Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones (39 page)

SS:
So American women who are trying to be everything are paying a price?

GR:
Absolutely. You’ve got to get off the treadmill. It’s killing us. By contrast, we have more than fifty thousand people in this country
who are over a hundred years old. When asked the secret of their longevity, these people say that it is attributable to a good diet. Moreover, the ones who lived the longest are insulin-sensitive; they have not had insulin resistance. In addition, they have a very positive outlook—they don’t think negative thoughts—and they are consciously positive.

Some of them might say staying away from doctors and hospitals (
laugh
). In actuality, the third or fourth common cause of death in this country is iatrogenic.

SS:
Meaning?

GR:
Induced by surgery or medicine.

SS:
That’s scary. So it goes back to diet and lifestyle?

GR:
Absolutely. Hormone imbalance is a very significant factor, which is why women should be having hormone panels done in their mid-thirties for the first time. Men should start at forty. But the number one factor is diet. Without a good diet, you get insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and all the problems that accompany these conditions. When I started practicing back in the 1950s, we were prescribing diets high in carbohydrates and low in fat. That kind of diet can lead to these conditions. It’s very tragic, and physicians played and continue to play a part in this.

SS:
Don’t get me started; I have written several books on that subject. It all started when President Dwight Eisenhower had his heart attack in the 1950s. His doctor put him on a low-fat, high-carb diet, and that turned the tide to become the trend.

GR:
The American Medical Association says that 50 million people in the United States have coronary artery disease. The sad thing is, heart disease is preventable, but it’s hard to get that across.

SS:
You and I both agree that bioidentical hormones are a big missing piece of the health puzzle. Why is it so difficult to get the rest of the doctors to come along with this thinking, and how long is it going to take?

GR:
Having been a physician for fifty-five years, I have certainly seen how slowly it does change. I believe it will take another twenty-five years for this concept to be accepted. It will take a long time because there is a kind of animosity toward physicians who follow the bioidentical protocol.

The thinking is: How dare you do something different? But it’s really fear of criticism by their peers, so the majority of doctors go along with the “standard of care.”

But you must have hope. I attend meetings that combine alternative and functional medicine. The discussion of menopause and bioidentical hormones is a topic of discussion. So slowly, it’s happening.

I also see the pressure put on the doctor by the patient. Patients are standing up and saying, “Hey, Doctor, I want more of an answer.”

SS:
A lot of the women I have interviewed talk about estrogen dominance, bloating, and inability to lose weight, water, and fat. Explain estrogen dominance.

GR:
It’s the loss of balance with progesterone. Estrogen is a growth hormone; it’s also an excitatory hormone, so it’s responsible for insomnia and many of the mood changes as well, whereas progesterone is a very calming hormone that balances it.

The number one reason I would see patients as a gynecologist would be women in their forties complaining about weight gain in their lower abdomens. They were exercising and eating well but still gaining weight.

That, of course, was a major clue. It just told me that they were not producing progesterone anymore. They had estrogen dominance. It’s not being in balance—and, of course, estrogen likes to put on fat in the middle area. But more important, estrogen dominance inhibits thyroid. It inhibits the conversion of thyroxine, or T4, to T3 at the cellular level. T3 is by far the most potent of the thyroid hormones, and it’s seldom checked. Even when it is checked, it’s not that accurate, but it does give us a clue if we check.

The tiredness women experience, plus the fat deposition, are both probably due to a change in the thyroid as well. You know hormones all work together; if one hormone is off, then they are all off.

SS:
Let me ask you again: Doesn’t cycling make sense?

GR:
Absolutely, cycling. I just don’t necessarily subscribe to the fact that menstruation has to occur. That would depend upon the patient. During perimenopause or early menopause, the amount of estrogen needed to build the endometrium may be enough to have a period,
and that’s fine because we’re using progesterone on a fourteen-day cycling basis. So if there is an increase in the endometrium, it will slough off at that time.

As time goes on, you continue to produce estrogen either from the ovaries or the fat cells, and studies go all the way up to eighty years of age that some women may still have enough estrogen. And if progesterone is in balance, it will enhance the receptor sites.

You don’t have to have as much estrogen to build the lining of the endometrium to make the brain feel good. I don’t think it was intended that way. I mean, when we didn’t have any medicines and women went through menopause, I don’t believe they were intended to fall apart.

SS:
Yes, but we didn’t live as long as we do today. This long life is no fun without quality of life. What about the antidepressants prescribed for stress and anxiety? Most woman my age are on some kind of antidepressant.

GR:
I don’t like them. I have never prescribed them, and I won’t prescribe them. A big problem in medicine today is the HMO. A doctor is given approximately eight minutes per patient. What can you do for a patient in eight minutes except write a prescription? That’s the kind of medicine we are practicing today. A prescription mill. Doctors no longer have time to sit down with their patients to find out what’s really going on.

The system is not working. I hope it has hit bottom, but I don’t know how it is going to straighten out. We have the government handling our health. I don’t know any agency in the government that is really helping people.

SS:
What do you tell audiences in your lectures?

GR:
To take responsibility for your own health and challenge whatever your doctor tells you to do. Verify and feel comfortable with what he or she is prescribing. When doctors have only eight minutes per patient, they have no time to make new discoveries or make changes. Doctors learn more today by reading lay magazines!

The reason I’m still doing at my age what I am doing (I’m eighty years old) is that it isn’t happening with the doctors. They don’t have
the time. When I first started my practice, I talked to my patients and taught them how to stay healthy. Very few doctors do that anymore.

For instance, men need to know that testosterone levels are dropping about a decade earlier than they used to. Coronary heart disease is associated with low testosterone levels; it’s not just erectile dysfunction and libido. To stay healthy, a man has to have adequate testosterone levels. If estrogen dominance is an issue, then he may get cancer of the prostate, because that is likely to be caused by the estrogen rather than the testosterone. But who is going to tell people in the community these things when the doctors are too busy? This is why I say you’ve got to take responsibility for your own health.

How do you educate everybody? When you get hooked on sugar, how do you get off it? You can’t eat sugar every day and be healthy. Sugar should be a treat, a reward. There are some school systems that are taking junk food out of the school cafeterias. They are trying to educate kids in school, but it’s a drop in the bucket. But that is where it has to start, because I don’t think enough parents are into this. Parents are so busy that a good many of them really aren’t paying attention until something happens. I mean, 40 percent of today’s meals are eaten in restaurants and fast-food takeouts.

We have so many health problems, from bacteria overgrowth to inflammation to acid reflux, I’m hearing more and more about esophageal cancer probably as a result of acid reflux. Our whole medical system is in a big mess.

But I see little signs of hope. If people are educated and exposed to the new information, they will want it. Little by little, step by step, we’ll get the information out, and change will happen. This is what I dream about.

SS:
Thank you for your wisdom.

DR. REYNOLDS’ TOP FIVE ANTIAGING RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The number one factor in managing health is diet. Without a good diet, you get insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and all the problems that accompany these conditions.

2.
Testosterone levels are dropping about a decade earlier than they used to. Coronary heart disease is associated with low testosterone levels; it’s not just erectile dysfunction and libido. To stay healthy, a man has to have adequate testosterone levels. If estrogen dominance is an issue, then he may get cancer of the prostate, because that is likely to be caused by the estrogen rather than the testosterone.

3. As for menopause, those who go through it well, without a lot of stress, have a good nutrition and exercise program in place.

4. Women should be having hormone panels done in their mid-thirties for the first time. Men should start at forty. This is a different world.

5. Take responsibility for your own health, and challenge whatever your doctor tells you to do. Verify and feel comfortable with what he or she is prescribing.

PART FOUR
D
ETOXIFICATION
AND THE
E
FFECTS OF THE
E
NVIRONMENT ON
Y
OUR
H
EALTH

A study demonstrated that after people die, their bodies are not decomposing as quickly as they used to because we are consuming on average eight pounds of preservatives a year just from the food we eat.

CHAPTER 20
A
NTIAGING
M
EDICINE

Reporters interviewing a 104-year-old woman: “And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?”

The woman simply replied, “No peer pressure.”

A
ging is a part of life. Each cell in the body has a function to perform. Heart muscles have to function for our hearts to beat. The nerve cells in our brain have to function so we can think. These functions are fed by the hormones in the body. If you have read this far, you know that hormone loss is the hallmark of aging. By replacing the hormones lost in the aging process, we can substantially stop the clock. As several doctors in this book have stated:
Our hormones do not decline because we age, we age because our hormones decline
.

The second component would be the effects of our damaged environment and the toxicity all around us that are aging us prematurely. Our bodies are under an assault unlike anything the human species has ever before endured. Our environment is polluted, our food has been poisoned, our water is contaminated, the stresses of our daily lives are killing us, and we are taking too many pharmaceuticals that are making us sick.

Antiaging medicine understands this assault. In fact, antiaging
medicine is a relatively new specialty brought about by Western doctors who realize we are living in a changed world, a polluted, stressful world. We are living longer, and traditional medicine has for the most part not kept up. In other words … it is not working. Like medics on the battlefield, these doctors work to heal the aging, environmentally wounded body and then reverse the damage through detoxification, hormone replacement, energy replacement, supplementation, and real food.

Traditional medicine focuses on treating the
effects
of the aging process, while antiaging medicine concentrates on treating the
causes
of aging. This is functional medicine, restoring the body to optimal functioning levels. The only way to reverse or slow down aging is to prevent or attempt to reverse the diseases we expect to get in the aging process. We have to make a shift in our thinking. The way we are being taken care of at present is pharmaceutically based and, for the most part, is not healing us. Again, I am not antipharmaceutical—when we need them, they are godsends—but in general, as a society, we have become addicted to our prescriptions, and then that drug causes another problem, which creates another problem requiring yet another drug. It’s a merry-go-round that never stops. Look around you … are your friends and family well and healthy?

Antiaging doctors work to stop the clock dramatically by slowing, preventing, or even reversing the diseases of aging that I talked about in
chapter 4
. These doctors take the environmental assault very seriously. Every day they work with people who once felt hopeless relative to their health and well-being and have helped them reverse their chronic, degenerative conditions. I’ve interviewed several of these doctors in the chapters that follow. Once you read what they have to say, I think you’ll agree with me: This is exciting medicine!

This chapter provides important information on how the environment affects our health and provokes premature aging and chronic inflammation (the two are related)—and what you can do about it. Pay close attention to the sections on detoxification and ways to reduce inflammation. This information is cutting-edge and will help you clarify what you can expect on this journey to becoming ageless.

A
GING
, D
ETOXIFICATION, AND THE
E
NVIRONMENT