Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (25 page)

SS:
Why is breast-feeding so vital to our health?

TSW:
Breast-feeding immunizes the baby against death from the outside … germs and the like. But breast-feeding immunizes you, the mother, against death from breast cancer. In July 2002, the British medical journal
The Lancet
concluded that a woman’s risk of breast cancer
decreases
by 7 percent for every birth she experiences; 3 percent more for each year under twenty-eight years old she is when that child is born; and most important, another 4.3 percent for every twelve months of her life that she breast-feeds. Add to that another 23 percent for whether or not she was personally breast-fed by her mother.

SS:
So what are women to do? It’s too late to go back. We’ve taken the pill. We didn’t breast-feed our babies. And we postponed having babies so we could pursue our careers.

TSW:
You’re right … you can’t breast-feed babies you never had, so that protection is gone, but you can put natural hormones back in a normal rhythmic fashion so your brain believes you might still be making them. With any luck, that may be all it takes to fool all of your systems into staying healthy for that potential. Young women should exercise all of the options when they are biologically capable of them before it’s too late. It’s hard to exercise your options when you’re on chemotherapy or have Alzheimer’s disease. Biological choice must come first before lifestyle choices. As a researcher into
women’s health, someone needs to tell our daughters what no one told us: that first-trimester abortion increases breast cancer by an overall odds ratio of one to three. Unfortunately, at this late date, for some of us, it seems biology
is
destiny.

Molecular biology makes it look very promising that we can stop the epidemic of breast cancer with rhythmic natural hormone replacement. Now that we have the knowledge of why breast cancer takes the lives of those we love, let’s not repeat the same mistakes. The
Lancet
study and literally thousands of others like it make clear that the pill, lack of breast-feeding, and menopausal cancers are inextricably linked and no one ever told you.

Reproduction is an elemental force that you can use wisely or that can destroy you.

SS:
But we’re dying of breast cancer, heart disease, and dementia. Can bioidentical hormone replacement truly be the only answer for us?

TSW:
There is another study, from the
Journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
from October 2001 that says full-term pregnancy early in reproductive life is protective against breast cancer in women. Pregnancy also provides protection in animal studies against carcinogen-induced breast cancer [the environment]. Pregnancy shows the same protective effects for heart disease and dementia, and I believe these effects can successfully be mimicked by using natural hormones estrogen and progesterone.

In other words, I think it’s going to be all right; just call your doctor and tell him what you want. Tell him you’ve done your homework, considered your options, and you want hormone replacement—natural bioidentical transdermal creams in a natural rhythm, probably for the rest of your life.

SS:
One of the biggest obstacles in turning women on to bioidentical hormones is having a period at the end of the progesterone peak in your protocol. But what about doctors who give women a choice to have a period or not?

TSW:
I sat with one doctor recently who said, “If a woman comes in and says she doesn’t want to have a period, how can I argue with her?” I said, “I don’t agree. I think women need to be informed. And they’re coming to you for information. They have not been educated
into understanding what normal and natural is. It’s your job as the doctor to say to that woman, “I highly recommend you have a period.” And he sat there with his mouth open.

SS:
What about hysterectomies? My uterus was removed this year because of severe hyperplasia. It wasn’t cancer or even precancer, but with my history of breast cancer, I was warned that this hyperplasia could become cancer. I felt there was no choice.

TSW:
Cancer doesn’t mechanically move like that. Women with breast cancer look to their lymph nodes as the next place it goes. But there was an article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in 1991 or 1992 that stated that when you have a pinpoint-size lesion, like the end of a pen, in your breast, you already have breast cancer cells in the bone marrow of your shin or your leg. Now, realistically, it didn’t travel there.

SS:
I’ve never heard this.

TSW:
I believe what is happening is a bodywide phenomenon of a change in stem cells. The stem cells in your breast made some wonky cells, and we’ll call them cancer. But the stem cell in your leg can make breast cancer because a stem cell anywhere can make anything. That’s how
I
believe metastasis occurs. That’s why with a woman’s uterus, I would first try a lot of estrogen and progesterone to reprogram bleeding before removing it, because once they perform a hysterectomy, all they’ve done is remove the evidence, but you’re still not protected, you’re still not in a normal rhythm. Does that make sense? I’m being candid with you, not trying to scare you.

SS:
Yes, but what about excessive bleeding?

TSW:
Actually, using the Wiley Protocol, we fix that problem with more estrogen. Doctors know that in a hospital setting, they “cure” hemorrhaging with high-dose Premarin intravenously. I’m saying you save your uterus with rhythmic cycling. You must put back the estrogen and progesterone in a template that is recognized by the brain and the stem cells. You can’t just throw it in haphazardly. You can’t give a static dose, either; it has to be given rhythmically just as it happened when you were a young woman still making those hormones. Putting back hormones is a huge question. Obviously they should be bioidenticals. The only logical conclusion I came to in the
eight years of research was that you absolutely had to put them back the way you originally had them.

Women have hysterectomies routinely, but if women were given hormones rhythmically, I believe very few would need to have their uteruses removed.

SS:
But what about repairing the damage of years of birth control pills? Can it be done?

TSW:
Birth control pills have certainly exacerbated the situation. But taking a static dose of BHRT, the same dose every day, whether it’s high or low, further deranges brain rhythms. You can’t receive progesterone to stop the bleeding unless the estrogen makes a peak on day 12 and then comes down, because your brain and all cells in the body make a progesterone receptor at that crescendo point of estrogen. If you have a steady dose of estrogen and it’s low, you just keep building and building the lining and that causes excessive bleeding, because even if you use progesterone, you can’t “receive” it. Everything that happens to a cell happens at the receptor level through gene activity, and the rhythm of the hormones creates those receptors.

SS:
I have to say this goes against many other doctors I have spoken with. They say that it is excessive estrogen that builds the lining and creates this excessive bleeding.

TSW:
Sorry, they’re wrong. The premise that in hemorrhaging, estrogen production is “excessive” is a misleading characterization. While the estrogen pours
continuously
, chronically, in a nonvarying way, the fact that it never reaches a peak of production means it never provokes a progesterone receptor. Is that “excessive”? Not exactly. It’s dysrhythmic. I’ve done the science. What you want to reach is normal apoptosis—that is, death of the cells, the release of them (menstruation), and the birth of them again (rebuilding the lining for the next month to get ready to make a baby). Every woman goes through this process each month while she is still making hormones. This requires estrogen peaks and progesterone peaks. When this doesn’t happen, cancer cells can proliferate.

We are about reproducing. That is what the brain knows. That is our job as members of the human species.

Let me tell you how powerful the human brain is. I was talking to
a woman in Washington where we have group meetings. And this woman said to me, “I have nipple tenderness,” and I said, “How many months have you been on the Wiley Protocol?” Because in the first three months of using that rhythm with bioidentical creams, you can have breast tenderness, like you’re in puberty again. Your body wakes up. She said, “Three months.” And I said, “Well, it should end at the end of this month, because that’s what I see in group diagnosis. And she said, “I don’t have breasts; I’ve had a double mastectomy.”

SS:
What’s that about?

TSW:
That’s the morphic field. Your brain doesn’t know once it has hormones and the right rhythm that your breasts are gone or that your uterus is gone. Just the brain talking to those organs makes them appear to exist again. The hormones actually, if they’re taken right, change your personal reality. The women on the Wiley Protocol who’ve had hysterectomies can have cramps right before their periods if the estrogen’s off, and they don’t have a uterus. This proves [biologist Rupert] Sheldrake. You know, Sheldrake is the guy who does morphic fields. His last book was about how your dog knows when you’re coming home.

SS:
Because the brain doesn’t know that the uterus isn’t there?

TSW:
Right, if the hormones are right, your body thinks you’re intact. Do you know what that means? This is a huge deal in psychoneuroimmunology, in physics.

SS:
So how exactly does a woman trick her body into believing she has a uterus?

TSW:
We need to figure out when the first day of your last period was, even if it was abnormal bleeding. Because the brain was a part of a rhythm. So many women on the Wiley Protocol are missing their uteruses and can’t tell me the first day of their last period, so we also use the lunar calendar. For women who have had cancer, I usually start them on day 14, because if they have any tumors, by starting them on progesterone and estrogen on day 14, they get a blast of progesterone with estrogen first, so we don’t get tumor flare.

SS:
But what about blood tests?

TSW:
We draw blood in month 3, and we look at blood work on
days 12 and 21. Looking before month 3 is not useful because in the first month that we give you this estrogen, you’re not going to have enough receptors to use. It takes receptor turnover for a couple of cycles to get a full complement of receptors for both hormones. This way you receive enough estrogen to make a progesterone receptor. It can take two months. So on the third month we measure your blood and look at your symptoms and then raise the dose or lower it depending upon what you need.

SS:
Cream as a transport system is controversial. Some doctors don’t believe in creams.

TSW:
The problem with troche or drops is that they peak in your body in two to three hours, and then it’s gone. With cream we are making a depot in your fat base so that you get the “pulsatility” that is the hallmark of a hormone. Your brain doesn’t receive hormones as hormones unless there’s a beat. By putting it in your fat base in cream form, every time your heart beats the blood goes through you and you get a little pulse of hormone. This way nobody has highs or lows. The fat base as a delivery system works really well. A lot of women are very thin, but most of us have a little fat on the backs of our arms. By escalating and descending the dosing schedule, we recreate the “amplitude,” also a hallmark of endocrine function. We justify this premise by measuring hormone levels in the blood on days 12 and 21 to see if they match twenty-year-old levels.

SS:
Do you believe rhythmic cycling will keep women from getting cancer?

TSW:
There’s no cure for cancer. There is an understanding of cancer, however. If you give it what it wants, it stops, and it wants hormonal balance mimicking the way your body once made it. And when you understand cancer and give it what it wants, it stops bothering you. It stops trying to be a third thing, another life form that’s not you. So in understanding proliferation and apoptosis, you aim for relative rates. You get the hormones right enough, then you get apoptosis, which is balanced hormones.

SS:
This is a lot of information. If I smoked, I’d go have a cigarette. Thank you for being so forthcoming. I am fascinated.

TSW:
I just want women to know what I know, and then they can make their own decisions on how to live their lives and how to take care of themselves.

SS:
One more thing: In your book
Lights Out
, you explain that going to sleep early (between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.) lowers cortisol and insulin. Could going to bed late be a major factor in women’s inability to lose weight?

TSW:
Yes. It’s really very simple. This is something we can’t sell or bottle; you just need to go to bed.

T. S. WILEY’S TOP FIVE ANTIAGING RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Use bioidentical hormones, but use them in rhythm and use them the right way. You can’t give a static dose; it has to be given rhythmically, just as it happened when you were still making hormones. Call your doctor and tell him or her what you want. Say you’ve done your homework, considered your options, and you want hormone replacement—natural bioidentical transdermal creams in a natural rhythm, probably for the rest of your life.

2. Bioidentical hormones, given in this way, are one method of reversing the damage a woman has unknowingly done to her body by delaying childbirth, not breast-feeding, having dry-up shots, and taking birth control pills. That may be all it takes to fool all of your systems into staying healthy for that potential. Women should exercise all of the options when they are biologically capable before it’s too late. It’s hard to exercise your options when you’re on chemotherapy or have Alzheimer’s disease.