Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (19 page)

Gloria:
I agree, but also what society did to us. Women are moving further and further away from what our bodies were really designed to do. As we have fewer and fewer children, become more
career-oriented, run businesses, and go against the nature in our bodies, there has got to be some payback for this.

SS:
How do you feel now about having a period again?

Gloria:
Oh, it’s like my best friend. Every month I get my period, and I know my body is working right. I don’t ever want it to go away again. I never thought I’d love having my period so much.

SS:
Now that you are feeling so well, how is your teenage daughter doing? I remember your telling me that she had to miss a week of school every month because her periods were so severe and that it made her moods very difficult.

Gloria:
It could be genetic, but I think it’s because of our diets. We’re eating food that has been altered, and it’s throwing off the delicate balance that these girls have in their bodies. So many girls are starting their cycles earlier and earlier. I have a niece who started her cycle at age six!

I took my daughter to Dr. Hall around age sixteen (she’s eighteen now). Dr. Hall prescribed a little bit of natural progesterone after looking at her blood test to be sure that was the problem. I was so glad she wasn’t going to give her birth control pills like other doctors are giving to young girls. This just causes them to act more crazy and gain weight. Now my daughter has no more mood swings, and her periods are regular. Things in our house just couldn’t be better. I’m fifty-two years old, and I have never felt better or happier.

It wasn’t too long ago that my daughter wanted to put me in a cage and only let me out at certain times of the month. I feel better than I did at thirty or forty years old. I think it’s because I’ve gone one step further. I am cycling rhythmically, in which I am taking different levels every day, reaching an estrogen peak. Then later in the month, I reach a progesterone peak. That’s how my body did it when I was younger.

SS:
I know. I was speaking with Dr. Hall, and she said, “You should see Gloria. She looks so beautiful. She’s in love, she’s thin, and she’s happy.” I was so happy for you that I almost started to cry.

Gloria:
I feel beautiful. I have a boyfriend now, and it’s a wonderful feeling to be in love. I will be the first one to testify that I’ve seen life on both sides of the fence. I really have, and it wasn’t worth living the other way. It really wasn’t.

SS:
I understand.

Gloria:
That’s what I appreciate about you. You were the first person who was out there informing everybody about hormones. I was always trying to seek information. I needed to know as much as I could because that’s how I was going to survive. I’m even making a dress from scratch. That’s something I used to do, and now I’m doing it again because I’m back to the old me. See, this is a great thing for me. I wanted the life I once had, and now I have it again because of bioidenticals. I’m calm enough again to put in a zipper without losing control. I’m also gardening again. I’m getting my life back. And it’s the life we all should have. Because I feel so good on these hormones, I finally have the courage to go back and fix the stuff that caused me to be dysfunctional in other areas. I never would have been able to do that.

I’ve changed everything about my life. We now eat only organic food. It’s amazing how much better an organic pear tastes than one that has been tampered with. I bring them into the spa, and clients say, “That’s a pear!” I don’t buy junk food. I cook at home. I don’t like eating out very much because I don’t trust the food. I won’t even put an aspirin into my house anymore. The only thing that even resembles a drug are my hormones.

SS:
And you know enough, because of the work you have done to learn about your body and how it works, to know that this hormone you are taking is not a drug.

Gloria:
The first thing women say to me is, “Gloria, what about breast cancer?” Know what I say to them? “Read Suzanne’s book, then come back to me, and we’ll talk about it.” It really pays to inform yourself, because no doctor in the world is going to have the time to sit down, educate you, and figure out exactly what you need. If you don’t educate yourself, you’re going to end up the loser. This is your life.

SS:
Amen. What a great thing that you work in a day spa. Think of all the women coming in that you are going to educate. Good luck to you, Gloria, and thank you.

Postscript: Gloria is getting married. Look what bioidenticals did for her!

CHAPTER 7
D
R
. J
ULIE
T
AGUCHI:
B
REAST
C
ANCER

Dr. Taguchi is my personal cancer doctor, and it gives me great relief to work with a doctor who will support the use of bioidentical hormones as my choice for preventing a recurrence of my breast cancer. She is a medical oncologist at the Sansum Medical Clinic in Santa Barbara, California, and currently the principal investigator for the Sansum Clinic conducting cutting-edge cancer research. Her interest in hormones led her to coauthor the book
Sex, Lies, and Menopause.
She is also conducting clinical trials on the use of BHRT
.

SS:
Thank you for your time, Dr. Taguchi. I know how busy you are. So let’s begin. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, the first thing I was told was that I had to discontinue taking my bioidentical hormones.

JT:
I know, but it’s unlikely that is what caused your cancer. It is my conclusion that balanced real hormones (also known as bioidentical hormones) are important to keep aging women healthy. If you’re going to replace hormones, they should be rhythmic because it makes the most sense. The hormones that medicine in general had been prescribing for the past forty years has been with Premarin alone and Prempro, daily. Prempro is not good for women because it is associated with a higher incidence of breast cancer as discovered by the Women’s Health Initiative 2002. Now I see that there are commercials for low-dose Prempro, which makes no sense at all.

SS:
That seemed crazy to me also. When it comes to hormones, too much is too much and too little is too little. It’s about perfect balance. So women who gave up their synthetic hormones when this report came out were left adrift. They threw away their synthetic hormones but then didn’t know what to do. Menopausal symptoms are so devastating, and if these women didn’t know about bioidenticals, then the idea of “low-dose Prempro” would probably make them feel that these are better for them.

JT:
Yes. I don’t blame women for being terrified. The party line in medicine is that hormones can cause cancer. That’s the dogmatic thought, and physicians have been ingrained with this information or this limp belief based upon weak information that’s been around for years. The thinking originated when they would have postmenopausal women with breast cancer give up and/or block their hormones, that breast cancer sites would shrink or disappear. The standard in traditional medicine is to take away hormones so as not to “feed the tumor.” But we have several single-institution studies on women who have been treated for breast cancer who are on bioidentical hormones, and even Premarin and Prempro, who actually do better in several different parameters.

SS:
Even with synthetic hormones? Why is that, because even small amounts of horse estrogen are beneficial? If that is so, imagine the benefits of real bioidentical hormones.

JT:
We don’t know. Maybe because the small amount of cognition is better; maybe because they feel better because the hormones make them feel better and they have more will to fight. On hormones the quality of life is better. And who knows? Maybe the hormones may even be protective in ways we have not discovered yet. There are several studies that are being done, but mostly with synthetic hormones, that show improvement. I’m sure bioidenticals have been thrown into the mix, but bioidenticals are rarely looked at … that’s why we are running a clinical testing with ten doctors at the moment to see the effects of bioidenticals in perimenopausal women without breast cancer first. From my experience, I think the results will be impressive.

SS:
Normally, a cancer doctor would be oblivious to bioidentical hormones. What made you interested?

JT:
Observing an elderly physician with recurrent metastatic bladder cancer go into remission by taking and applying natural progesterone, suggested by T. S. Wiley. This got my attention. I then became a partner working on the book
Sex, Lies, and Menopause
with T. S. Wiley. It was the theory of replacing hormones based upon the original hormones and cycles of women. We studied the physiological levels, the physiological highs and lows, and we found that there were important biological reasons for those highs and lows of both hormones during a woman’s menstrual cycle.

SS:
You’re talking about the rhythm of women’s cycles, estrogen peaks and progesterone peaks … the highs and lows, the ebb and flow of our cycles?

JT:
Yes, I’m talking about estradiol and progesterone levels. You’re right, there are low levels of both hormones on days 1, 2, and 3. What happens at that point is your pituitary is pouring a message to your ovaries to make more estrogen. By day 12 you have your highest level of estrogen in your system as a reproductive woman to cause an egg to pop at ovulation. Then, throughout the cycle in the rest of the month, there are different estrogen levels that lower just before your period. After ovulation, progesterone is produced starting with a low level and slowly rising until a peak is reached on day 21, and then it falls again. Once the progesterone falls, it signals your body to have a period. This style and type of hormone replacement has not yet been studied. That’s why we are conducting a second clinical trial using bioidentical hormone replacement in this fashion. I have several women who have had breast cancer who choose to use this particular program, and they are doing very well. The problem is because there is no data using this type of treatment, I can’t recommend it … 
even though I believe in it
. I must first recommend “standard of care.” But when I get a patient such as yourself, who wants other options rather than the “standard of care,” it’s very gratifying because I feel we can really achieve good health and quality of life together.

SS:
Give me your thoughts. I took birth control pills for twenty years, had the dry-up shot to prevent lactation as a teenager; throw in the environmental mess and the stresses that accompany everyday
life in America, and you have a pretty good picture of myself and a lot of other crazed women in America. By switching to rhythmic cycling with bioidentical hormones, even though I am nearing age sixty, should I expect to be in pretty good shape for the rest of my life?

JT:
I would hope so, and that’s what I am hoping for with other women. I’m not trying to be negative, but there’s a combination of things. I had a ninety-one-year-old patient who had a mastectomy when she was sixty because she had breast cancer. She did not have chemotherapy, radiation, or tamoxifen. I saw her thirty-one years later, and she had tiny nodules on the skin over her mastectomy site. This was her recurrence thirty-one years later. What it taught me was that if she had died a year before the recurrence, everyone would have considered her cured from breast cancer.

SS:
But it was never really cured?

JT:
It was never really cured.

SS:
What you are saying is that the mastectomy didn’t really do anything for her?

JT:
Well, the mastectomy probably gave her peace of mind for thirty-one years. I quote this for my patients … If you have a mastectomy, there’s a 9 percent chance that the tumor will come back to the chest wall. The reason we began to do lumpectomies and radiation is that the number of local or breast recurrence is also about 10 percent, so we consider the outcome the same. But even with lumpectomy, radiation, or even a mastectomy, there’s still a chance that certain breast tumors can come back to the skin area.

SS:
What do you think about radiation? Because isn’t it radiation that can
give
you cancer?

JT:
It’s an odd paradox … I tell my patients that if you have a lumpectomy and you do not have radiation, your chances of the tumor coming back to the chest or skin are one in three. However, if you have radiation added to your lumpectomy, it reduces the risk of it coming back to one in ten. So that’s worth it.

SS:
Add chemotherapy to that equation.

JT:
Depends upon the patient and the tumor. When I evaluate a woman with breast cancer, I take many things into consideration,
such as the age of the patient. Is she menstruating? Is she hormonal? You look at the tumor characteristics such as size, histology estrogen receptor status, and HER2-neu expression. How many nodes were positive, if any? With this information or staging, we try to predict the treatment benefit for women with these different profiles and deliver our best shot.

But this is changing now, because of molecular biology and genomics. Soon we’ll be able to take a tumor, plug it into a machine, and it’s going to tell us the genetic mutations and where the problems are located. This will allow us to be able to fine-tune and target therapy much better, instead of giving a hundred women toxic chemotherapy and having a mere 20 percent of them getting a benefit.

Women who have positive estrogen receptor breast cancer tend to have a better long-term prognosis than women with estrogen receptor negativity disease. But this latter subset is doing better with newer therapies.