. Both ways have given me back quality of life. Because I was on birth control pills for twenty years, I can honestly say that the way I feel on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is the best I have ever felt in my life. This is all such a personal choice, and just being on bioidenticals is a step in the right direction.

T. S. Wiley is knowledgeable yet somewhat controversial. Some doctors will react with horror at such amounts. But according to Ms. Wiley, it’s not the amounts, it’s the correct ratio that makes you feel
good, and the ratio between progesterone and estrogen must be correct.

I have spoken to a lot of women and doctors about this protocol. Some women cannot stop rhapsodizing about how they feel on this protocol. They love it, they love life, and they have their sex drives big-time.

Other women feel it is too much work and stop the protocol. There is such rampant fear of hormone replacement because of the alarming reports that have come out on synthetic hormones that these amounts seem to be crazy. Yes, the Wiley Protocol advocates large dosing, but we are talking about
bioidentical
, not synthetic HRT. That is a big difference. We are talking about real hormones. We are talking about regular blood tests and striving for perfect balance. If this protocol interests you, look into it. Do your homework, and then you can make an informed decision. The problem with these passages and transitions is that our doctors are so poorly informed that you are really on your own.

In the interviews with doctors that follow this chapter, it is important that you read carefully and absorb what each of them is saying. Every one of these doctors is on to something. What you can learn about aging well, antiaging, detoxification from the environmental pollutants, and bioidentical hormone replacement therapy will set you on a path of joy and good health.

But I’ll say it again: No one will ever care about your health the way you do. No doctor can understand your body as you do. No one will lose out as much as you do if you don’t make the right choices for yourself. This book is meant to empower you with knowledge. We have to question our doctors. No longer do we have to take their word as gospel. In this era of specialization, you, the patient, now need to understand how
your
body works, what is happening to it internally as the years pass, and what you can do to reverse the destructive process brought about by the environment, bad diet, and poor lifestyle habits and choices.