Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (24 page)

SS:
What kind of delivery system do you prefer?

DP:
Based on my experience, the best one is a gel that I put in a syringe. You just put a little pea-size on your arm. Because the skin is transdermal (through or by way of the skin), the hormone gets right into the bloodstream for better absorption.

I like working with estriol, the major hormone in the body. Numerous studies have shown that it doesn’t cause cell division in the million breast valves or cause hyperplasia in the uterus. When we are menstruating, 80 percent of the estrogen in our bodies is in the form of estriol. When we are pregnant, the highest level of hormone that is secreted is estriol. So I put estriol in with the estradiol, and I don’t use any estrone. Until I did this, I couldn’t get my patients feeling good. When I did fifty-fifty, they felt fantastic. Also in the gel, I put a little bit of testosterone for some women. I have been getting great absorption with gels, and they are very easy to use. The great thing is that it costs them $50 for everything: melatonin, natural progesterone, pregnenolone, DHEA, and estriol with the estradiol.

SS:
Is this all in one application?

DP:
No, just the estriol, estradiol, and testosterone is in one application. If I add progesterone, there are too many molecules and they don’t absorb. I get terrible results. I give the progesterone orally because
it’s been shown to give better blood levels, increase HDL, increase bone density, and give women more antianxiety benefits. The gel is cost-effective, too—priced at about $50.

SS:
What are the ramifications on the liver of taking estrogen orally?

DP:
It is important to detoxify the liver. It is such a busy organ, dealing with so much toxicity from the environment, and until you detoxify, too much of the estrogen is lost, and you do not get relief. This is why the gel transdermally is more effective.

SS:
Let’s talk more about testosterone. Do you feel that testosterone is the greatest brain food?

DP:
Yes, it does increase short-term memory, but we don’t know about long-term memory. It decreases waist-to-hip ratio (an important indicator of your overall health risk), it increases lean muscle mass, lowers hemoglobin, and improves insulin resistance.

I get asked by colleagues, “Aren’t you afraid that testosterone replacement will raise the risk of prostate cancer?” I say no. There is no literature that shows testosterone replacement increases the risk. However, if there is an existing cancer, it may increase the risk of that cancer to grow.

SS:
Tell me about your philosophy. How do you feel about your work?

DP:
Since I started working in antiaging medicine, I have been gratified. I know am doing something beneficial. I do believe with all my heart that I am not only going to extend their life span, but also improve the quality of that life span. I know what I am doing; I have researched enough to know that I am not going to be increasing their risk of any cancers or immunologic disorders. I know that I am going to boost them up as much as I can with hormones. I do explain that preventive medicine is not holistic but that it is real medicine. The rest is then up to the patient. I can give them perfectly balanced hormones, but if they eat pizza all day, hormonal treatment is not going to work as well. Good nutrition, exercise, stress relief—these are measures that will uplift their lives.

I also tell my patients to not watch sad, terrible, gruesome programs
on television. I tell them instead to listen to motivational tapes. Pamper yourself with daily bubble baths; use aromatherapy. Attend a house of worship, find joy in happy things, watch programs that are uplifting. I have even been known to prescribe a dog for lonely seniors. I put on their prescription: Go to the Humane Society and adopt a dog. Do whatever it takes to build yourself up physically, emotionally, and spiritually every day.

When patients on antidepressants come in and say these drugs are not working, I tell them that they will never, ever find happiness from a pill. There is no magic cure. You have to have balance in everything.

I am always trying to improve myself so I am able to give more to my patients. I feel honored to be in a position to have people come to me to help them and be involved in their health. There is nothing more intimate and precious than a person allowing you to help them with their health. I take that very seriously, and it gives me a great deal of pleasure. My patients have my cell phone number so they can call me anytime with questions or to let me know how they are feeling.

SS:
Your lucky patients.

DR. PAUNESKY’S TOP FIVE ANTIAGING RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy helps boost your immune system. Work with your doctor to obtain a regimen individualized just for you.

2. Talk to your doctor about adding the hormone pregnenolone to your bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, if you are a woman. About 90 percent of all women over age fifty are low in this hormone, which is a precursor to other hormones in the body.

3. Talk to your doctor about whether you need extra testosterone. It improves sex drive in women and improves brain function in everyone.

4.
Even if you have perfectly balanced hormones, you cannot afford to eat junk food all the time. This will negate the benefit of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

5. Live an uplifting lifestyle—no exposure to gruesome, violent shows in the media, regular pampering, regular attendance at a house of worship, and listening to motivational tapes, among other measures.

CHAPTER 11
T. S. W
ILEY:
R
HYTHMIC
C
YCLING

T. S. Wiley is an anthropologist focusing on evolutionary biology and environmental endocrinology in molecular medicine and genetics. She is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and has been a guest investigator at Sansum Medical Research Institute. She is the author of two books
, Sex, Lies, and Menopause
and
Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival.
She is also the creator of a unique form of BHRT called the Wiley Protocol. T. S. Wiley understands the hormonal system from the inside out and has been a great inspiration for me to continue to study and learn about the inner workings of our physiology. I believe you will be fascinated by the depth of her knowledge of how it all works
.

SS:
Women of our generation from ages forty to seventy are now considered the sickest women in history. We have cancers of the breast, ovaries, and uterus. Our doctors perform approximately 1 million hysterectomies a year in this country alone. Do you think this was caused by the pill?

TSW:
Well, I believe that’s certainly where it started. At this point, it is my concerted opinion that bioidentical hormones are the answer, versus synthetics. But how you should take bioidenticals is a huge question. I mean, we know that synthetic hormones were in the pill. And we know the dosing rhythm the pill made was more like a bad TV screen than the normal rhythm that occurs in the body of a young woman.

So the pill’s synthetic hormones and dosing regimen derange the original HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis, which is sort of a global positioning system, to tell your systems the time of day and year based upon your location to the planet. Unfortunately, whether or not the axis ever rights itself depends upon
childbirth
. If you have babies after the pill, that’s a start, that helps. Whether or not this axis can stay righted as you continue to reproduce depends upon lifestyle. How late you stay up, how much sugar you eat, how old you are inside. But once the HPA axis is deranged, you need a jolt, like cardiac paddles, you know, when they jump-start your heart to get your hormones back in sync with the planet. You can use bioidenticals, if you use them in rhythm and use them the right way, to make peaks that feed back to the brain, and then the brain talks to the lower half. You have to make up the part of the song that is missing. Make sense?

SS:
Yes. But if the pill was really synthetic hormones, which means that we women were not fully ovulating all those years, then all of us in this generation were in hormone imbalance. That’s disturbing.

TSW:
Well, that’s why in my research, I went all the way back to the beginning of modern time. That’s what scientists do. I wanted to know what it was to be a woman, and I wanted to know what had changed. I wanted to know what the lies were that made us all so desperately sick. So I had to look at what had changed for women in the last 150 years. The pill was the major factor. The pill was not mimicking nature, and whenever you do that, there’s going to be trouble.

But the pill gave women a new kind of freedom. At the turn of the century, women were fighting for the right to vote. We were fighting for equality, but we forgot that men and women are different biologically, physiologically. The pill led us to believe that we could have sex without pregnancy, but nobody consulted our bodies about this premise. We were pressured to pursue higher and higher education, because we had to wait for men taking advantage of the GI Bill after World War II to marry and have children, leading to careers that put us in competition with biologically different creatures—men. What no one ever thought to ask were the real questions: Is it more dangerous to have a first pregnancy after thirty than it is to have no children
at all? Or could delaying childbearing until we “couldn’t” have children make us sick in ways we could never have imagined?

You see, the birth control pill was the first powerful drug prescribed to normal healthy women for long-term use. The pill was low-level estrogen (synthetic, not real), plus progestins, dosed in an abnormal rhythm, and it put the body into a sort of controlled menopause. Since menopause is the beginning of the end healthwise, this was a tragedy to perpetrate on eighteen-year-old women.

SS:
Those of us who were on the pill were then in a controlled menopause, because we were unknowingly using the same hormones that the Women’s Health Initiative told us to discontinue, meaning the synthetic hormones. Could this be the reason for the rise in breast cancer?

TSW:
By 1962, research stated that there were 132 reports of blood clots and 11 deaths. Pill users were beginning to show abnormal glucose tolerance and some diabetes from altered metabolism. Today we know, from the Women’s Health Initiative 2002 involving 103,027 women in Norway and Sweden, that even users of the minipill have a 22 percent increase in breast cancer versus childless women who haven’t used oral contraceptives. When the pill came on the market, it contained even larger doses of hormones, far more than are found in today’s diverse and still effective array of birth control pills. The early pill was as dangerous as today’s pill, yet women whose doctors prescribed it received little or no warning of risks and complications, such as blood clots and strokes, et cetera, because since it had never really been tested in the way drugs are now, no one knew how destructive synthetic hormones could be to natural rhythms such as fertility, mating, and sleeping.

The Women’s Health Initiative was abruptly curtailed when it was found that a common hormone replacement drug, Prempro, actually seemed to increase women’s risks of breast cancer, stroke, and pulmonary embolism.

Women’s bodies were designed to breed early and often, breastfeeding each child for years and thereby building up enough hormones to insulate themselves from later diseases. There’s the pill, and the other reason women get breast cancer these days is that they
don’t have babies early enough, don’t have enough babies, and don’t breast-feed them long enough.

SS:
Then where is the outrage, why don’t we know this?

TSW:
I try to get mad enough for all of us in my books.

SS:
I delivered my baby as a teenager. No one ever talked to me about breast-feeding. The nurse brought my son to me and said that mother’s milk had germs and that it would be better for the baby to give him baby formula. It was a decision I have regretted all my life. Further, they gave me a shot to dry up my milk. What was in that shot?

TSW:
Yeah, that was very common in the seventies. It was probably DES in that shot.

SS:
You mean tamoxifen? The cancer after-care drug?

TSW:
Not the same drug, but the same effect. Both of them are synthetic “superestrogens.” Tamoxifen has the effect of destroying estrogen receptors over time, but DES is what causes cervical cancer in offspring generations later. If you force estrogen, you turn off prolactin (a pituitary hormone that induces lactation and prevents ovulation); that’s how you dry up milk. Today they use something called Pariodel, which is a dopamine agonist that will also block prolactin reception. They think that this is safer, which is nonsense because it is not nursing that will hurt you.

SS:
I’m beginning to see my history. I started having bad Pap smears early in my twenties. I had two D&Cs in those years. At that time, I was too young to ask what and why. I imagine now it was because I had the dry-up shot. I was then put on birth control pills for twenty years.

TSW:
Oh my God. That is a long time to be on birth control pills. There are fifty-nine different versions of the pill on the market today, as well as a contraceptive patch called Ortho Evra that you can “preview” by tearing out a dud sample in women’s magazines. Right now, 16 million women are on the pill in America. Approximately one-third of those women are on it for perimenopausal symptoms. The pill can in no way ameliorate the real and present dangers to health before, during, and after menopause. Our evidence shows that, at best, it masks the real symptoms of impending disease and enhances
low-level estrogen-driven cell proliferation in the breasts, liver, and cervix. Birth control pills contain higher doses of synthetic estrogen than regular standard of care hormone replacement therapy. The very same progestins’ thrombotic action [forming of blood clots] in birth control pills has been seen to be caused by the “Pro” in Prempro in the recently canceled HRT heart trials in the Women’s Health Initiative. We in America have taken almost five times the amount of birth control pills as all the other countries in the world combined. For our health’s sake, this is all very, very bad. We don’t breast-feed the ones the pill prevented us from ever considering having. Contraceptives have been the key player in our lack of childbearing and, by degree, our subsequent lack of breast-feeding, so this starts to round out the picture of why breast cancer is an epidemic.